Getting Here and Our Apartment

Our flight over to Germany was leaving at 5:30 p.m. U.S. time and landing in Frankfurt at 7:30 a.m. German time. We were hoping to get some sleep on the plane ride over but weren’t so lucky. I think Matt and I averaged about 1.5 hours of sleep. We did have some WWF wrestlers on our plane though. We noticed quite a few large muscular men and one short stature guy. We figured they were wrestlers of some sort. At the Frankfurt airport we were waiting at the baggage claim and there was Triple H. I am not a WWF fan but trust me, if you saw him, you would know too! So there were about 20 of them all together and we noticed in the group Mike “the miz” from Real World. He had always wanted to be a wrestler and it looks like he made it!
We were picked up by Thijs (Matt’s new boss) who was very nice and quite tall! He took us to our new apartment and helped to show us around. The place is nice, older and a weird setup, but nice. I will try to describe as best I can but I think pictures will be best.
We are considered the 2nd floor although we are really on the 3rd story. The first floor is a doctor’s office (we think a dentist but are not sure) and then the second floor is another apartment. On our floor there are 2 separate apartments that we believe at one time were actually 1 big apartment. Reasons: you open a door from the hallway that leads to a small foyer with a door on each side. When you are in the family room there is a door that is sealed off that appears to lead to the next apartment.
We have 1 bedroom, bathroom, family room and a kitchen. Here you don’t go by bedrooms, you go by number of rooms, so this would be considered a 2 room home. (kitchen for some reason doesn’t count). We are also lucky to have a balcony that over looks the next street. When you walk into the apartment from the before mentioned foyer, you walk into a small foyer/hallway with a door straight ahead and an entry to the kitchen on the left. In the kitchen is the dishwasher (woohoo!) the washing machine (still can’t figure out) and the dryer. We also have a small storage room at the back on the kitchen. According to European standards we have quite a large fridge, but in the US it would be smaller than your standard fridge, but it does the trick!
From the small entry foyer if you walk through the door ahead of you, it will lead to the bedroom! The bedroom is actually quite large, with nice widows at the back that let in a lot of light. There are closets (from ikea) on the left side and the bed to the back. The bed itself is a double bed and we can’t wait to get our down comforter and feather bed for it!
Across from the bed is the door to the bathroom. It is quite possibly one of the smallest bathrooms I have seen in awhile but we are making it work. The landlady has tried to install as much storage as possible (again ikea!) so that definitely helps. There is a lot of light in there as well from the windows and a heater which I assume will be good for the winters.
If you were to take an immediate right when you walked into the bedroom you would go through the door to the family room (yes, you walk through the bedroom to the family room! Another reason we think this was initially one big apt.) The family room is a decent size and it has the balcony off of it so we have a doorwall there. We are hoping to spruce it up a bit and our land lady Reneta Krause has promised a larger T.V.!

So after dropping our stuff off and getting changed we headed out to the grocery store so Thijs could show us the ropes. Pretty much the same as any small grocery store at home, except for a few things, first being that you pay for a cart (1 euro that you get back at the end) and second you must bring your own bag to put your groceries in or else you have to buy one from the store. The other interesting thing is that there are these stores (the name of the chain is Rewe) every 3-4 blocks. Some small some big but it is nice since you have to walk home with your groceries!

We then went to the Frankfurt facility for Arvin Meritor where we saw sunroofs being made. They are shutting this plant down and apparently some of the machinery is over 100 years old. We then went to the headquarters where Matt will be working which is in Dietzenbach which is about 25 minutes south of Frankfurt. We met people there and got a tour of the manufacturing there as well. By this point we hadn’t slept in the equivolent of 24 hours so we were pretty exhausted. About 3 hours later we were able to go home! We got here and quickly fell asleep.