pedometer working again; thank you Kim!

Many many thanks to loyal reader Kim in Hamburg, who wrote me off-blog to tell me where to buy and do all sorts of things in this country. (I knew there were answers, but as Kim correctly suggested, it can also just be frustrating to not know what the answers are! It is infantilizing and exhausting just, sometimes, to not know. Last night husband and I were walking, a nice long walk through a lovely town on a mild April night, and something reminded him of our first night at a restaurant here last fall/summer, when the waitress couldn't quite believe we'd never paid with our EC card before. I realize that's not quite the same thing as not knowing what store to shop in but it's the same general idea - we are extremely competent adults in the country we've lived in for 22 years and the town we've lived in for 8, but suddenly here in this country we are constantly bumping up against our own ignorance.)

Anyway - thanks to Kim's suggestions, after Weight Watchers this morning I walked across the street to Bauhaus, which is kind of like an urban Home Depot, and asked the lady on the ground floor where to go for screwdrivers, and went upstairs like she told me and looked around a little myself, but finding nothing asked the man and showed him my pedometer, and he sold me a lovely little screwdriver exactly calculated to open the pedometer battery case, for 3 euros 50, and I came home, after a little panic found the new battery I'd brought with me from the States last fall, and now my pedometer is like new. So I went for a 120-minute walk with my friend Susanne around the absolutely lovely Schlachtensee this afternoon, and the pedometer recorded it all.

It was a glorious afternoon and there were Germans in all the possible states of undress, from fully clothed to not clothed at all, with everything in between. Susanne and I were actually there for a walk but she found it unbearably hot and close at some point so we took off our socks and shoes and rolled up our pants (OK, she did; I was wearing kind of floppy capris) and stood with our feet in the cool water for a while.