Back in the Fatherland
Gelting, Germany
Flying home the long way
Well the inevitable has happened: we're back in our apartment in Gelting/Bavaria... After a very nice six-week transition period in Maine we had two days in New York (including a reunion with our friends from Arearea) before Iceland Air took us back to Munich where we arrived on 31JUL. Our luggage wasn't as keen as we to get back and took another day...
Friday (01AUG) then was taken up by re-registering and insuring ourselves and our car. After that we started retrieving our "stuff" from our landlords garage attic and getting it back into our apartment. Today (Sat, 02AUG) we 're almost fully operational again as landlocked residents (thanks also to Doblers helping us out with bedding...). It will take a few more weeks until everything is back - including the stuff that is still in storage in Kassel (about 300 miles north of us).
After having moved onto and off the boat twice across continents in the past eight years you would think we had learned our lesson about not keeping and storing things that you don't absolutely need. Not quite... we've been unpacking quite a few things that must have seemed indispensable to us when we left three years ago. Now we look at them, thinking "I can't believe we kept that!" So after having packed it, schlepped it up to the attic, getting it down and unpacking it again three years later, it ends up on the "discard" pile... Some of that is driven by obsolescence (e.g. paperback fiction for which we've learned to appreciate e-readers while aboard Namani). However a lot of it is simply an indication of "Panta Rhei" - things change. Stuff that seemed so important at one point no longer does after you've changed perspectives for a while.
Two new sets of row houses have sprung up around us in our absence but otherwise Gelting seems largely unchanged. Going to the supermarket to buy food stuffs for only a few days felt a bit strange though - the "super market = provisioning for six weeks" logic seems still deeply ingrained...
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