The First Week

The 1st week you are in a new country is filled with challenges. Some people handle them gracefully, others...hhmmmmm, NOT so gracefully! The 1st 2 days we really didn't do much, other than walk around the base, watch tv and sleep. But on the 26th Boss drove us over to pick up our car and register it in Germany. I promise to never ever complain about a DMV office in the states ever again! We got to the office at 2pm and didn't leave until after they had closed at 5pm! It was insane! A big shout out to my kids...they were fantastic! We were totally unprepared and they sat in the chairs there, sweat pouring down them, and barely complained at all! How did I get so lucky? Boss drove us there, took us inside and explained the process and then he left to pick up a freezer at a nearby store. He came back in an hour and then waited there with us. I have never had people help us like this during any of our moves, I actually felt very bad for him.

At this point, only Big J had his German driver's license so he drove us back to the hotel. There are so many signs to pay attention to that you have a hard time remembering to pay attention to where you need to drive to! There are signs that tell you that you are on a priority road and everyone else has to yield to you, that's probably the easiest street to drive on. But when you're coming up on an intersection you have to remember to look for signs because if there are no signs at all you have to yield to the person on the right! My point here is that driving is no longer an automatic thing!

On the 28th I went and took my German driver's test and passed with a 90! (J got an 85, have to make sure to note the difference here!!!) Now that I am driving too I have found myself turning the music off because driving takes so much of my concentration I can't even have other noise in the car!! That is just craziness to me, I live for music..."music is the background to our lives!"...and here I am turning it off?!

On the 29th we noted 4 houses, called on them and only got an appointment to go see one, so I wrote down directions from yahoo maps. I was told by another landlord that they would call me back today, so I wrote the directions down for that house too. Off we went, out of the base gate, away from our security blanket of the american style base, out and about in the "real" Germany for the 1st time. Let me tell you, this was not a pretty sight! We decided to drive to our 4pm appointment, even though it was only 1pm to make sure we could get there on time. Let me preface this adventure with the fact that J is not happy about being pulled so quickly and violently outside of his box! Even though I wrote the directions down exactly as stated on yahoo maps, we had a really difficult time following them. When you approach an intersection, there may or may not be a street sign. In fact on some corners, there will be about 20 signs pointing in every direction (just imagine the post MASH had up that listed the towns and miles that everyone was from) and it is physically impossible to read all those signs going 50-70 km! There was one street that we couldn't locate to save our lives! We drove back and forth thru the town at least 4 times, I finally found a tiny sign with the street name we needed. The house wasn't really that nice on the outside, but most European houses are old on the outside and refurnished when you get inside. Now that we new where this house was, tried to find a house I really wanted to see...but after nothing but yelling and screaming we got a call from a landlord who tried to tell us over the phone how to get to a Netto shop for her to let us follow her to the house. Well after 30 min. of not being able comprehend enuf of her conversation to find the Netto shop, we had to give up and drive to our appt. The house wasn't that nice on the inside either. Then we got another call to meet at another house. I wanted to go home and look up directions, J thought we'd be able to find it; I won't embarrass him with details here but it was definately not his finest hour! Finally found the house and it was much nicer than the 1st one. We said we would like to rent the house and they said they would call.

We had heard multiple horror stories about looking for a house for a month or more, people said that landlords will show it to many people and then pick the one they want to rent to. Everyone we met suggested we take the 1st house we were offered because of this competition. So I felt very lucky when then next morning we got a call offering us the house. It's closer to the base than I would have liked, but we only had one awful day of house hunting instead of weeks and weeks of it. They had to get the painter in to paint the inside, but we could have the house next week.

After a trip to the landlord's house in Homburg to sign the contract (he's a pastor btw, and we had another horrid moment in the car lost. Couldn't call them because I didn't have the unlock code memorized on my phone yet!), and test driving an old BMW we purchased a Honda ! We had to go thru the DMV event again, but at least this time it was only 2 1/2 hours! Life is good!