Ich bin ein Texaner

Today started out kinda normal. We went and looked at cars and came home at lunch time. I went back into Munich to look at more cars (whee!) and Lisa stayed home since she wasn't feeling too well. It was a good thing she did, too. Our kitchen sink had a pretty sizable leak. The landlord sent someone over on Monday. He was supposed to arrive at 4, but he showed up at 6:15. He took one look under our sink and said that he needed parts and would come back Tuesday. Our landlord emailed us Tuesday morning and informed us that he would be there between 3 and 4. So, we spent yesterday afternoon hanging around the apartment, only to have him no-show. Whee! This brings us to today, when he was scheduled to arrive at 3. Owing, I'm sure, to the fact that Germany had a soccer match at 4, he wanted to be done with our stupid plumbing job, so he showed up at 1:15. Which is why it good that Lisa was here. So, that brings us to the afternoon. As previously stated, I was in town looking at ca

Our friend Cindy, who moved to Dresden three years ago, came in to visit us this weekend. She's been through the whole "moving to Germany" wringer, so she was able to shed some light on a number of topics. The biggest one was that we went to multiple grocery stores so she could show us  the ropes. Robert covered this topic extensively in his most recent post . One of the coolest things about the G I A N T grocery store we found (by giant, I mean that it's possibly larger than an HEB Plus, only on two floors). They have a cheese aisle, which is awesome, but they also have a cheese case (a K ä se case, for you punsters). This is one section of probably 8-10 total sections. Antonelli's is undoubtedly more carefully curated than this, but the sheer quantity is really impressive here. After the grocery store jaunt, we decided to go into Munich. It's about a 10-minute walk to the train station in Haar, the small-town suburb where we're staying. I snapped

We have found our small local grocery store within easy walking distance of our apartment, but we hadn't really explored to find someplace to do the large weekly trip. Well, Saturday we changed all of that in a whirlwind of shopping that left me a little overwhelmed and grateful that it was done. Backing up, we have a friend (Cindy) that moved from Austin to Dresden 3 years ago. Since she has learned all the lessons, she offered to come in town and help get us settled. She arrived late Friday night and we didn't get up particularly early on Saturday, but once we got up and moving, there was no stopping. We first tried to find a "large" grocery store and drove about 15 minutes toward Munich. This store ended up not being particularly large. We made a few purchases and headed back to the apartment to drop stuff off and regroup. Cindy found what she was looking for on the map, also toward Munich. We again went off toward Munich and I was in no way prepared. I'm no

When you arrive in a new city, you want to explore. Maybe not right away, because jet lag is real, and the bag monster speaks loudly. So if you want to fight the jet lag beast, you rouse yourself and go find out about your new surroundings. Ugh. Do I have to? It helped that we had a commitment to meet our relocation expert, the lovely and helpful Irene, at 10:30 to get our city registration done. We're staying in a small hamlet called Haar just outside Munich to the east. Irene told us that, if you have to register in Munich, you can expect to spend 2-4 hours in line. In Haar we spent about 15 minutes. Not bad! Here's a look at the permanent maypole  in the town center. As is Bavarian tradition, it's decorated with German folk images. Pretty cool. There's a clear process flow for doing all the things that must be done for immigration: you get an offer letter, which is used to get an apartment. The landlord signs the form  that we've blogged about earlie

OK. so some of this may be redundant with FB posts and some may be familiar to those who travel a lot, but I wanted to give a full account of how things went on our trip here and our first view of our apartment for the next six months. Travelling out of Austin on Norwegian is a nice way to do it: the flight is inexpensive; they fly to Gatwick, which is a large airport with lots of connections; and we flew on a nice, new 787. However, they have a lower weight  limit for luggage than most other airlines: 20kg (44 pounds) vs 23kg (50.6 pounds). We were able to check 4 large suitcases (yay for upgrades!). Our travel luggage scale told us we were close, but when we checked in, they ended up at 20, 20, 20, and 19.6 kg. Hah! We are SUCH engineers. The flight to London is overnight, as all flights to Europe are, so we left Austin at 4:30pm and arrived at 7:30am (1:30am body time). Lisa and I can't sleep on planes, so we were rather scrambled at this point. Since we were changing air

This is a question that I have been asked a lot. Why Munich? Why not [insert city name here]? There are a few reasons that we have for having decided to move to Munich. In no particular order: It's the economy... Germany has the largest economy in Europe and, while it can't keep up with Luxembourg in terms of GDP per-capita, it is the 4th largest economy in the world . It is also a fairly diversified economy. And there is a large tech industry there, so, should the worst happen and I am let go, I would be able to find another job. While the UK has the advantage of having English as the primary language, their exit from the EU made me a bit uneasy. Location, location, location While Munich may not be exactly the geographic center of Europe, it isn't too far from being so. It also boasts a  fairly busy airport . While not Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle, it has non-stops to a lot of places in Europe and even a few to the US. And, given that travelling around Europe was