Our first full week

Our first full week as German citizens was full of meetings and planning. I know it had to have been hard for Sean because he started working four days after we arrived. I will make him write about his new job some time this week.

We have a relocation agent that has been helping us with all the logistics of moving to Germany. His name is Matthias and he is awesome! He speaks very good English and has a great sense of humor. He is also very knowledgable which is good too. Oh and the best part...he is a fan of Grey's Anatomy! Needless to say he and I hit it off. Can you see it? Me and Matthias sitting in the front seat talking about plots and characters and Sean shaking his head in the backseat?? Oh yea!

The most important meeting we had was to set up our bank accounts. Unlike the US, no one here takes credit cards! They only take EZ cards which are just like our check cards. Credit here is very limited. You can get a credit card, but your entire balance is taken out of your checking account at the end of the month. Don't have enough money to cover it? Too bad! And Germans only get paid once a month. So Sean will not get paid until the END of March! There must be quite a bit of budgeting over here! Just like pretty much everything so far, we have learned the hard way about no credit cards. On our first Saturday here we went to buy our washing machine and dryer. We had everything ordered, set up our delivery, and got ready to pay. Can you imagine our faces when they said, nope sory, no credit! Grrrr.

Matthias also went with me to set up a new cell phone. I am so glad he did because he found this amazing deal for me. I guess not all iPhones are alike. The German SIM card is not compatible with my US phone so I had to buy a new phone. Matthias was looking though some ads and turns out they were offering a special for a 3G iPhone for 1.00!! I got a new phone with my same plan for only 1.00! Pretty good!!!! Of course with such a great deal, they had no phones available so I had to go the next day (by myself!!) to pick it up. Nate and I did great taking the train all by ourselves and picking it up. I can't begin to describe how awesome it was to have interent again. I felt so lost without it. Isn't that sad??

On Thursday we finally got the keys to our house. It was an amazing feeling knowing we could finally begin to settle in. We were starting to go a little stir crazy in our hotel room. Of course there is nothing in our house but it is OUR house. The air shipment came in on Friday so it wasn't long until there were boxes everywhere. Our air shipment wasn't very big but it had all of our kitchen stuff, Nate's bed, and our clothes. Getting our clothes was great because Sean forgot to pack a pair of jeans in the suitcases so he didn't have any jeans. We had to buy jeans at WalMart before we left the US and the front belt loop broke. He walked around a few days with a broken belt loop.

The first week was really a blur and even now sitting here writing about it, I can't believe how fast it went. We learned so much in just 5 days. But there always has to be that learning curve I guess.

Thanks for the comments and I will post more tomorrow. Love you all!