Poor squirrel...

On an average day, I am usually woken by my son around 6 o'clock. But today, I heard this strange, angry motorized sound. My first thought was that my son had come into our bedroom playing with a remote controlled car, but then I realized that he doesn't have one. I slowly turned around to see the time: 7 o'clock. Huh?! My son is still asleep at 7 AM?! I kept hearing that annoying noise and started to realize that it came from outside. When I pulled back the curtains I see this:

ARGH!!! Their cutting the trees?! Why the hell is that? They are our only barrier with the neighbors across the yard... There is nothing wrong with them, except that maybe one of them a bit further down the row might be sick, for it's leaves are turning brown. But the ones in front of our windows look just fine. There is even a squirrel living in one of the trees that has already been cut down...

Meanwhile, my son has woken up and joined me at the window. While discussing the poor squirrel, we suddenly see it running towards the most left tree in the picture below. It climbs all the way up and starts nibbling on something. While I am still busy pitying the poor little creature, my son remarks: "Never mind mum, there are other trees for it to make a home." OK...

And to top it off, later this morning I saw this yellow monster entering the building site. I don't know exactly what it is, but it looks suspiciously much like a pole drilling machine. I sure hope the construction worker's holidays last till the end of August...

Tomatoes revisited

Remember my tomatoes? Well, they have already outgrown their pots and needles, so I had to build them a bigger home. Since we are here only temporarily, I did not want to buy too many pots, as we all have to take them home with us. Bigger food buckets would have been a very cheap and convenient replacement, but none of us are big eaters...

In the end I bought some buckets at the 1-euroshop and bamboo canes at a hardware store. I planted the roots relatively deep; they grow upwards and need extra soil every week. 

The tricky thing this time was that the plants were already in bloom (yes!), and I was not sure if the flowers would suffer from the replanting session. But after just a few hours, they seemed happier than ever and they are still growing as crazy! The only thing that keeps puzzling me is that the plant on the left has real yellow tomato flowers (see below, on the right), while the other two plants have little green bells that seem quite empty (see below). I mean, I cannot see any flowery stuff in there. It seems that these are 'sterile plants' that apparently do not need pollinating(?). Maybe I should investigate a bit more on that subject...

Seed bombs

My son recently received mail from OERRR, an initiative by Natuurmonumenten (Nature Preservation) to get children to explore nature. In the envelope were some new outdoor discovery cards and a package containing zaadbommetjes (seed bombs). He got really excited at the word 'bombs' but was disappointed when I told him the package would not explode when opened. The idea of making his own seed bombs became much more appealing when he realized that sand, clay and water would be involved. Since we did not have clay and the bombs now had to be made immediately, we just put some sand and water in a small bucket and mixed in the seeds. He then wanted to just throw the seed bombs off the balcony, 

but I managed to convince him that the seeds would probably be scooped away by the construction workers. So we went down into the 'garden' to look for a suitable place to drop our bombs...

In the end, we settled for a space next to the old electricity house, which is not likely to be torn down in the next months and which also had plenty of sun and most important: it is not an active construction site. As you can see, he did not want to get his hands dirty and carefully shook out the seed mixture in several places. He then faithfully went to watch the seeds grow for the first few days, but then decided that they were probably dead. Patience is not his strongest asset. Yesterday he suddenly remembered the seeds and went down to the seed spot to see if anything happened. 

Yes! Tiny little plants had come up at most of the seed spots and we could already discern several different leafs, although he was disappointed that I could not name the flowers. But hey, do I look like a flower expert to you? Anyway, he now checks up on the tiny fellows every morning before going to school and he puts a thumb to me when they grown again.

Was jetzt wieder?!

It is time to return to the continuing story of the building activities here at the Carré Charlotte apartment building site. Last week, my son and I gladly noticed the removal of the yellow workman's cabins in front of our balcony. Would the building activities finally come to an end?

Indeed, the whole site looks a lot better with all the trees having leaves again and the rubbish removed. We were already daydreaming about a playground with a swing and a water pump, when the next day...

an excavator arrived, which tore down the whole wall on the eastern side of our terrain?! What was that all about?

That afternoon, I met out our neighbor on the staircase and she told me that she was furious because she had heard from the Hausmeister that another apartment building will be built right in front of our balconies! Staright away! After clearing the site they will immediately start building?! We were both quite sure that nobody from the Hausverwaltung had ever told us this was going to happen when we rented this place. She asked me what we were going to do about it. Well, we are moving out at the end of August... She said that she was so angry that she thought about moving out as well. And she knew from several other tenants that they are thinking the same. The Hausmeister had also told her that there is another project from the same builder in Berlin Lichtenberg with the same problems: taking way too long to finish, lots of complaints about missing stuff in the apartments, bad communication with the Hausverwaltung. Hmmmm...

Purslane pesto

A few weeks ago, I was doing my usual Saturday shopping round at the local eco-market at Karl-August-Platz here in Charlottenburg. I love the many local producers that come here every week to sell their homegrown products - all of them are from Berlin or from somewhere nearby in Brandenburg. Germans are quite passionate about their food and they love fresh vegetables in many varieties. And so I was very happy to find the lovely tender bright green leaves of purslane in one of the stalls. I remembered a recipe for purslane pesto that I had found in a Christmas special of of PUUR, a magazine of an eco-supermarket chain in The Netherlands:

Ingredients
* ± 90 grams (winter) purslane
* 6 tbl spoons olive oil
* 50 grams walnuts
* 50 grams grana padano cheese, grated
* 1 tbl spoon lemon juice
* 1/2 tea spoon salt
* 1/2 tea spoon freshly ground pepper

Mix all ingredients in a mortar or in a mixer. Add more oil if the mixture is too dry. Be a bit careful in adding the cheese: this pesto has a wonderful subtle taste, and too much cheese can make the taste too 'heavy'. Enjoy!

Please don't send mail

That is, please don't use DPD to send me a package... Deutsche Post/DHL do find us most of the time, though they don't seem to like post cards. We have estimated that out of the 7 post cards we know were heading our way, only 3 actually made it to our mail box. Comparative analysis of the date stamps learned that a post card with priority sticker will take about 2 days, whereas a post card without priority sticker might easily stroll over here by itself in about 5 weeks. Packages sent with TNT have all arrived (as far as we know). The Dutch newspaper we receive here usually is 2 days late, but sometimes it does not arrive at all or they arrive in throngs at the end of the week. The only mail that is always on time and arriving in abundance, is the official Dutch authorities mail. You know, tax papers, social security services stuff, municipial taxes... 

But now back to the DPD package service. About a month ago, my dear friend Ilse ordered a gift for my son's birthday at a Belgian webshop. The package was sent using DPD. At his birthday, we got a lovely birthday message from Ilse and family, asking whether their package had arrived. Well, alas, it had not. A few days later, I got an e-mail from Ilse asking me if our address was correct, because DPD claimed that there was an error. I confirmed to her that, yes, the address was correct but it might be that DPD still has the old address of this building on record, for after renovation the building was assigned to a different street. So I also gave her the data of the former address and the package was sent to Berlin after all. All this took about a week. Several days after this, I got a phone call from the DPD distribution center in Berlin, asking whether the address was right, because they did not know it and were confused by my extra information including the former address. I told them that yes, the address was right, but please use the entrance at the site of the old address. I realize this might all sound a bit puzzling to you, so I made a small map to explain our situation:

See? It's actually quite simple. But not so for the DPD guy. Last week on Tuesday - I was not at home - I got a call from the delivery man, trying to explain to me where he was waiting for me with the package:

DPD: "Hello? This is DPD, I am standing at Fraunhoferstrasse near the orange container."

me: "Orange container?"

DPD: "Yes, the orange container at the building site. Can you come down here to receive your package?"

me: "Eh, well, no, I am not at home right now." (Meanwhile I was racking my brain about the location of the orange container)

DPD: "When will you be home? I can come back in about half an hour."

me: "I will not be back in half an hour, can you deliver it at one of my neighbors? You will have to walk to the Otto Suhr side, though."

DPD: "All right, I will try". (Big sigh)

A few minutes later he calls back:

DPD: "Yes, DPD again; there is nobody there to accept your package. I will take it back to the distribution center."

me: "OK, will you bring it tomorrow, then?"

DPD: "No, you will have to make a new appointment."

me: "Yes, and how do I do that?"

DPD: "Well, you call this number ... and then I will come once more on Thursday"

So I call the number, which is a call center and costs €1,49 per call(?!) and try to explain to the lady that the delivery should be done at the Otto Suhr Allee building site, not at the Fraunhoferstrasse. She obviously doesn't understand what I mean, but agrees to print out the explicatory note and schedules the second delivery for Thursday.

On Thursday, no DPD and nobody answers the phone. On Friday, same procedure (but it's Good Friday, so they probably don't work today). On Tuesday, after the long Easter weekend, DPD calls again:

DPD: "Hello? This is DPD, I am standing at Fraunhoferstrasse, can you come down to collect your package?" (No orange container this time)

me: "Fraunhoferstrasse? That will be difficult, for I cannot reach the other side of the building site. I am at the Otto Suhr side and the access to the Fraunhoferstrasse is blocked."

DPD: "OK, I see what you mean; I will give the package to my colleague on the Otto Suhr route."

me: "But can't you just make a detour, it's only two corners to Otto Suhr from where you are now"

DPD: "Sorry madam, that's not possible, it's a different route. I will give to my colleague and you will have it tomorrow." (Argh?!)

And today, hurray! I finally got the package (as well as two more packages for neighbors). And to top it off, a post card arrived from grandma O. - without priority sticker - after 3 weeks.

In short: should you decide to send me mail, please put a priority sticker on it and don't use DPD...

Do bin ich

And then there was wifi - finally. It has been a bit over two months since we moved to Berlin and so much has happened already. Although at first sight, everything seems the same. We moved into a brand new apartment in a brand new building in Charlottenburg, called Carré Charlotte. 

Everything was so brand new that it wasn't even finished by the time we showed up here: the entrance area was unpaved, the mail boxes were inside the building (and quite out of reach for the post man), the door bell was working but buzzed in someone else's apartment when pushed and the elevator wasn't running (which was a nuisance for our helping hands, for we live on the third floor). Inside the apartment there were a lot of uncovered cable outlets, the balconies were quite unfinished and there was no telephone and internet connection. 

And that was where the real trouble started. Our quest to get the digital world up and running proved to be long and tedious. The fact that the Dutch and German languages are strongly related does not mean that communication is any easier than in a different foreign language. Sometimes you think you understand someone, but a slight difference in the interpretation of the single word Festnetzanschluss lead to a confusion of tongues of biblical proportions...  It suffices to say that after 6 weeks we finally reached a stage in which we actually understood each other and then it was a piece of cake. It was one of those 'one day it's all over and then we can laugh about it'-things. Although we had to wait for another two weeks before all the equipment arrived in a box that was almost too big to carry home from the post office - for of course, our door bell was still buzzing in someone else's apartment. 

Anyway, as you can see, from the constructional side of things nothing much happened: there is sunshine and somewhat less snow, but inside the cable outlets are still uncovered and the balconies are still unfinished - though I was promised today that the balconies will be dealt with tomorrow. We will see...