So many houses! Too many decisions!

So we decided to start a blog. This was suggested by a few people and will probably be more fun that sending emails to everyone! Plus I get to play with fonts and customize backgrounds, etc - so that will be fun.

Anyway, I'm sure you are all eager for an update. The last two weeks have been extremely busy, stressful, and exciting. When I last emailed, we were looking for a house. And let me tell you, that was NOT fun. At one point we saw 5 houses in 24 hours - I can't even remember some of the houses we saw. Mike and I decided the housing office really didn't have anything to offer us and so we started looking at what the German market had - which was also very limited. I had the pleasure of calling German realtors, asking them in broken German if they spoke English- which was so much fun. They all spoke a little English and were willing to work with us - but then when they tried to give me the street name and numbers of the houses it was so difficult to understand! I mean were talking about streets like Graesiger Weg (I don't even know how to pronounce that - let alone spell it when somone says it to me!).

Despite the language barrier we saw several houses on the German market. As we saw more and more houses our criteria changed for what we wanted. And we found that there just wasn't much available. Despite that, we found one house that fit all our criteria and we really liked it. Unfortunately, there was more than one realtor on this house and the other realtor had already found someone who was interested. So, the owner told us we would know the following week if we could have the house. Well, waiting 5 days would mean everything else we found would be gone! In addition, there was another nice house where the owners were willing to wait for us so that we could live there - but it wasn't really what we wanted and it wasn't fair to make them wait until we heard about the other house.

So all that happened last Thursday and what was the final outcome? Well, on Friday I was getting ready to go test drive a car with Mike and I got the urge to look at the housing website again - just to see if they had anything new available - and they did! A great townhouse with a backyard out in wine country. So, I quickly got an appointment with our housing advisor, found Mike at the car dealer to tell him I couldn't test the car with him, got an appointment to view the house and then coordinated with the dealer to let us borrow the car for 2 hours to drive to our housing appointment and back (okay, take a breath!).

So, Friday afternoon we drove a sweet Audi A4 out to Oestrich-Winkel to see this house. It was at the end of this cute neighborhood, surrounded by rows of grape vines with a view of one of the oldest vineyards at the top of the hill - talk about picturesque! The house has plenty of space, including an open kitchen and a nice sized backyard that the owner was willing to fence in for Misty (the dog).

Well, after seeing this house we struggled with what to do. There were a lot of factors that we had to consider, which I won't bore you with, but we decided to take the house in Oestrich-Winkel.Even better, the landlord was going on vacation so we had to expidite our move-in date to October 1st! So we had a few days of running around to get all the paperwork in order and we move in Monday! So exciting!

On Friday they delivered our washer/dryer and a full sized refridgerator and our Army-issued furniture (until our stuff gets here in a few weeks). So now its a matter of packing up our hotel room and moving everything (and the cats) to the house Monday morning! Quite a week!

Oh, I'm sure you want pictures so here you go:

Our Front Door

 

The kitchen which opens up to the dining room/living room and backyard!

 

 

Living Room with wood burning stove and access to backyard

 

Dining Room with access to backyard

 Stairs to basement and 2nd floor

 



Master bedroom

 

 

Backyard

 View from the kitchen

 



View from upstairs

 

There is much more that I did not put pictures of - I will put more up when we have our furniture and are all set-up. We have more rooms than we know what to do with at this point - looks like I will be getting my NY Giants room after all! :)

 

 

Besides house hunting, Mike and I have taking some time to enjoy our weekends and de-stress a bit. Here are some pictures of what we have been up to:

 

Rhine River Cruise (with lots of wine) - this is a famous river which is surrounded by wine country - we will be living a few blocks away from the river!

 

We saw lots of castles

 



And more castles

 

And drank wine - pretty much a perfect Saturday. Don't mind our friend in the background, he actually had a good time, it just doesn't look that way in the picture.

 



 

We also took a water powered train up a super steep hill in Wiesbaden to this pretty overlook. We went hiking for a bit as well, it was a nice way to get out and see the city from above.

 

Water-powered train

 

At the top, overlooking downtown Wiesbaden

 

We rode in the front of the train on the way back down the mountain - pretty cool!

 

And we've spent some time at Rudesheim - a popular tourist place near where we will be living - but fun to visit because it has the traditional German feel. I'm sure when you all come to visit we will take you there!

 

 

Well, that was a long blog post, but there was lots to update you all on. Some cultural things I have learned: 1. When a girl gets engaged in Germany her friends take her around town to sell some embarassing stuff to make money for the bachelorette party. We saw this at a festival yesterday and some of the Germans were really mean to her and embarassed her a lot! We took pity on her and gave her some euro in exchange for a rose - I'm glad we don't do that in the states!

2. A popular drink in Germany is Federwiesser  which is early wine (basically the early states in wine making). There are stands every where selling this stuff and an entire festival to celebrate the drink. We haven't tried it yet, but I'm sure we will soon!

 

Thanks all for now!

 

Tschüss (bye in German),

Katie and Mike