Good news, as it means we can speak to people on the phone over Christmas without running up a huge mobile phone bill!

Update (24.12.2011): The phone works some of the time. Particularly in the evenings it often stops working. Iberfone are investigating. But if you want to contact us over Christmas and don’t get an answer on the phone, try skyping us instead!

Update 2 (03.01.2012): The electricians who installed the network came today and discovered (with support from Iberfone’s technical hotline) that they had made a mistake wiring the router into the rack. It looks like everything is now working reliably and correctly. The phone should be working all the time now!

The truth is, no matter what kind of message you leave, some people will just never listen to their voicemails, period. Even if you call them five times and leave three voicemails, they’re just not going to do it, and they’re not going to change for you. The expectation is that if it’s important, you’ll either text, so they’ll read it when they get back to their phone, or call again and catch them when they’re available…

…But if you can, stick to texts. It saves time for both parties and does the job adequately well for a good chunk of the time.

Hmm – I’m clearly out of sync with current etiquette. I send about 1 text message a month. At the most. But I will often leave a voicemail message if I call you and you’re not around. I also expect that the message will be listened to.

It was a tight fit for the driver, turning down our little side road – the removers thought they would have to remove the safety-barrier at the roadside, but in the end the lorry got round the corner without modifying the barrier.

The piano was taken in a separate truck to the removers – it goes into a controlled environment, instead of the main storage warehouse, so it should stay in tune while it is in storage. The plants go to the admin office of the removers until the delivery to Spain.

We hand the house over to its new owners on Saturday, and then we wait for the new house to be completed. At the moment the builder and Antonio, our architect, think it should be finished at the end of the month, or the beginning of October. There are still a few things we need to decide and do before then – the most urgent one being to choose the tiles for the kitchen walls. It’s not turning out to be so simple – we want locally supplied tiles, and we are visiting various tile showrooms near our flat in Kronberg, trying to track down Spanish tiles which we like!

At the moment Maggi is sponsoring some restoration of the castle, which is why the scaffolding on the Oberburg tower is covered in a huge Maggi bottle – there is also an exhibit about Maggi, who are celebrating 125 years of existence, in the museum.

Lots of packing cases

And we’ve spent a lot of the last week up in Schmitten, packing as much as possible for the move to Spain – we move out completely next week. That is a much bigger job – the photo above is of just one of the rooms which are more or less full of packed-up cartons! So far we’ve packed 99 cartons, and the removers will probably need another 20 − 30 to pack our glass and china (which they must pack, otherwise it wouldn’t be insured for breakages during the move). That sounds like a lot of breakables, but they put a lot of paper or bubble-wrap around them, so not many items fit in a carton.

One difference between this move and our moves in the UK (over 30 years ago, so things could have changed in the mean time), is that all our removers in Germany have always packed our things in cardboard cartons like the ones in the photos. They fold flat when they are not in use. In the UK the removal companies used plywood tea chests to pack everything. Tea chests are much larger, and obviously don’t fold flat – they often still contained a few tea leaves at the bottom of the chest!

Seen today, on our afternoon walk