The Container has arrived in Oslo!!

On Thursday our container arrived from Mexico: Yea!! We have been waiting for it for the last two months. It has been delayed several times along the way and we have had a huge, sometimes painful, always patience-taxing, learning experience.

But, in the end, good things do indeed come to those who wait!

The truck arrived in the afternoon with a light dusting of snow swirling down. As the now somewhat rusted seal came off the container and we gazed at its long awaited contents, we were actually a bit amazed at how many boxes there were! We knew there were 112 of them, but . . . !?

By the end of the afternoon, we had moved each one of those boxes many, many times. We unloaded the truck about 100 meters away from the shop on the other side of the street. It added another "leg" to the unloading, but it was by far the best place for the truck to stop space-wise. Once the truck was unloaded, we then "two-wheeled" the boxes over to the front of the shop.

Once there, we had to get them through the surprisingly narrow-seeming front door and up the 2 inside steps into the shop proper. From there, they had to be carried down a long-ish flight of stairs, across a small tri-level area, and through another doorway into the storage room. There were only 3 crates we couldn't physically fit into the shop. We took those apart outside on the sidewalk and carried the merchandise inside by hand. The crates were rather full of styrofoam peanuts though and with a stiff wind blowing, we had a fair amount of cleanup to do all down the street.

We hired two men to help with the unloading & moving. We called a telephone number on your basic streetlight posted moving service flyer and were very happy with the worker's performance. Jim referred to them as our "Eritreans", but we don't actually know where they were from. Only one of them spoke some Norwegian and we never stopped moving long enough to cover our personal histories! Our moving guys needed to break to pray at one point. They did their ritual ablutions at the sink in the back and prayed right in the front of the shop. Jim really wanted a picture of that for the blog, but, you know, we agreed that should remain their private business.

It was a fair amount of toting all told, but from start to finish we got everything into the shop and almost all of it into the downstairs store room in just 3 1/2 hours flat. The 3 hours of wages for the workers only set us back about $350.00 (!). Eva (my mom) & I worked on unpacking on Friday and Jim & I did more unpacking and cleaning up packing materials (35 large black plastic trash bags full of balled up &/or shredded newspaper alone?!) on Saturday. When we left the shop last night there were just 5 more boxes to open! We hope that we may be able to start on displays by Thursday.

There's rather a lot of final & touch up painting & cleaning that needs to be done now though, so we will see, never-the-less we will be working to make it happen.

Fruity Keiko Oslo here we come!!