German Houses

Curious Girl continues to confuse Germany (the real thing) with Germany (the place we're moving, where we are right now, looking for houses and me doing some preliminary set up for next year). "Can we go to the Hello Kitty street?" she asked last night as we drove home from dinner. The Hello Kitty street is in Berlin, near the Hackesche Markt: there's a Hello Kitty store near by, with a sign on a lamppost close to the train station. We used that sign to guide us down the street to the apartment we rented for a week last summer.

We are also house hunting. We know what neighborhood we want to live in, but there aren't any houses for sale there. Well, there are two for sale, but one is on a majorly busy street and the other just doesn't have the kind of layout we want. So we can't decide whether to wait and see whether more houses come on the market in this neighborhood, or whether to set our sights on another neighborhood.

So we've been looking in other neighborhoods, trying to decide whether we should live someplace more suburban (where the housing is much cheaper), whether we should live in a cute small town 15-20 minutes away from the campus we'll be working at (and whether we should live in the suburban part of said cute town, or in the center, in a smaller house that's walking distance to the center of small cute town). Or would it be better to be closer to the area's Distinguishing Geographic Characteristic? Or to have a view of that Characteristic?

Germany isn't the most diverse spot in the US, but the cute small town is less diverse than the not-so-diverse-and-way-more-expensive city. Tough choices.

Maybe this means we've just not yet found the right house. And we're definitely overthinking this all. I hope some clarity will emerge when we sleep on it.