Haus (House)

Our house is a Doppelhaushälfte which is really just a Duplex. The landlord lady lives in the other half next door.

As you can see there is almost no front yard to speak of but there is a back yard. When they renovated the house, they did not finish the outside work as it was winter. We are still waiting for a driveway, backyard, patio and balcony.

You can see our wooden "walkway" that we use to get to the front door (which is on the side of the house.)

Most of the houses on our street are duplexes as well.

Only in Germany

This is the car we are renting for me....it is automatic as I do not (yet) know how to drive a stick shift.

But only in Germany would they have to point out that the top speed of the vehicle is 210km/h = 130mph. You really are allowed to go very fast on parts of the Autobahn (highway)!

First Solo Trip to the Supermarket

It was time for me to venture out on my own and make my first solo trip to the supermarket! We had gone to some larger ones over the weekend, but I thought I would try our local (much closer) but smaller supermarket. One of these days I will remember to take my own shopping bags as you have to pay for them in Germany if you don't bring them.

The girls are sticking with Peanut butter sandwiches on "American Style" whitey-white bread.

However, I have started to enjoy the hearty German bread...

But found it even better with Nutella!

MMmmmmmmm....tasty!

Painting of Rooms

The older one wanted her room painted, so I said if she wants to do a lot of the work, I would help. She chose BRIGHT colors!

Before:

After:

Re: Packing and Moving

We only planned to take part of our household stuff to Germany and leave the rest in long-term storage. The Mover people said to separate all our stuff into "Germany" stuff and "Storage" stuff... I decided it would be too difficult to move stuff all around the house so we just labeled our items.

Then the movers came and with tremendous speed and efficiency they packed up all the Germany stuff first.

For all the Germany items, they loaded it into a shipping container. It ended up only being 3/4 full...important because we only get one shipping container to get all our stuff back to the U.S. too....evidently we can do a little shopping!

By Tuesday all the Germany stuff was on its way, and then they started on all the items that are to go into storage. They finished that by Wednesday night, and the house was cleaned out!

We sold our minivan to CarCash for a pittance, but they would buy it on the spot, so what do you do. On Thursday we finished cleaning out the house...donating food to the food bank at church and finalizing details. Our friend Kathy took us to the Airport and we were off!

We've Arrived!

We arrived in Munich this morning at about 10:00am local time. We rented the biggest car (suv) they had to fit all our luggage -- 8 checked pieces plus carry ons!
Now we are unpacking...where does it all go?

Packin' and Movin'

The Germany Shipment is off !
So far they have used 2 boxes of packing tape = 55yds/roll * 36 rolls/box= 2.25 miles of tape!
Now they are packing the stuff to be stored...