It's August 20th and much has happened. I've been driving in the Motherland for about two weeks now and am really starting to get the hang of it. Manual is pretty fun. I pretend I drive a racecar everyday! At first the width of the roads scared the crap out of me ("there's no way that car and I are going to fit!! AHHHH!"), but now passing an oncoming car on the windy country roads hardly phases me at all.
But BIG NEWS! Ariel ist hier. She got here two days ago from Portland and lemme tell ya, that girl means business. Right from day one we're looking up apartments, exploring the towns and finding Ultimate. I will admit that I'm a much more slow paced. Do a couple things one day and one or two more the next. I do things a little at a time, but Ariel gets here and within 24 hours is up and searching.
Well, you have to take into consideration that I've been spending the past two weeks driving everyday trying to learn how to not stall my car everytime I'm unsure of traffic laws or there are any cars around me. If you include that and had seen me the first few days of driving, you would agree that I've gotten a lot done!
We're a good team.
First non-jetlagged day in Germany we go to an appointment with a German realtor, which proved to not be very helpful but we got a lot of information! Then, we went to base to print out listings, went to a restaurant in Ramstein and got lunch and beer, explored Ramstein village and looked up the best apartments to call.
Today we're going to call some apartments and check out Kaiserslautern, which is the big city of the area. 90,000 people live in K town, versus 9,000 in Landstuhl.
It's a tough call on where to live. At first, I wanted to live in Landstuhl because it's biking distance from base, closest to the hospital, and is bigger than Ramstein with a better nightlife. I hadn't even considered living in Kaiserslautern because of it's distance from base and our car situation. We aren't sure if we want to buy a car, we were thinking about just renting one during the winter months and biking the rest of the time, but Ariel seems pretty set on living in K town, despite it's location. Of course, there's a lot more people and a lot more to do there. We'll see how we feel when we explore the city!