Day 2

Oct. 12th 207

We met Frau Hector (who works with the transfer company and is considered a Destination Assistant) at noon to get our residency permit from her as well as have her show us around the town. She lives 2 u-bahn stops north of us so she knows the area well. When we first met her we were a bit scared. She filled every German woman stereotype. Direct, no sense of humor and didn’t really seem interested in us. But as the day went on we realized she was very nice (still direct but that is the german way) had a dry sense of humor that sometimes translated a bit weird and was excited to help us get the best deal on things. One of these things was a gym membership. We wanted to get a membership asap so we could get a sense of home and normalcy. She helped us get a good deal at the chain gym here. We went out to dinner that night. But were only adventurous enough to try a restaurant called Lousiana. An interesting thing there is that you seat yourself. There is no hostess. It seems to work well as we were served quickly. But still through us a bit. We are not sure if this is the case at all restaurants or not but believe it is.
After dinner we returned home to realize (at 11:30 p.m.) that Frau Hector had our keys! We were lucky to find that she had put her home phone number on our gym membership, so we were able to call her and she came with the keys. Our only other resort was to stay at the Hotel Mondial that shares a parking lot with us! Quite an adventurous second night.