It is done!

Last look out of my apartment

I still can't believe it, but I think everything is ready now! My apartment posed the biggest problem. If you leave your apartment, it has to be renovated. I am not good in renovating anything. My apartment has a height of more than 3 meters and the thought of spending days on a ladder painting the ceiling gave me vertigo and made my arms ache. So I hired a Polish guy to do that for me. It took much longer than I thought but made me realise that it was way better to let him do the renovation than doing it myself. For the last 3 days we were working together. He painting and me cleaning. I had to realise that being a cleaning woman is not my dream job. I hate crawling around on my knees and scrubbing floors. Cleaning is hard work, especially if you have not done much cleaning in your apartment for the last couple of years.

But today it is over - I passed the official inspection today and will spend my last night in Berlin in an empty apartment. It is pretty spooky -there is nothing left in the rooms so the accustics are pretty weird now.
Tomorrow at 8.35 am I will fly to Paris with my bike. Of course I have all sorts of nightmares now about my bike being damaged or lost on the flight. I have never flown with a bike. But it is packed into a cardboard box and hopefully nothing will happen to it. Cross your fingers for me!

And I do hope that I will eventually master my new gadget, a Nokia N95 cell phone. Actually, I don't need a cell phone at all on my trip, but it has all the other functions I need. It has a camera, an MP3 player (I will take 17 days of music and books on tape with me and Micro SD cards), a GPS and you can surf the internet with it. And you can make phone calls with it, but I don't really need that.