In addition to the boxes that we sent to ourselves right when we left Bolzano, we also had 33 more boxes of stuff that needed to get from Bolzano to Tübingen.  I’m happy to report that all of them are now sitting in our pretty much otherwise empty living room at the moment. 🙂

I know, 33 sounds like a large number. The boxes are mostly small book boxes, with a few larger packages of artwork and framed photographs (from our photography shows). A few practical items like winter coats are somewhere in the boxes, too – handy now that the weather had taken a decided turn toward winter. Of course, I just have to figure out which of the 33 boxes those coats are in, since most of my numbers were hidden when the boxes were tightly sealed at the shipping place. Best laid plans…

You may recall that the delivery of the boxes sent via UPS in September made for a nice little blog post, owing to the necessity of someone having to carry them up the 59 steps to the vacation apartment where we were living. And that someone was not going to be me.

This time around, the delivery guy  — not from UPS, BTW — had an elevator at his disposal. He unfortunately arrived equipped only with an extra-wide dolly, the kind that makes it easy to lift a pallet on which you can move 20 boxes easily. A  good system, except our building’s elevator is not extra wide.

So, the guy  had to unload all the boxes, one by one, into the elevator from the palette, and then take them from the elevator around the corner to the apartment when he got to the second floor.  The elevator is also quirky, and you have to hold down the button for the floor you want during the entire trip. I tried to explain this, but he didn’t get it at first (I’m sure there’s a verb in German that I needed; in my own defense, the sign in the elevator does say all this, so it may be that he just didn’t believe me at first.) Anyway, he eventually stopped opening the door (thinking that it wasn’t closed properly, and then I was able to call the elevator to come up to the second floor, bringing him and the boxes with him.

I wanted him to put them all in the living room – it is the room in the apartment that is, or rather was, fairly empty. I did offer to help with unloading the elevator on the 2nd floor,  since it would have been a much longer process otherwise.  I was able to offer since  I had packed most of the boxes myself — and made most of them light enough to be able to carry myself, should the need arise.  As it did. Note to self: do this again in future, this is a good plan. Of course, the delivery guy was overall pleasant and decided that really the boxes must be too heavy for me to carry, so he carried most of them himself. Very nice.

Overall, he was friendlier guy than that UPS guy was in the end.  I’m sure  it was being able to say Es gibt einen Aufzug, “there is an elevator” that made him my friend when he learned i lived on the 2nd floor, rather than the fact that I said it all in German.

Anyway, I’ve used an interesting mix of languages to get all our stuff shipped here to Tübingen.  With the guy at the shipping place in Bolzano, who spoke a variety of languages, I also spoke in a mix of English and Italian. He was the hero of our story 3 years ago trying to get our stuff delivered to us in Bolzano, and he came through again this time when there was a problem with the payment we sent to his store in order to get the boxes shipped off. He finally got the bank in Italy to say what had happened to the money that we’d sent from a bank here in Tübingen. It was a huge hassle to get it straightened out. In fact for over a week, I was on the phone almost everyday speaking mostly  in Italian about paying for and shipping the boxes to that guy in Bolzano. Then, I’d go to the bank here to sort out the problems with the bank transfer, armed with the information I’d learned in Italian. Here in Tübingen, of course, the language I used with the guy at the bank was … Italian. Yes, a guy in the bank here speaks fluent Italian, and I’m “fluent” enough when it comes to the necessary banking vocabulary in Italian. I did have 3 years of practice with “Richard Gere”  at the bank in Bolzano, after all. 😉

Yup, nothing like moving to Germany and using Italian everyday.

Today, when almost all the boxes were in the apartment, the delivery guy asked me – in German – if I was Italian and if I spoke Italian; it was a logical question, after all, since I had just shipped 33 boxes from Italy. I said no, I was American, but had lived in Italy for 3 years. I said I did speak Italian as well as English, though, and then I asked him if he spoke Italian. He replied … in English .. that he spoke no Italian, but did speak English. Darn –  it hadn’t occured to me to ask, since I’ve met so few people in the service industries here that do. In fact, I think I’ve used Italian much more here than I’ve used English in these kinds of random situations.

But that’s OK- a smattering of German words, a lot of pointing and smiling, and who needs Italian or English, anyway. My German teachers would be proud I’m sure. 😉