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By cosmoravian, 18/09/2011 8:24 am

For more Silent Sunday posts, click on through …

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By cosmoravian, 11/09/2011 4:31 pm

For more Silent Sunday posts, click on through …

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By cosmoravian, 08/05/2011 3:13 pm

For more Silent Sunday posts, click on through …

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By cosmoravian, 05/05/2011 7:13 pm

ALDI is a German chain of discount supermarkets. Well, they’re around in so many countries now, you probably know them! Bare bones deco, store brands only. In Germany they also do biweekly special sales of just about everything – many people here go by special ALDI shopping calendars to plan for major acquisitions according to ALDI’s special sales. Gardening equipment, furniture, PCs, wall paint, bikes … You name it, they sell it.

These days I shop at ALDI every single day. There’s one right next to my office, and as I don’t have fridge space and we do this whole campout on air mattresses thing still that’s where I buy my lunches every morning. Lunches? The same bloody lunch every day but never mind …

Mondays and Thursdays are special sales days, and when I arrive at the shop front around 7.59 there’s a queue of people waiting to get in. I hate those days because the shop will be overrun, I’ll have to queue longer to check out, and I have about 7 minutes if I want to get to work on time. Which I do want, being very German about punctuality!

There was a particularly big crowd this morning. Most special sale days I can’t figure out what the main pull is. I looked at today’s sale poster and didn’t see anything that stuck out. But usually there will be one item that most people go for. When the doors finally opened and everyone stormed in they went wild about … Disney bedding!

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By cosmoravian, 02/05/2011 9:18 pm

Tonight I went for my first aqua fitness class with B! I had registered us as soon as we knew we were moving here – in typical German rundum sorglos fashion 80% of the cost is covered by our health insurance

It didn’t give me as much of a burn as I’d expected (oooh, maybe I’m secretly fitter than I knew?) but I swam a couple of laps afterwards, and now I do feel pretty done … Took the bus home, cooked (green asparagus, yum-ee!), fell asleep chewing. A bit of Country House Rescue, and I’ll be fast asleep for good!

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By cosmoravian, 21/04/2011 8:57 pm

I’m not made for living offline!

Well, I have my iPhone of course, my trusty little companion, with all my friends living behind its handy touchscreen. Love having my friends in my pocket. (Yeah, I’m one of those weird my-friends-live-in-my-computer people!)
But then my iPhone can’t do everything. <- Not true, but I don't have the patience to do everything on a tiny little screen! So I'm selective: always Twitter, always The Other Place [cryptic, cryptic], bit of news, some Facebooking. The whole Social Media Thing. Oh and exciting stuff like checking out prices for laminate on eBay

But blogging and uploading/posting pictures ... not so much. It's a bit of a drag doing that on an iPhone after a long day at work. A long "it's early days" day at work. If you remember the frantic feeling of being new and clueless at work, that's me these days.

Right now, though, I got my grabby fingers on the hosts' family computer! Life is good, work is good, I love that we've found our new home - we signed the rent contract this Monday - and I'm mostly okay with the wait until we can move in. Sweet delayed gratification. We may get in earlier than assumed. Still June, though, just not mid-June.

And so that this isn't just a dull "state of the Tatjana" post I'll leave you with some photos!

If I weren’t back home, this would make me homesick. Now I just get homesick looking at photos of Amsterdam – expat’s lot, I guess!

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By cosmoravian, 18/04/2011 8:06 pm

We signed the rent contract tonight!!

B looked at another place today (awful), called last week’s place to say we’d drop out if we didn’t hear today (they didn’t react) – so we met up with the funny, quirky, warm landlady of the flat we viewed on Saturday and signed the contract!!

Current tenant is leaving around 9 June, so slightly earlier. 7 weeks and a bit, we’ll manage somehow …

Yaaaay, not homeless any more!!!

ETA: Certainly the oldest house we’ve lived in. I am ah-mazed B likes the flat!

First floor. The four windows with outside blinds! Entrance is at the back of the house, through that wrought-iron gate