Drama Samstag

Big excitement yesterday. Rob, Yoshi & Brandon are coming to stay for a few days this Tuesday, so we needed to go buy some beds for them. Rented a station wagon from Hertz down at Wittenburgplatz and headed over there after doing the Saturday morning marketing. They didn’t have a station wagon available, so I was told it was a van instead. I’m thinking minivan which would actually be better for an Ikea run. I get up to the parking garage and what do I find but those enormous delivery vans. Bigger than an Excursion. Or Expedition. Whichever is more obscenely huge. The roof of the van was about an inch from the ceiling of the garage. I couldn’t even get it out of the garage—couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t get wedged on the ramp! Did they have another car? I’d take something too small for the job even? No, nothing else. Their driver brought it down to the street, and I was on my way to pick up Dan and the kids.

Ikea was Ikea, though everything was 19% more expensive on account of the VAT. We waded through the kid bed & guest bed options, finally chose some fitted sheets in what we guessed were the right dimensions, piled on the other crap that was needed to make this primary-colored apartment seem less garish and more like us, and got down to the checkout. Two different kinds of line, but which one takes Mastercard?? I ask a guy in one line and he’s not sure. He jumps his line and asks the clerk. They don’t take credit cards. In any line. Now, we should have expected this. We saw the ATM when we came in, and almost nowhere we go takes credit cards (not restaurants, not grocery stores, not Ikea!). Apparently the Germans abhor credit. Now we know where my mom gets it! So I headed to the ATM to take out my bank’s daily maximum—300 euro--and returned to Dan with the carts loaded down with far more than 300 euro. He left it me to parse through everything we had to prioritize goods for less than the total 390 euro we were packing. Horrifying! So, we have beds for the guests, but no cute kid bedding; we have a second throw, but no decorative pillows to dull the red sofa; we have 3 fitted sheets for 5 beds, but no slipcovers to hide the red fabric dining chairs that the kids are well on their way to destroying already. My purchases came to 359 euro, and we loaded up the van. Dan had the joy of hauling it all up 6 flights of stairs—sorry, I’ve got to find a parking place for this beast!—and Drama Samstag was pretty much over.