Ich bin ein Texaner

This week has been hot. I can feel the Texan eye rolls from here, and I get it. It's much hotter in Texas than it is here. However, in Texas there is an abundance of air conditioning. Here there is virtually none. Not our apartment, not Robert's office, not most stores. There are a few mall-type places that have AC, but you have to go looking for it. Additionally, we spend a lot more time outside here than we ever did in Austin. We lived in a pretty walkable neighborhood in Austin, but I felt pretty virtuous if I walked to lunch or dinner a couple times a week. Here, it's near-daily. We walk to the train station (about 12 minutes). We walk to the grocery store (5 minutes now, but that'll be longer at the new place). If we take the train somewhere, there's walking on the other end. All of that means more time outside. Until this week, that was a wonderful thing. The summer weather was glorious, the trees are green, there's a lot of green space throughout Mu...

Part of getting settled in is finding things that work in your new location. It's both fun and frustrating, as anyone who has ever moved as an adult can attest. The car-buying process is very different here and MUCH more lengthy (maybe we'll talk about that in detail in a future post). We've now made the decision about what car to buy and have obtained insurance. It's in the registration process as of Thursday, and we'll pick it up Monday. A car is useful, but most places in Europe are super bike-friendly. I've been itching for a bike for a couple of years, and now the dream is a reality. It's a reality in almost Pepto-Bismol pink, in my case. Yes, I bought a pink (PANK!) bicycle. No, it wasn't an accident. I'll explain. We went to the bicycle superstore in Munich -- probably a couple of acres of bikes. The store is big enough that you can test-drive inside the store. There's even a small track where you can build up a little speed. ...

One of the things I was sick of living in Austin was sitting in traffic. I even said, "I don't care if it still takes me 45 minutes to get to work. If I'm not sitting in traffic it is way better." Well, that is indeed the case. It takes me about 45 minutes door to door. But it is a much different commute here. First of all, let me say that my friends that are used to using public transportation will not think anything of what I'm saying. To those friends I say this: I drove my car every day in Austin. I had no choice. I'm not even sure that was even a bus stop within a mile of my office. Cars are an integral part of life in Austin. With that disclaimer out of the way, I will start out with the fact that I turned in our rental car last Wednesday and Lisa and I have done quite well without a car for a week and a half. Really, the only reason we are getting a car is for driving trips on the weekends, the occasional large grocery trip and, of course, travellin...

There have not been any posts in a week. What? Why? Well, because. It was a ... normal week. I started work on Monday the 2nd, which means there was a routine. There were small things that came up, but they weren't very out-of the ordinary: I returned the rental car on Wednesday; Lisa soloed a grocery store trip; the air shipment showed up. Exciting things in a way, but not particularly note-worthy. Saturday was spent going to a bike store and trying to figure out which bike to get. We left without bikes, but we have a much better idea what we are looking for. I bought power cables for my computer. Stuff happened. We did do a little wandering on Saturday after the bike store and ended up at the  Alter Botanischer Garten , I will say, the Europeans do know their gardens. We sat outside at a picnic table and sipped beers. It was lovely. So, what is the "non-normal" stuff that has crept into my routine? Well, there are things that Americans that live in large cities do t...

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...