Wow, time has flown.
We've enjoyed a visit from my friend Ramona, gotten furniture, and started work. Oh, and squeezed in a Glueckstadt weekend . . . .
When I last wrote, we barely had furniture (think 2 chairs and some beds). We now have some cabinets, a table and chairs, two armchairs, a coffee table, a TV stand (complete with TV and DVD player), a wardrobe, bathroom mats, and carpets. Nightstands were found (no small task finding them under 40cm wide, which is what our house demanded), light fixtures have been hung, the kitchen is being outfitted (it's nice having dishes), and clothes are slowly being unpacked permanently. It's neat, but it hasn't been without some difficulties. The first of these has been the adventure of the car, which went something like this:
In Germany, dealers are required by law to provide a 5 year warranty on a car. That means finding a "beater" or anything in the price range we wanted (under 5K) just wasn't going to happen. No problem, we thought. I can read car ads, and so I started looking at private sale ads. Here's the catch--to look at a car, you must first GET to the car--no small feat when you live in a town of 5,000 and have no car. Thankfully we found one and even got it registered right away. That was on a Thursday night and Friday morning. We promptly put on the tags, filled it with gas, and drove to Glueckstadt. The car (named Ellie) is a dark red '93 VW Golf with no working a/c at the moment. The drive was 800 km (about 500 miles) and was expected to take 8 hours. An accident on the autobahn and roadwork season meant it took 10 1/2. We spent the evening celebrating our friend Henryk's birthday, spent Saturday with Oma in Glueckstadt, and promptly came home Sunday.
Monday Ramona came into town, and we went with her back to Neuschwanstein. This time we were smart enough to get tickets in advance and got to see the inside. Yay! We parted ways on Wednesday evening, and we spent the last few days of summer vacation getting the kinks worked out. These included getting our money (finally after numerous faxes, phone calls, emails, and more), getting the mail delivered (apparently our mailman decided he didn't feel like delivering to us), and getting more stuff from IKEA. Our final trip (yeah, right) is going to be on Tuesday, as they were out of what we needed last week and we weren't about to pay a delivery fee twice! Our shipment has not yet arrived either, so that's annoying. Progress is being made on the dogs, so hopefully they'll be here in 3 weeks--we really miss them! We've met our neighbors--a nice young family with four very sweet and friendly kids. Dad (Martin) played American Football here in Munich, and he speaks English fairly well. He and Gus get on like a house on fire, and already food has been brought over and beer shared. We are also getting to really like Zolling. Today was one of the hottest days of the year, so we headed over to the lake and brought books and towels. The water was chilly but pleasant, the lake large enough and with enough toys, and the ice cream truck was there. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon!
As for work, I'll have tons of time to fill you in on the details. Let's just say that expectations are high, people are awesome, and we love it. We've met some amazing people (including a couple who invited us over for dinner the other night), and the school took new staff out a few times. We went on a city tour of Munich and to a downtown beergarden last week, then to a beergarden here in Freising this week. Last weekend we also went on an informal outing--new teachers (and a few returning) and families headed out to the Ammersee on the south side of Munich and hiked up to Andechs Monestary, where the beergarden was nice, the hike pleasant, the food good, and the company excellent. Apparently this is organized by the IT guys every year. We are meeting cool people with all kinds of stories about where they're from, where they've lived and taught, and things they've done. It's pretty cool to work with a staff like this!
We're also settling into living like locals. Yesterday we went into Freising and went shopping for a few essentials. We also went to the farmer's market to buy some food. We sat down at a little restaurant and enjoyed watching the city go by over lunch. When the view of downtown Freising is what you get to see as you sit there, you know life is good. Freising is a neat old town, and it home to Weihenstephan brewery, which claims the title of world's oldest. The Catholic churches of Munich also belong to Freising, not the other way around. It's an old, beautiful, and lively city that still retains its peacefulness. We're pretty happy here!
Tomorrrow is the first day for students, so we're off to get squared away with that. I promise there will be a blog post with more on "impressions of Germany" in the near future.
