I am waiting for the kids to finish getting ready as we head off to church this sunny Stockholm Sunday. It is our last day (yahoo!) at The Biz, an extended stay hotel, the place we have called home the last two months.
Alas, I have jumped ahead. Let me catch up as briefly as I can.
Responding to this summer's news that we would be leaving Berlin and moving to Stockholm was and is a process that has been hard on the whole family. We are QUICK to put this in perspective - there is hard and there is hard and we are very aware that moving our healthy selves to a beautiful city hardly makes us objects of pity. And yet, the circumstances around the move made it tough. Having to leave Kit in Germany for boarding school - no words.
School here started in mid-August so it was our goal to arrive for the kids to start on time. This herculean feat happened at the eleventh hour thanks to the generosity and hard work of folks at the US Embassy, and the permission of the Swedish government. Bill's assignment does not technically start until late this month so there were A LOT of hoops to jump through to get me and the kids here by the magic school start date. It happened!!!
Staying at a hotel for two months was fine. Someone cleaned every week - yay! Free Wifi - yay! Friendly front desk people who knew us - yay! Living in such close quarters - not so "yay". I kept reminding myself and the kids that we were clean, dry and fed and better off than most of the planet. After the first two weeks they moved us to a two bedroom apartment (that was somehow smaller than the one bedroom - just carved up differently!!) with a much improved view of the port vs. the rooftop HVAC system under construction on the building next door. We watched the enormous Tallink and Silja ferries go in and out all day and on foggy mornings heard the foghorns boom their warnings. It turns out that sound is not for show! It was not a beautiful area of town, but interesting.
The kids' second week of school they had class trips that took them out of town for a few nights so I flew back to Berlin to help Bill with the pack out. We packed up the house (ok - supervised others packing up the house), packed up the car and said Auf Wiedersehen to our lovely home on the Schlachtensee. We took a two day drive up to Stockholm stopping at Copenhagen overnight. In the midst of a year of being apart a lot, it was great to have a few days on our own together. We had a fun date night in Copenhagen and then did the final push the next day. As soon as we crossed the bridge we made an immigration stop where Bill was asked to do a breathalyzer at eight am on a Sunday morning. Welcome to Sweden!! (Apparently many Swedes go to Denmark to drink because it is less expensive - oh well!)I write now on Thursday of the same week as the days have slipped away. On Monday we moved to the place we will be calling home for awhile. It is a lovely apartment overlooking the water (apparently Stockholm is termed the Venice of the North with water, water everywhere). We look across to historic buildings and a shoreline stocked with vessels old and new, used for both business and pleasure. It is busy and quite a departure from anywhere we have ever lived - which I love.
Moving in has had its usual issues. No matter how much help you have it is somehow emotionally exhausting. I think it is the disorientation of not knowing where to put things, not having all your things here to make it feel like home yet, and not knowing where to go to get life done and how to get there. Every day brings a bit more clarity to each of these areas of unknowing. One normal hurdle that is NOT present is language. Everyone, but everyone (except maybe some of the elderly) speaks better English than you do. I'll save that topic for another post but suffice it to say it has made this a very, very soft place to land.
I will wrap up for the moment but hope you will indulge me this space to write, post pictures and reflect on our time here.
