As many of you might now, I now am proud owner/mama of a hungarian vizsla puppy. She's beautiful and soft and cuddly and a whole helluva lot of work. And her name is Lenja. Right now, she's passed out on the couch next to me, probably having nightmares about the dumb-ass husky and owner who got WAYYY too up in her grill on our way home from the vet today and then had the audactiy to ask me, "Did something happen to her that she's so scared?" Innerly, I thought, "No, you moron...it's just that your dog looks like it could eat her for breakfast!" Outwardly, I smiled and explained that she's still awfully young (9 weeks this week) and hasn't had a ton of experience with other dog breeds.
People.
Anyway, it was a bit of a circus getting her, and actually quite a good story.
It all starts with us not having a car. We don't, because the public transit in Berlin is so deluxe that you really don't need one. And a few streets down are some coops where the anarchists fighting gentrification tend to get their not-so-friendly fire on with parked cars. And I can't drive here and don't agree with the bureacratic hoo-haa I'd have to go through to change that.
But that's not really the point.
So we don't have a car, but we'd made an appointment to meet a breeder from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern over the weekend. She agreed that if we came by train, she'd pick us up at the station. We were going up to look at the last puppy left of the litter (all the rest were apparently spoken for already) and there were other appointments with other interested families the whole week before we got there. So we took the train up with the general battle plan of only staying for two hours at the most and being back on the train to Berlin by four thirty at the latest.
Well, all of a sudden it was six. Pm. We'd had lovely apple cake, watched home videos from the last litter, talked for hours with the breeder and her family about the dogs and the breed and their characteristics. We realized what time it was and started to get ready to leave. It took a few minutes, but we were in the car on the way to the station, with the verbal agreement that we were going to come and pick up Lenja in two weeks. Well, we got to the train station and the bars that block the tracks when trains go through had already come down. So we couldn't get across in the car. The woman let us out, sped off and I ask, "Hey honey, is that our train coming?" It was. We were kind of screwed. Standing on the opposite side of the tracks, watching our train roll in. What do I do? I suggest to my dear, law-abiding german boyfriend that we get the hell over those tracks and onto that train. He looks at me like I'm on drugs and says, " We can't do that! It's illegal to cross the tracks!" I don't really care at this point, so I dash over after the train had come to a halt, and Stephan followed. We reach the other side, are getting ready to dive into the first car when the conductor slams his window open and says, "Don't think you're going to be riding on MY train! You idiots can go take your own lives elsewhere!"
We were slightly flabbergasted. I hadn't ever previously been directly yelled at by a train conductor. Stephan apparently also had not. We decide to leave the scene of the crime, as the train had already left and the personel in the station still had the authority to fine us for our grevious "crime". We looked at the schedule after furritively wandering around this TINY village for a few minutes, thinking we'd only have to kill an hour, maybe two until the next train came.
WRONG.
We were not in Kansas anymore. Not in Berlin either, for that matter. That was the last train. At six thirty pm on a Saturday. We were stranded in a tiny, picturesque East-German village without a bank, pay phones, taxis or cafes. The train station was pretty much all they had going for them. We were kind of screwed.
So we started using all the jokers we could think of: phoning friends, trying to find out when another train would come, whether or not we could get to another station to get said later train and most importantly, how. It finally boiled down to us calling Stephan's mother, whose first words were, "Are you guys drunk? WHERE are you?" She lives in the same province at least. It still took her over an hour to find us...with her GPS. We waited as it got darker and darker in the middle of a village under the lone street light. It was really something out of a very bizarre movie.
Our idea was that Stephan's Mom drive us to the next major train station where we could possibly catch the last train to Berlin. She arrived with a big grin on her face and said, "Hi guys! You just saved my Saturday night! Wanna come back to my place?" What to do, what to do...your future mother-in-law has just rescued you from a cold, dark East-German village. Can you really say, "Aw, no Angie...we don't really want to hang out with you. We'd much rather go back to Berlin and go out. Can't you please drive us further out of your way so that we can get back?" I couldn't. So we spontaneously headed back to Güstrow to see her new apartment. Just what I always wanted--a surprise slumber party with my mother-in-law without my toothbrush or clean underwear. Awesome!
Of course you also can't wake up at dawn the next morning and say "See you later, alligator, we've got things to do--by the way, thanks for the chow!" We finally wound up in Berlin around 4pm Sunday.
This probably should have been some kind of sign.
Two weeks later after lots of soul-searching, we were still all about getting her. So we hijacked a visiting friend and her car to spare us the trauma of potentially being marooned in Rastow (the East-German village of my nightmares) again. She was a peach and drove us almost two hours one way (due to faulty GPS) and then back with our precious cargo.
Which brings us approximately to the present date. I'm getting over my perfectionistic tendencies and my fear of being an inadquate dog-mother, she's eating and listens to most of what we say...and one can fortunately distract her with kibbles hidden in various parts of the kitchen for almost ten whole minutes. We're celebrating the small victories. It's fun but quite demanding and I do understand why every second person we tell asks us "Did you guys really think this over?" She's a little diva and is not happy unless she has the combined semi-constant attention of Stephan, myself and everone else in attendance.
Somehow I think we're going to be just fine.
