I am here, I'm alive, and man am I excited! Friends, it's happened...I've moved to Germany for the year. Looking at it that way, I'm still not so sure how I feel about it, but if I take the idea that, "I'm in Germany" in smaller chunks, there are very few (although presently unfeasible) things that could make me happier!
Anya and I arrived after an exceedingly hassle-free flight around 11am on Thursday (while most of you lovely people were still sleeping like babies back across the pond), and proceeded to blaze through customs and the purchase of our Bahncard's, which provide us with 50% off of our train tickets for the year; as long as we rack up 100 Euro worth of savings, they pay for themselves, which won't be hard since if I took a 2 1/2 hour train to visit Friedie (which is surprisingly long, actually), I would already save 25. And did I mention we plan on taking lots of trains this year? Anyway, Lufthansa once again blew me away, with the most excessive drink service I've ever experienced in Economy (can you say free wine and cocktails, and a FOURTH beverage go-round offering bailey's and digestifs after 'dinner'?).
True to form, we also met some interesting people while en route. Actually, I'm mostly referring to the very nice man at the baggage drop-off who was very friendly toward me and we think was also the guy who waved a fee for Anya. For some reason I always end up meeting rather flirtatious airport employees, and this trip was no different. He complemented me on my perfect packing job (for those at home who watched the weigh-transfer things-weigh again-transfer more things-lots of swearing crisis with interest, I was 1kg underweight in the big bag and 3 underweight in the other!), asked me all about where I was going, and when he gave me the little electronic pad to sign for the $70 second bag fee (yes, not overweight bag fee, SECOND BAG FEE), he said in his rather charming but nondistinct Eastern European accent, "So I just need your signature here. And your phone number at the bottom. Noooo I'm just kidding, not your phone number". Oh dear. We then heard him make an announcement in four different languages (with exceptional accents) at our gate and were impressed. Anyway. Moving on.
Our first purchase in the Frankfurt airport was Apfelschorle, the world's most perfect combination of apple juice and fizzy water that we missed quite terribly. Being the responsible travelers that we are, we thought we would document it...
Our only hitch was making the 8-minute connection between trains in Stuttgart. The signage was poor and we had BIG bags, so we ran down some long stairs and up some long stairs thinking we had to, reaching the train door and pushing the little 'open' button JUST before the train started to move. We swore the conductor had seen us, and cursed him as we only know how to do in English. This meant that we missed the housing office that afternoon, but were taken in by Meike, our wonderful, incredible, oh-so-helpful and knowledgable peer advisor whose praises I could never in a million years sing enough. And if anyone wants to contribute some money to her salary, which I'm sure is paltry, I should add a little button over there on the side. No but really. She's awesome. We stayed at her place, had some dinner and passed out, which was phenomenal after 90 minutes of sleep on the plane and a brief brief snooze on the train, and went to the housing office the next morning.
When we got off the bus and saw our neighborhood, the day got great. When we got to our buildings and saw the entranceway, the day got really great. When we got to our adjacent apartments and saw our rooms, it became just about the best day ever. After some repeatedly non-ideal housing at Wesleyan, I think Anya just about had a heart attack. Here's my room, mostly unpacked, for a reference:
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We also have a Kaufland around the corner. This is basically a combination of Target and Walmart, that has everything for ridiculously low prices. Including, wait for it, organic produce. Yeah. We're pretty psyched. And when I say, 'around the corner,' I mean two minutes walking. If that. We went three times yesterday....three! In fact, it was a very productive day in general, and we couldn't believe how long the day felt (in a good way, not the bad way). After we got our keys from the Hausmeister (let's not even go into that bureaucracy), we brought all of our stuff over, dropped it off, and headed out to do some useful things. Anya and I have pretty quickly figured out how to get between here and the Altstadt/downtown on the bus (a mere 5 minutes), so we hopped on over back that way to get our bank accounts set up so we could get our phones set up. they squeezed us in late in the afternoon on a Friday, we think because we had our passports/were all prepared and spoke very nicely to them in German. Go figure. The phones were equally easy, and I finally got my data set up on my iphone. Unfortunately, it still costs me .39 to send an international text message and .19/minute to place an international phone call, but we figure for quick check-ins while traveling and for emergencies, that's pretty decent compared to some rates, and we got a sweet deal on unlimited data, texting, and 80 minutes of phone calls within Germany. We were pretty psyched. We then met up with the whole group for dinner and some fabulous brewed-in-house beer. Life is good.
I leave you with some photos. And if you're curious about what Tuebingen looks like, though I'll be putting up more photos as time goes on, check wikipedia out of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%BCbingen
After dinner we decided we wanted chocolate. What's open at 9pm on a Friday? Kaufland, of course!
Okay, so there's an 'e' on the end, but there are plenty of Steidl's here, too, and this about made my day.
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