Our Stuff is Here!

A few minutes before 11 this morning, our boat shipment was delivered to our apartment!!  We now have our own bikes and I have more things to do.  :)  The apartment is now a mess because there is stuff and boxes and paper all over, but we feel very blessed to have our stuff again after exactly 7 weeks (they told us 6-8, so we are happy!).  All the boxes were still taped shut and nothing was damaged - praise the Lord! 

Our Apartment

Since today marks our first visitor to Deutschland (one of my best friends, Becky!), I figured that the rest of you would like to see pictures of our apartment.  I spent the last few days cleaning it pretty well and decided that would be a good time to take pictures.  :)  We're still working on getting some things for it (like curtains and more attractive pillows), but you can at least see where we're living.  It's about 110 square meters (which is quite large for Germany and much larger than our last apartment) and we are blessed to have the opportunity to live here.

Welcome to Schmidstrasse 22!  Our mailbox in on the bottom left.

Our storage closet is what you see as soon as you come in the door.  It's full of junk right now, but will hopefully hold our bikes soon.  The stairs down to the left take you to 2 apartments and the laundry room.  The stairs up to the right take you to 1 apartment a floor up and 2 apartments on the floor above that.  Our door is to the right before the stairs.

Here's our door.  The handle doesn't turn, so it locks whenever you shut it.  We have to always remember our keys!

The inside of our door.  Notice my stylish new rain boots!  Much needed here in FN!

To the right when coming in our apartment is the guest bathroom.  Here's the toilet and shower.

The other side of the guest bathroom.

The guest bedroom is straight ahead when you come in the apartment.

The guest bedroom closet which Brian has already fixed!

The guest bedroom looking into the hallways.  Forgive the insanely bright bedding...it's all that we have so far!

Looking down the hallway when you enter the apartment.  The doorway on the right is to the kitchen and straight ahead goes toward the dining/living room area.

This cabinet thing in the hallway has become the key shelf so that we always remember our keys when we leave the apartment.  We don't have much in the cupboards because we don't have anything to put in it.

The kitchen from the hallway.  Those are towels hanging on the curtain rods, not curtains.

Our freezer and trash corner.  Germans are really picky about trash and everything has a particular spot.  The freezer is about the same size as our refrigerator.

One side of the kitchen.  The cabinet with the metal strip along the top is actually our dishwasher.  They hide everything to look like cabinets, but it opens like a regular dishwasher.

The other side of the kitchen.  The cabinet second from the right and second from the bottom is our refrigerator.  The cabinet on the far right opens as one and holds our cleaning supplies.

The living/dining/tv room.  This is the part that makes the apartment seem huge!  The kitchen/door hallway is directly to the left after the desk and the master bedroom/bathroom hallways is the door you see behind the green couch.

The desk is in the dining room.  We hope to use it more once we have Internet in our apartment!

The dining room.  The desk is to the right of this picture.

The sitting area.  This couch needs new pillows!  The doorway in the background goes into the kitchen.

The TV area.  We don't watch much TV because the only thing in English is CNN.  We have watched a whole season of MASH that my sister gave us.  :)

The rest of the TV room.

The windows to the balcony.  We are borrowing two bikes from other ex-pats that are here.  The window on the right opens like a door to go out to the balcony.

One half of the balcony.  The grill works and we are very happy to have one again!!

The other half of the balcony.  That couch is disappearing because it is all ripped and gross.  We're growing beans, lettuce, and flowers.  We've started a compost bucket.

The left side of the yard.  Several cars park down there and this patio is for the tenant below us.

The right side of the yard.  This patio belongs to the other tenant below us and she has an awning that pulls out that she doesn't want us dropping cigarettes on.  :)

The view from our balcony.  We can watch tennis games whenever we want.  The line of trees prevents us from seeing the lake, but it is on the other side of them.

Here's the master bedroom hallway.  The first door on the right is our bedroom, the second door on the right is the bathroom, and the door at the end of the hallway is a storage closet.

The "dresser" in the hallway.  We don't really have anything in it, but plan to put sweaters and sweatshirts in it.  I use the mirror/shelf to do my hair because the mirrors in the bathroom are too high for me to see myself in.

The storage closet.  These gold lamps used to be all over the apartment, but I think they're ugly so I put them in the closet.  We have overhead lighting, so we don't need them.

Our bedroom.  Notice the two mattresses (yuck!).

The bedroom looking toward the hallway.  The wardrobe has some shelves and some hanging and is actually pretty nice.

The master bathroom is bigger than our office was in our last apartment.  Our dryer is in here, but you have to shut the door and open the windows when you run it because it makes so much heat/humidity.

Here's the sinks/shelves.  The only counter space is this little shelf below the mirrors.

Here's the toilet, bathtub, and shower.  The shower thankfully has a normal faucet that hangs from the wall.

Here's the bathroom looking toward the door.

I hope you enjoyed this tour of our apartment!  We'd love to have visitors anytime so that you can see it for yourself!

Barcelona

We are a few days into our vacation to Barcelona!  We have had a pretty good time so far.  The first night we were here we saw part of the Olympic installations for the 1992 Summer games that were held here.  Yesterday, we went on a bike tour through the city and saw a concert at the opera house of a blind jazz/swing piano player (excellent!).  Today we toured the Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell which are both creations by Antoni Gaudi (breath-taking!).  Here's a picture of us in front of a fountain at the Parc de la Ciutadella.  More to come later!

Sounds of Friedrichshafen - Part 2

So, after talking to Brian about my previous blog post, we came up with a few more "sounds" to include.

Raindrops
This is a sound that we definitely wish we didn't hear as much as we do!  Since we've been here, it's been rainy most days.  We have a few nice days here and there, but mostly it rains at some point during the day.  The rain isn't always very hard, but it is definitely steady.  It was relatively warm at the beginning even when it was raining, but the last couple of days have been in the 60s and rainy.  We are looking forward to heading to Barcelona, Spain tomorrow where it should be in the low 80s and sunny.

Car Engine
Maybe this one is cheating, but this is a sound we have NOT experienced much in the last few weeks!  We do not have a car here (yet!), so we have not heard the sound of a car engine starting for the last two weeks.  Last night we went with a friend out for dinner and he picked us up in his car.  It was strange to get into a car after it has been so long!  We'll see how long we can go without driving a car.  I'm definitely not excited to do that here!

Jingling Coins
 Perhaps this is a sound that we heard in the US, but we definitely hear it with more regularity here!  In the US, we usually bought things with our debit card and rarely had cash.  Since we get hit with the exchange rate and a fee every time we use our debit card, we have been taking out cash to pay for things (plus, many places don't accept a debit card).  Because of this, we have more coins in our pockets and sometimes find it hard to use them up because it is hard to remember to use them.  Plus, they look different and are different denominations than in the US, so sometimes we forget how to use them.  We try our hardest to use them, but sometimes we just want to do things fast and not look dumb looking through the coins to find the ones we need.  :)

We're headed to Barcelona for the next week, so hopefully after that I will have some pictures to post up here.  I had a picture of Brian in the rain to put with this post, but we already packed the camera, so I'll have to put it up later.