Transit: Potsdam to Berlin

Weekend: Sat 31st March - 1st April '12

I'm just going to say this now. Moving sucks major balls. It seriously does.

I had to leave my apartment in Birnenweg 7 on the 31st of March by 2pm. I had to meet my new landlady at 1pm on Sunday in Schöneberg to get the keys to my new apartment. Wednesday, Thursday, I was sure I'd be fine. Daniel had agreed to help me move. With two people, I knew the move would be fine. I had just enough stuff that taking it all with one person would be too hard, but with two people would be easy.

All of my luggage...

That was until Daniel informed me late Friday evening that he had to return equipment and go to university during the day, and he could only help me in the morning. I'm talking meet at HBF before 9am. I thought, okay, that's not too bad, until I remembered that I had to return the key.

So I had to painstakingly dismiss Daniel's help for the move. I sent frantic text messages out to the few people in Berlin that I knew, hoping that one would come to rescue. Emma had already started drinking and would thus be incapacitated the following morning/day. Gabrielle decided that walking around a place she would be living in for a year, was more important than helping out a friend. And there ends my list of people that could help.

I went to sleep that night feeling lonely and completely helpless, resigning myself to a six hour day of travel and horror, as I would have to do two trips to move all my stuff the 1.5 hour (each way) journey to Berlin.

I woke up the next morning and my immediate thought was "fuck it."

I ordered a taxi for midday and asked it to take me to Daniel's place in Friedrichschain. I knew it would be expensive, but I decided it would be better than wasting an entire day travelling. I thought this right up until the moment where I realised it would cost a further 20 euros than the website had estimated, so in total I had to pay 80 god damn euros for the taxi trip. The last twenty minutes of the trip was spent with horrendous amounts of crying on the inside.

I finally arrive at Daniel's place at 1pm. I was told Nica would be arriving between 1:00 and 1:30, so I thought that's ok,  I'll just take my stuff to this cafe on the corner and have lunch.

I can't even bring myself to lift all my shit over the tiny step at the threshold. My grocery's kept falling out of my bags, everything kept tipping over and was so heavy that I just gave up. I thought 30 minutes? That's not too bad, I'll sit outside the cafe on the bench here and wait.

It was freezing. Absolutely fucking freezing.

At around 2pm when Nica still had not shown up, I started to get frustrated. It also started raining quite heavily. It was at that point that I decided I needed to get indoors. I took my bags the 10m back to the door to Daniel's building and spam rung every person in the building until the building door was buzzed open. Thank goodness somebody opened it. Nica had managed to contact me by then to say she would still be a while away, as there was track work and she had to do a lot of backtracking. I took the opportunity to haul my bags up the 2 flights of stairs to the door of Daniel's apartment.

30 minutes later, sitting in front of the door, knitting, Nica found me.

Phase 1 of the move had been complete.

The rest of the afternoon was actually quite lovely, spent most of it together with Nica. We went out to a thai restaurant for lunch and I experienced snow for the first time in my adult life. At first we thought it was just rain, but then it started to dot Nica's hair and jacket, and we realised it was snow.

I didn't take any pictures as we were cold, hungry and walking. But I'll just casually steal this picture from Gabby's fb and post it.

I woke up around 10:30 the next morning, after a light 4 hour sleep. I then took a great chunk of my possessions and made my way to Schöneberg to my new apartment. I took the fullest bag of groceries, my big backpack, my small backpack (which felt like I'd filled it with solid gold), my camera bag and my little bum bag.

That trip, was tough. I had leaned the grocery bag on the top of the big roller bag with the plastic handle around the handle I used to move the bag. Problem was that as I walked the groceries kept falling to one side or the other and swinging to the other side of the bag to create a counterweight. I had to stop every five seconds to fix the problem and my groceries kept falling out of the bag. It was a nightmare.

At one point I fell on my butt trying to carry my bag up a flight of about four stairs to get to the U-bahn on Warschauerstr. I arrived at Nollendorfplatz, where I was to change trains to get to Rathaus Schöneberg. Alas, the platform I needed to get up to was up an impossible flight of stairs, and the escalator was broken.

I made it about halfway up the staircase before some (I think he was homeless) man took pity on me and carried the bag the rest of the way up. At this point, I was sweating like the Niagra Falls, hot and ridiculously uncomfortable in my huge winter jacket.

I finally make it to my stop, to be confronted with yet another lot of stairs up to get to ground level. Resigned, I start the long journey up, step by step. Once more, a lovely elder gentleman took pity on me and helped me up the remaining steps.

The second trip was so much easier. I left all my stuff, including my big coat, at the apartment and went back for the second trip. I had emptied my backpack, so I could pack most of the groceries that were left into the backpack, and that way I could easily carry the now, much lighter, grocery bag in my hand without any obstruction.

Finally, at around 4pm. My nightmare move was done.