And finally, our stuff is here!

Many changes around Ringstrasse 39 (our street and house number) are happening! We finally received our household goods shipment. This involved about 7 German men going in and out of the house saying, “Miss, miss! Where does this go?” Honestly, I had no idea where things went because we have no where to put anything. So the entire downstairs became a sea of boxes and plastic wrap and more boxes. We had to create little pathways just to get to the kitchen. But a week later, all the important things have found their places and yes, we still have an entire room or two of boxes but at least it is organized. At the same time as the house was a ridiculous mess on the inside, they started work on the roof. Finally a purpose for the scaffolding that has been up since we got here in September! So this has consisted of a week of, once again, about 7 Germans in and out of the house. They put in two new skylights upstairs, so it was not uncommon for us to wake up to 2-3 Germans right outside the bedroom door (and they aren’t the quietest workers). During the day there is lots of hammering, thumping, a few loud bangs, and even a chainsaw used as the new roof is being made. I know it will be nice and hopefully do a better job of keeping our house warm, but Jordon has had a hard time sleeping during the day through all of this! I just talked to the landlord (Gretel) and apparently they will be done with the major work on Tuesday, thank goodness. They are also trying to fix our satellite for the TV today which is nice, currently it has been frozen on a football game for the past 3 hours which is not a good sign. Our landlords have been great to us though, and are trying to make the house even nicer than it is so we are thankful for that.

We are hoping to take a mini-vacation next week because next Thursday is our only mutual day off. It will be so nice to get out and travel again! It feels like it has been forever since we went anywhere, but I guess we would be doing even less traveling if we were living in the States so we are fortunate to do what we can. Hope you are all enjoying the (hopefully) beautiful fall weather! It has turned to winter here already and it’s so windy I wouldn’t be surprised if we woke up in Kansas one morning. Tschüß!

 Our still-a-work-in-progress living room. Feels so much more like home than before! And if you notice the upside down laptop sitting on a bed of rice, someone might have spilled water over his laptop. Whoops! 

Currently the view of the house from the street! The landlord joked with me the other day when I got home, he said "all done, looks good!" Yeah, right. 

A Little Update

Hi all! Thought I’d share a few things and let you know what our day-to-day lives look like. I am starting to volunteer at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center soon, but there are about 1200 steps I have to go through first. This hospital is mainly where soldiers from Iraq and Afganistan are transported to after being injured in combat. Also, it serves the giant American military community surrounding our area. Needless to say, it is quite the facility and will be a great place to gain nursing experience. The in-processing to a military medical center is very involved and even more so since I am hoping this volunteer position will lead to a staff position down the road. I will be volunteering in the capacity of an RN in the Pain Management unit. This means I will work closely with anesthesia doctors on procedures like nerve blocks, epidurals, and even acupuncture. I think it will be a great learning experience for me and I am really excited to start! I can volunteer as much or as little as I want each week and can set my own schedule, which is very convenient. Jordon works 12 hour night shifts 4 days a week, and has Wednesday through Friday nights off right now. This makes our “work weeks” interesting! He is also taking an Anatomy class online in pursuit of his Exercise Science degree so we are lucky to get an hour of quality time together during the days when he works! He is currently recovering from his latest oral surgery and will have another surgery in about a month. This allowed for a few days off work so he has been enjoying a very long weekend. We got a parking ticket the other week and decided to pay it the other day. Turns out, the entire ticket is in German. We were able to decipher a few words but that didn’t help too much. We saw something that looked like an address on the ticket, so we typed it into our GPS and it took us to the general area of the building we needed to go to. After showing 3 very helpful Germans our ticket and asking where the heck we needed to go, we found a tiny office where we paid the fee. This just goes to show you that simple things like paying a parking ticket over here can turn into quite the ordeal. But it’s all a learning experience and we are up to the challenge!

It is getting really cold here already, it's not uncommon to be in the 30's and low 40's during the day. Hope you are all doing well, Happy Halloween from the both of us! 

Pretty church in our town, about a 10 minute walk from our house

Our 1st visitors and a little more!

Hello all! This weekend was busy busy busy. We purchased a big tv and are now going through the hassle of getting it to work! Between German electrical plugs, aligning the satellite, and trying to get the Air Force network, we have only been successful with 3 channels. At least it’s in English (and we were able to watch part of the Sounders game today!).

We had a couple that Jordon has known since being over here over for dinner on Thursday. They are actually from Enumclaw so it’s fun to talk about home with them. Just as we were about to eat, Ben Abraham and his sister Ericka arrived at our doorstep! Last we had heard from them was that they were in Amsterdam that morning and they were taking the train to Germany and going to try to make it to our house! It was a great surprise and so fun to see friends from home. We were able to take a day trip to Heidelberg and did a little shopping and sightseeing… it was cold! We hiked up to the Heidelberg castle which is HUGE and walked as far through it as we could without having to pay. Then we went to the Kaiserslautern October Festival which is about 20 minutes away from our house. Germans love their festivals! This one had rides, food, and of course beer and wine tents. Even a fireworks show, but we weren’t impressed (I guess we get spoiled every 4^th of July). Jordon’s favorite game at these festivals is throwing ping pong balls towards German glasses and beersteins. Let’s just say we are set for glassware in our house! Our friends left the next morning to continue on their travels. It was so great to have company from home and to be able to show people around. Can’t wait for more visitors (hint, hint)!

We bought a car today! We needed another car as I am starting volunteer work as a nurse at Landstuhl Medical Center in a few weeks. Volunteering will hopefully lead to a paying position but I will take what I can!

We are missing everyone at home but are getting more and more settled here as the time goes on. Have a great day! Auf Weidersehen!

Jordon and Ben in Heidelberg

You can see the castle on the hill!

At the castle

Kasierslautern Festival

Jordon's favorite game! 

Kandersteg and Murren, Switzerland

Hello all! We recently got back from a few days in Switzerland. We started off for Kandersteg, which is a very small town about 4 and a half hours from our house. Unfortunately, our GPS took us on a roundabout way through France (which is full of tolls and bad roads) so we didn’t arrive at our destination until 6 or 7 at night. Kandersteg is an “end of the road” town and to go any farther in this particular area of the Alps you must take a train. So we found ourselves a hotel with an excellent view and had dinner (no meal we had in a restaurant in Switzerland was less than $40- very expensive country!) I think I had a cup of soup for $9 and Jordon’s spaghetti was $23. But Kandersteg was a great place to stay and ideal for hiking. In the morning we took a gondola up a mountain (where the skiing would be excellent in winter) and hiked to Lake Oeschinnsee, which was breathtaking. For a Wednesday in October, there sure were a lot of Swiss out and about taking a vacation! The weather was perfect and even a little too hot. There were a few restaurants up there, which was amazing since this lake is out in the middle of nowhere. We had lunch by the lake, and unfortunately Jordon ordered “a quaterpounder with mushrooms and chips.” He was expecting a good-sized burger and fries. Reality was a slab of some type of meat (not ground beef) smothered in thick mushroom sauce and fries. No bun in sight. We have learned to not get our hopes up when looking at menus! We gondola-ed down and headed towards Murren, which was about an hour away. We passed through Interlakken and headed up into the mountains. We reached a small town where we parked the car and took another gondola up to Murren, which sits at 5,000 feet and literally on the edge of a cliff halfway up a mountain. Our hotel room was on the edge of that cliff so it was a little scary looking down but looking out and up we had spectacular views. The next morning we took the gondola up another 5,000 feet to the Schiltorn. From there you had 365-degree views of the Alps and could see the Jungfrau, which is the tallest point in Europe. There is a rotating restaurant up there, much like the Space Needle, but a little different view! The hiking was a little scary up there and it didn’t take much to lose your breath from the high elevation. Then we took the gondola all the way down, which was about a 30-45 minute trip and then headed back to Germany. We are already planning to go back in the winter!

 View out the hotel in Kandersteg

 Kandersteg is in the valley behind us, on our way to the lake!

 Lake Oeschinnsee! So beautiful, I have never seen water that color. 

 You could rent paddle boats and go fishing on the lake. So many people here were just building little fires and cooking brats or having a picnic lunch on the shore.

 Very steep hike! 

 View out our window in Murren. 

 At the top of the Schilthorn. What this picture doesn't tell you is that I am grabbing onto Jordon for dear life because there is a VERY long and steep drop a few feet behind us! 

 The Jungfrau behind us

 And you wonder why it's only Jordon in this picture??

 Paragliders were everywhere! 

Making our "haus" a "hof"

So we are taking advantage of Jordon's short weekend and trying to get a lot of things done! Today we went to the next biggest town (Kaiserslautern) and Jordon got his international driver's license which means he can drive out of Germany and all over Europe legally! I had my first doner kebab today which is basically a pita filled with lamb shavings and your choice of vegetables. I just told myself it was chicken.
We then had to rent a 9-seater van and picked up 2 couches for the living room which is a huge upgrade from the extremely uncomfortable Air Force couch we had. Jordon was pretty excited about the van because it was a Mercedes and apparently had more get-up and drove easier than the BMW. Next car???? I think so. It was quite the struggle to get the couches into the house (especially on my end) because German doorways are quite skinny. But all in all it was a success. We explored our town a little tonight and had dinner at an authentic restaurant and will definitely be back.
Pictures will be up soon of our much improved living room! Have a great day everyone!

A Day in London

So we took a little flight up to the UK and had a full day in London... definitely want to make another trip back because there was so much to see. But we did feel like we saw as much as we could in one day. Just would have liked to shop a little more!
We flew on RyanAir from Frankfurt. Always an adventure! Just to give you examples of their service and focus for the flight.......
-Even before the security announcements they remind us there is no smoking on the flight, then immediately pitch smokeless cigarettes that are on sale during the flight!
-The flight attendants were walking up and down the aisles selling newspapers. Jordon jokingly asks one of the FA's if they are free. His response: "come on, this is RyanAir!!" And that is an employee!
But it is a convenient way to travel around Europe so we can't complain!

We learned a lot on our London trip. The double decker tour buses are great because you can hop-on and hop-off at any site and the guide is talking the whole time telling little facts and pointing out things you wouldn't normally notice. We learned rather quickly that London is a HUGE city. The underground works great (except when major parts of it are shut down for construction as we experienced) but there are many other options to get around in London. Just wouldn't advise walking from site to site unless you realize that it may be miles and miles until you reach your destination. On a side note, we realized on the way home that we used just about every type of public transportation possible on this trip. Car, taxi, bus, plane, subway, train, and boat were all ways we traveled. Not like home where we usually only drive places we need to be! It was nice to travel to a place where they speak English, it makes reading signs a whole lot easier too. But I do have to say it was sometimes really hard to understand what they were saying still!

 Typical London city street, near our hotel in Westminster 

 Lonon Eye Ferris Wheel

 London Bridge from a boat tour 

 Houses of Parliament next to Big Ben (which is actually not the biggest clock in England)

 Big Ben

 This car is smaller than the Smart Car behind it! Only in Europe

 Justice courts where Paul McCartney and Heather Mills were divorced

 Sherlock Holmes Pub (we hopped off the bus here after the tour guide pointed it out). Best fish and chips! 

 Picadilly Circus. This is the main shopping and theater district

 This was a little walkway full of small high-end shops where parts of Harry Potter movies were filmed. We hopped off the bus to see it for ourselves after the tour guide told us that : )

 Pretty small bathroom, even for Europe!

 Red tour bus, we braved the cold top deck to get the best views of the city.

 Part of the bus was undercover, helpful in the rain!

 Awesome buildings

 On a bridge over the Thames River in front of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

 Just making a quick call!

It's true that England has the best fish & chips- we had some at the "Sherlock Holmes Restaurant" and they were absolutely delicious. The main restaurants throughout London were either authentic British pubs or little Middle Eastern cafes, definitely worth trying out. Overall, the people of London were very friendly and helpful and it is a place we would love to go back to. However, we were ready to come back to Germany, there is really nothing else like it and we appreciate living here so much! Cheerio!

Hello and Welcome to our Blog!

We hope you enjoy looking at our pictures and descriptions as we keep on traveling and experiencing living in another country. We are fortunate to have this opportunity to live in Germany and we are going to live it to the fullest. Everyday is an adventure over here, and we hope to share that with you. Genießen! Jordon & Mal