We’re in the home stretch. 11 days until our flight taking us away from Germany for an unknown amount of time. People ask us if the move is permanent. Well, it’s permanent in the same way we expected our last 3 transatlantic move to be permanent. We know better than to make any claims at this point. But, yes, for the time being, we have no timeline for returning to Europe to live. We do hope to do a lot of longer stays. But we’ll see. It’s not up to us.
Herbert is back at Kita this week after 3 weeks of Sommerferien (summer break). The first weekend of his break we went to Hamburg for 4 nights. We went to the Minatur Wunderland, which we all highly recommend. Our family was at this amazing model railway museum for 5 hours and no one was bored. No one! Herbert has been asking us to go back since. He especially loved pushing the buttons. He also wants you to know we stayed in a hotel with an elevator and he got to sleep in a bunk bed.
Beyond that, we mostly saw different parts of the city. We used our public transportation pass to take a ferry around the harbor. We visited the International Maritime Museum, which – warning! – is nine stories of exhibits. We also spent a morning at the city library which we all loved. I could live in Hamburg just for the children’s section in that library.
The rest of summer break was mellow and exhausting at the same time. Although we didn’t do much during the week at all, other than practice speaking German at home, our weekends were always busy. We spent a night camping at a friend’s garden, visited an outdoor train museum in a nearby village and Herbert and Will enjoyed a day in Berlin at the Deutsches Technikmuseum. Herbert had been asking to go back to since we went last September, so that was a very exciting day.
And now our focus is on tying up all our loose ends. Packing up and cleaning the apartment, giving away most of our stuff, canceling basically our entire lives. We’re getting there.
Probably one last update once we’re back in the States. Then I’ll be turning this blog into a language learning, bilingual family blog.