Boxing Day(s)

Well, we have lots of boxing up and moving to do. Ten days ago we flew from Doha back to Germany bringing as much as we could possibly fit in our luggage, while still trying to keep under our combined weight allowance of 70 kilos - not an easy task without a scale. Although we had to do some reorganizing at the airport because the bike case we filled with paintings was too heavy, we managed to get all our art work, all DVDs, several questionable books (in terms of the Saudi border crossing, at least) and some things we just don't want to risk losing should we have border problems or be broken into along the way.

Along the way...

What do we mean by that? Well, our plan is to drive all the way from Qatar to Norway in Tigger (which we paid off two weeks ago, by the way). But that is for another blog...

Anyway, my mother has been asking for pictures of our Doha apartment building from the outside. I finally got one!!! 

Our apartment is directly ahead on the fifth floor. We have half the larger windows to the left in our living room and the guest room is window to the right. Our bedroom has an even smaller window even farther to the right, but you can't see that in the picture. Tigger is the blue car parked in the lower right-hand corner of the picture.

Unfortunately, we never got any pictures of the living room painted and with our paintings. It looked fabulous. Here is a photo nonetheless.

And here's the kitchen - with packing mess, bicycle case, open dishwasher and the hand of Erik. Notice the dishwasher BETWEEN the clothes washer and dryer. Brilliant idea! I'm being sarcastic in case you were wondering.

It should be pretty easy to pack the last bit. We just have the clavinova, a few kitches things, clothes, books, CDs and music left. Oh, and a bike and sports equipment. I guess the car will be pretty full, but we plan to pack at least one or two work days in advance in case we end up having to make a trip to the post office.

So, for the past 10 days, I've been back in Cologne and Erik spent a week here as well, having realized that we won't have much time to pack up the Cologne apartment later. So, it's been boxing, tossing, dismantling furniture, tossing, going through clothes, toiletries and sewing stuff, tossing, trying to breathe in the heat of an attic apartment, tossing. You get the picture.

The lovely hallway...

Thank goodness it's pretty wide. There used to be an enormous bookcase to the right. Now it's in pieces to the left.

And the kitchen, which now houses the wardrobe boxes instead of the kitchen table.

We even found another use for the packing tape...