Arrival!

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 airlines, terminals and even itineraries, we had to go through immigration and customs. Immigration actually went fairly smoothly. Then came the part we were dreading: we had to collect all of our luggage (the 4 large checked bags) along with our carry-ons (I had a suitcase and backpack, Lisa had a suitcase and messenger bag) and move all of that stuff to the other terminal where we thought we would have to sit with it all until we could check it all in for our next flight. However, apparently this happens a lot at Gatwick, so they had a service at baggage claim where they would take care of all of that for you. There was one oddity to this, however. We had to collect our bags and walk with them through the customs area ("Nothing to Declare"). The woman from the transfer service actually walked with us and about halfway down the hallway said, "OK. That's good. I will take them from here." It was ... odd. We half wondered if we'd see our bags again, but everything worked out perfectly.

Hanging around Gatwick for six hours was mind-numbing for two sleep-deprived people. The flight to Munich was short and easy, but Lisa and I actually snoozed for a few minutes by putting our heads down on our tray tables. That shows just how tired we were.

The immigration line at Munich was fairly short, but the immigration officer we talked to was completely flummoxed by the fact that we were planning to stay. He asked if we had residence cards yet and I said we had an appointment on Monday. I'm not sure what he asked next, but I said I could show him my employment contract. Fortunately, I had this readily available, figuring that something like this would come up. He actually spent a few moments reading it and said, "OK" before stamping our passports and letting us through. Not a big deal, but I found this interesting.

We picked up the rental care and headed to the apartment. What was supposed to be a 45 minute drive even under normal 5:00 traffic turned into a 90 minute ordeal as there was a bad wreck that had a major highway closed down to one lane. Oy.

We eventually arrived at the apartment and got sorta settled. It was lovely clear day and we could actually see the Alps off in the distance. This was a rather nice perk that I sure wasn't expecting considering how cloudy it can be here and the fact that I didn't think we would be high enough up for that. :)

OK, so they are FAR off in the distance, but that is closer than I'm used to seeing mountains. :)

I will say that the apartment is nice and well-stocked. It's mostly modern, but there are a couple of throw-backs that amused me. One was an old-school fax machine. The other is this relic of a TV in the bedroom.

Not sure what to make of this. Not that I plan on watching TV much (other than streaming) anyway, but still.

Today we will get registered with the city (that German bureaucracy that I have previously mentioned), do some grocery shopping, buy a fan (must .... have ... air ... movement) and do some roaming around Munich in search of food .... and beer.