Some random thoughts

When we moved to Germany, we went through several briefs to prepare us for the upcoming adventure.  One of the pamphlets we received was on culture shock.  I threw it away.  I'm a world traveler.  I know how this works.  Intercultural Communication was my major.  I got this!  Ha!  Was I wrong.

To do anything administratively in Germany is 100 times harder than in the States.  Setting up utilities takes more work and more steps.  Registering your car is pretty easy IF it passes inspection, but having it pass inspection can be tricky.  Germans are very green and they walk and bike everywhere, but they smoke like chimneys.  Dogs are allowed in restaurants, but most German restaurants don't have highchairs for your babies.  A lot of Germans speak English, but hardly any of them have the confidence to do so.  They are as nervous about the language as we are about speaking Deutsch.  The other thing that I have observed about Germans is that they are to-the-point kind of people and have no use for you if they don't know you.  So smiling at you when they pass you on the street is unheard of.  That's a little harsh for me. I may not like you, but for darn sure I'll smile at you.  I'm nice like that.

Jeremy was crazy on top of things before we left Virginia, which was great considering we didn't have a sponsor when we got here, which means we didn't have a place to stay when we got here either.  We had one guy drive us around one day to get some things finished.  (And that guy could have cared less about living here, so he was a real downer.)  If Jeremy hadn't done some of the legwork in the States, I'm sure it would have taken even longer to get things set up.  For example, if you are active duty, you can take your driver's license test online before you get here.  Awesome!  So that first day, Jeremy picked up his license from DTS and was able to rent a car.  Looking back on the whole adventure, I'm not really sure if we would have shipped a vehicle either.  I think I would have liked to sell our Taurus and take the money to buy two beaters for the price of one.  I can guarantee Jeremy would have sold his motorcycle before we left too (in hind sight).

That first day we got here, Jeremy got his driver's license, a rental car, a cell phone (we agree with the pre-paid cell phone way around here), got our customs stuff filled out, got an Esso card (we'll go over that again later), went to the post office, and brought dinner.  It was rough.  The hotel they put us in was terrible (Hotel Atlantis)!  So about four days later, Jeremy got us into the Ramstein Inn.  Much better.  We signed a contract on the first house we looked at.  So far we love our landlords.  Nice people.  Our biggest hurtle was getting internet to our house.  We were without it for a month.  That was pretty hard on both of us.  It's one thing to have to combat culture shock, it's completely another thing to be cut off completely from everything.  After signing a contract with the wrong internet company, signing another contract with the right internet company, we have internet.  When you sign up for internet, you get a phone line along with it.  It's actually more expensive to not have a German land line.  We also signed up for Vonage before we left the States.  It's an internet phone line that acts like it's coming from NC.  This enables us to talk freely back and forth to the States without any problems (well, time difference maybe).

I know this is random and not really written well, but it's hard to cover last months adventures when most of them were a blur.  I'm sure we will cover them again later in detail at some point.  I will cover German trash adventures, but again, I'm not ready for that yet.

~Tara