If there is one thing I hate more than anything it is moving. Yesterday I helped my friend Robert and his family move into their first house. Moving somebody else’s crap is not as bad as moving your own crap. You show up, move everything into the truck, take it to the new place, unload and your done with it. If it is not my place I don’t have to worry about unpacking and setting up the kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms. No Siree, just drop off the stuff and get out. Damn he has so much stuff. I’m so sore today because of the schlepping.
I had one problem though. I didn’t know what a Hauswirtschaftsraum was. I kinda know now, but in English it can have different names depending on where you come from. You know the room that you may have off of the kitchen, in which you may or may not have the washer and dryer? Or maybe a spare fridge? Or just shelves to have cleaning supplies or food or a sink or the dog’s dish? That room in German is called a Hauswirtschaftsraum. When you separate the words it means House Economy Room. If you’re like me you’re thinking what the hell does that mean? But if you are a real German you’d know that Hauswirtschaft could also mean something like household or housekeeping. See? A solid form comes out of the fog. German is weird like that. There are always these so obvious words that, when you analyse them, are silly and sometimes cute.
Example:
Gloves = Handschue= hand shoes
Trunk (in a car) = Kofferraum = Suitcase room
flashlight = Taschenlampe = Pocket lamp
We have words like that in English too but I’m too lazy to give examples.
Robert’s old apartment (the coolest apartment in Lüneburg) was next to Clamart park near the city center. Yesterday was a demonstration against the Castor. The Castor is a huge container used to transfer nuclear waste from various power plants in Europe to Gorleben, a city not far from here. There the waste is processed and dropped into a bottomless pit where future generations of archeologists can worry about it whenever they stumble across it, or it is sent somewhere else for some other reason. Anyway, every time the Castor rolls through there are protests and people chaining themselves to the train tracks and all kinds of civil disobedience. The Castor didn’t come through yet but there are cops all over the place. We were expecting there to be trouble yesterday as we were moving stuff but the cops left us alone.
Last I heard The Castor was expected to come through on Wednesday. Sometimes when busses and police cars drive past my apartment we can pick up their radios on the TV. Strange I know, but a few hours ago we heard suddenly a police announcement blasting through our TV that the castor was coming through early tomorrow morning. So that means, if it is true of course, that they are trying to sneak the castor through without bringing attention to it. Hmmm.