March 2 - A Bicycle for Monika

Heinke and Gustl called and said they were coming over in the morning, so while we waited for them we entertained ourselves by scrubbing the fireplace a bit to remove some of the soot from the front. I expect someone had forgotten to open the damper sometime, but maybe it was just a normal accumulation over the years of use—I’m not sure. A Brillo pad worked pretty well in getting at least the outer layers off, though, and I was satisfied when I could at last see the mortar between the bricks!

Heinke brought some food items we had left in her refrigerator, our napkins, and a squeegee to help us wash the windows! Boy could we have used that the previous day! Gustl brought a detailed map of the greater Hamburg area and an even more detailed map of the Sachsenwald (Saxon Forest), a large state forest that lies a bit to the east of Reinbek. Once we both had a bicycle we thought we would explore some of the paths or lanes in the forest.

Since Heinke had offered Monika her new bicycle, we went back to their place to pick it up, stopping off along the way to pick up some light fixtures. I was continuously hitting the light switch when I went into our bedroom at night, which had absolutely no effect because the overhead light had been removed. Maybe that wouldn’t frustrate you, but it was starting to really annoy me after a few days, so we bought a couple of light fixtures to take back to Reinbek.

We used our CC Karten to take Heinke’s bike back to Reinbek on the commuter trains, and that involved a bit of planning to find a way to do it without lugging the bicycle up and down a hundred steps. We had already noticed that most stations in Hamburg had many steps and were definitely NOT “handicapped accessible”. Along the same vein, the streets all had curbs without the breaks for sidewalks that have been installed in the U.S., which would make life in a wheelchair there quite difficult. The steps issue also definitely hindered us from schlepping the bicycle around on the trains because many of the transfer stations also had steps between the station platforms. But Heinke figured out a route from Barmbek to Hauptbahnhof to Dammtor to Reinbek where we could at least avoid the steps when we transferred from one train to another. The only disadvantage to this creative solution was that we backtracked a bit from Hauptbahnhof to Dammtor, which resulted in our missing a train and waiting for 20 minutes, but otherwise the plan worked perfectly.

Despite the delay, we arrived in Reinbek well before the 4 p.m. deadline for our CC Karte. Monika rode her bike while I walked on the way back from the train station to our house and after stowing the bicycle safely in an empty room she fixed dinner while I struggled with light fixtures. I successfully installed a globe in the little room off to the side of our bedroom that we are using as a dressing room, but the dang thing wouldn’t work. Since I was using a new bulb I strongly suspected the fixture itself was dead, but without a voltmeter I couldn’t be sure. The fixture we had purchased for the bedroom looked great, but I found out I would have to carefully disconnect and reconnect some bare wires and I couldn’t be sure if they live or not. So we still didn’t have any overhead lights in the bedroom and I was frustrated enough to really focus on buying a voltmeter the next day in order to finish the job, hopefully.

I also failed at removing a light fixture in the downstairs powder room—I just couldn’t pry it off the ceiling without using so much force that I thought I was in danger of breaking the glass globe. Aunt Size’s house is 50 years old, and sometimes it seems to me that every fixture is mounted differently. One glass cover on the light in the foyer had to be rotated to exactly one position, pushed to one side, and then pivoted off. The only reason I figured that one out is that Monika found the glass cover sitting in the basement and we figured out the only possible bulb it could cover—if it had been installed I don’t think I ever would have guessed. Other fixtures appeared to be dangling from a hook in the ceiling while still others were kind of screwed directly into the ceiling plaster. Arrgh!

Fortunately I guessed correctly that the globe in the upstairs bathroom, which we use most of the time, unscrewed from its ceiling fixture, so I did manage to get that one off and successfully replaced a burned out bulb. So now we had an overhead light in the bathroom altho the toilet seat still kept trying to slide off, which was not exactly a relaxing way to go to the bathroom! Understandably, after a few precarious moments on the toilet I also decided to put toilet seat bolts high on my list of “must buys”! Despite these frustrations, the house was really beautiful and it made me wish we could do a German version of “This Old House” on it where we would document how to replace light fixtures, repair plaster walls, and refinish old wood plank floors. Oh well.