Given that my last blog post was written in a whole different year, I've got a lot to catch up on...  I can’t figure out how to write a blog post which encompasses the last three months without a table of contents!  This'll be a summary.

Christmas season in my new apartment.

A few weeks ago, walking down a street in Mitte searching for my friend’s name on various apartment building buzzers (having been to her flat before but forgotten which door), a woman standing in one of the doorways asked if I had an appointment to visit an apartment.  She was, I realized, a realtor awaiting a potential client, thinking I might be the one she was scheduled to meet.  (I’d love to write more about the “doorway moments” of apartment searching, and probably will, but some other day).  Victory came in my reply-- that I was not visiting an apartment but searching for a friend-- and the realization that I don’t have to say “yes” to that question again...  Because we have an apartment!

Lights at a Christmas market booth.

We moved into our place, which has now been dubbed “The Boonies,” a name which derives from the ubahn stop at which it’s located, not its proximity to civilization, on December 14.  Here’s a quick summary of moving day:  The Moving-Day Schedule (which, after only two years, is a legend); the guys picking up hand-me-down and e-bay items from virtually every part of the city; Ikea (can I mention here that I have a truly love-hate relationship with this store?); an-entire-apartment-in-one-moving-van and the guys’ constant reassurance that “it’ll fit,” regardless of what “it” was; assembly like no one’s ever assembled before; and the beautiful moment at the end of the night when I stood at our living room window, looking over the train tracks and the highway blurred by the rain, thinking about how excited I am that I get to live here for the rest of the year.  Thanks, Lord, for knowing about this place all along and for making it possible for us to be there.

Five days after move-in, we broke in the apartment by hosting our team Christmas party, and three days later, we headed down south for Christmas.  The twelve-hour train ride (cheap trains take time), broken up by several changes and several games, including my teammate Katie’s new and original version of Zug um Zug, proved on the whole to be an experience I’d be willing to repeat.  We travelled to a small, quaint old town near Stuttgart to spend such a special Christmas with the family of one of my teammates.  Wonderful hosts, they seemed undaunted by the fact that 9 people had been added to their family... They welcomed us in, fed us at every possible moment, and introduced us to their Christmas traditions.  We ate bratwurst and kartoffelsalat (potato salad) for Christmas Eve dinner and then, by the light of the real candles on the Christmas tree, sang carols to the tune of the violin... It was beautiful.

We left the south of Germany to head to a student retreat in the east, in a village in the forests of the Erzgebirge-- a region of whose beauty I’d been told and can now confirm.  We were able to help in various ways at the conference, and I loved spending time with the students, learning new German worship songs, and helping to build Heinrich, the biggest snowman I’ve ever seen in my life.

A candle on our Christmas tree.

Now we're back in Berlin.  At work we're doing some new things and some familiar things, and it's all exciting...  At home we're settling further into our apartment (we still need things like drawer pulls and a shower curtain)...  And we're experiencing the winter (snow!) that's only popped in for brief visits over these past couple months.

I'll pause this contradictorily long and brief review here... But there's more to come.  :0)