Blending

Well, my mother has started giving me a hard time about not writing, so write I will. Isn't it funny that she used to bug me after two weeks of no blog entry, and now it's after two days!!!

Life has been good. I started doing some work for the Wolf Group, preparing tax returns from our little hotel room. The internet in the room is incredibly slow, so it doesn't make for quick work... but I've been getting by. I had a bit of a "down" day a couple of days ago. Stayed in my room for most of the day, feeling a bit sorry for myself. But the next day a woman named Ingrid came by to pick up some official type stuff to fix our German tax card. The official tax office rejected it on the first round as I think Nate's name was misspelled. She offered to give me a ride into the city, and so I had my first car ride into downtown Stuttgart. The city is actually a very "green" looking city, lots of trees and plants. I just don't get much of a chance to see it as we travel by S-bahn everywhere.

She dropped me off and I strolled about in the rain. I hopped into the Markthalle... basically a market hall (ahhh, you get it?) full of fruits, veggies, nuts, meat, bread, and the like. I didn't have a shopping bag or money, so I didn't buy anything, but I'd love to go back. The food all looked so very good. I then strolled around Konigstrasse, the main downtown shopping area (pedestrians only!). I found a bookstore with English books and bought one, went to kebab stand and got a falafel standwich, and ventured into my first department store. It was kinda like Macy's. I found all kinds of fun stuff... BUT, as they only take cash nearly EVERYWHERE here, I didn't buy anything. I think that changing over to a cash basis consumer, I will probably spend much less. It's very different plunking down cash instead of swiping the credit card.

Basically, all that time out walking alone made me feel better. I just needed to get out of this little four walled place we call home and get back out into the real world.

That evening we ate at a little town pub in Vaihingen. I had the "Cordon Bleu", which I was hoping would be chicken. Oh how I have missed chicken. Everything here is pork! But, it was pork cordon bleu and quite good. Nate and I sat with a bottle of wine in the back of the restaurant and just talked. It was nice to relax in a little place where they all smiled at us, and seemed to find our bad German charming.

Today we went downtown to meet with our first official realtor. We definitely annoyed the guy. He took us to a few places, then asked us what "are you really looking for?". He wanted us to narrow it down to a few things... location, price, fancy equipment, recently remodelled? We still don't quite know what we want, which was driving the German a bit mad. Nate is now scouring a map, trying to decide where we really want to live. And, we sat down at a little cafe earlier and tried to budget out exactly how much we can spend on an apartment. Big decisions, and since our stuff is still floating out on a boat somewhere, we thankfully have a bit of time to make them...