Ex-pat Newlyweds

…we’re just busy with other things. I’m sure once our adventures start up again, we’ll get back to this blog. In the meantime, go check out Postcards from Luisa.

Yes, yes, I’m always a few weeks behind Sabine. Some photos from Sardinia…

Ok. So not quite yet. But our adventure is about to get a whole lot more adventuresome.

We don’t have any big trips trekking the Urals or floating in the Dead Sea. We’re not moving to Shanghai or even moving back to Vancouver. We won’t be hiking around Interlaaken or spending a summer observing Orca whales in the northern waters of Norway.

Our adventure is much  more domestic.

And way bigger.

On November 30, 2010, we hope to meet our little expat baby.

Yes, we’re now the Expectant Expat Newlyweds, and no, we’re not dropping the Newlyweds.

So as we travel to Sardinia next week, we’ll be travelling for three. Sabine has already resigned herself to an Italian holiday away from wine and prosciutto. As we get to Canada for July, we’ll be travelling for a bigger three, and Sabine will just have to toast to Andrew & Mel’s everlasting happiness with apple cider. There will be other things: she already misses the cheese breakfasts and is mourning the loss of the summer beer garden.

But in Italy, she’ll console herself with gelato. In Canada, it’s not about her anyway. And, to be honest, the summer has been pretty non-existant.

And in the end, we’ll have a little Berliner baby, and we’re sure it will be worth it.

13 weeks and counting

After living here for over a year and a half now, we’ve become used to people asking us for tips and hints on things to do and places to stay in Berlin. One of the common questions we get is where to stay in Berlin when you are coming for a month or more. Well, here’s a list of sites that we looked through to help us find something when we first moved here.

Rooms in Berlin *
City Wohnen *
Ex Berliner *
OTA Berlin
Coming Home *
Fine and Mine *
Home Company
Zeit Raum
Vacation Rentals by Owner (VRBO) *
Central Home *

I have starred the ones that seemed to be the better sites. In the end, we found a place with Coming Home and they were perfectly good. Central Home has lots of managed buildings and I know several co-workers who use them just because it’s dead easy (and close to our office). They will be more expensive than a “private” rental though since they offer more services and manage the entire building, not just per-unit.

The last one to try that we can highly recommend is the fabulous Schoenhause Apartments. They are more of a self-service, long-stay hotel but we stayed there a few years ago as tourists in the city. The location is great, apartments are newly renovated and the cafe/restaurant in the main floor is a block away from one of Nokia’s offices, so I can often be found there chowing on some amazing Italian food!

A few spare moments have revealed themselves to share photos from our last trip to Vienna…