We're here!

Our journey to Germany started on Friday night when we were supposed to leave Moline airport at 6:59 to fly to O'Hare and board our flight to Frankfurt at 9:50.  Well, the plane was late to arrive to Moline, so we were delayed an hour and when the plane finally did arrive there were mechanical problems that delayed the plane even more.  We were getting worried that there was no way we would make our flight on time.  We ended up boarding the plane in Moline around 9:15 and were in the air around 9:20.  They said or flight time would be 35 minutes and we were just praying we wouldn't have to taxi far and that the gates were close (we were thinking we would have to take the tram to the international terminal in which case there is no way we would have made it).  By some miracle (thank you God!!) we landed at 9:55, only taxied for a few minutes, knew where we were headed and ran the 4 gates (yes, 4 gates) down that we had to go to board our next flight.  WE MADE IT!! We were so relieved to not have to contact our friends in Germany that were picking us up from the airport and the landlord that was showing us our apartment on Saturday afternoon.  We had a really nice flight and landed in Frankfurt an hour early (only a 7.5 hour flight from Chicago).

One of Brandon's co-workers at the arsenal (Ben) moved here a little over a year ago and he and his wife Stacy have been helping us out and are our sponsors for our move here.  Ben picked us up from the airport and took us to the PX (a huge store kind of like a Target where military or civilians here with the military can shop) to get some essentials.  We then drove to the village of Ramstein-Miesenbach where our apartment is located and met our landlord.  We really love the place we are staying and our landlord is a really nice guy.  The first major difference we were faced with.......trash.  You are required to recycle in Germany and everything has to be separated.  They have specific trash days for specific types of trash and they are really strict with making sure everything is separated and nothing that could be recycled is going into the regular trash.  This is definitely going to be something to get used to, it is completely different than even recycling at home.  We spent some time relaxing and getting things unpacked and walked about 10 minutes down the street and found a place to get some food.  We found a thai, sushi, mexican and pizza restaurant (no German restaurants) so our first meal in Germany was pizza.  We watched some of Brandon's brother's football game stream online and turned in early.

Today was a packed day as well.  We slept in and Ben and Stacy picked us up to do some grocery shopping at the commissary (a grocery store much like the PX).  We hung out with them, got some lunch and went back to their house to hang out, meet some other new friends and eat dinner.

Overall we have just been settling in.  It is strange not having a vehicle and having no way around other than friends to pick you up and drive you.  There really isn't a lot we can do until Tuesday when we get our military ID cards so we can get onto the base by ourselves.  We also are VERY anxious to take our driving tests to get our license and get our car.  We drove past our car today, so we know it is here, we just need to jump through all the hoops to get it hopefully sometime this week.  We aren't really sure when we will start our house search; we have to meet with the housing office sometime this week as well.  

We are really excited to get settled in and start some traveling.  From talking to people, there are so many wonderful places to go and things to see a short distance from where we live.  Hopefully next weekend we can take a quick day trip somewhere and start sight seeing.

We are going to eventually try to start a picture album in another website that we can link to the blog, but in the meantime we will post a few pictures here of our apartment.  It really is more of a townhouse and it is very nice!  Our friends Ben, Stacy, Warren and Toni say we are very lucky to live in a place like this.  Many people end up living in a hotel room.  We got lucky and got some inside info that we could get a place like this if we found it ourselves, so we did! :)

We are missing people at home already, but are really excited to be here and make some new friends and see some awesome places!  More to come in the next few days and weeks!! :)