Our apologies for disappearing for so long! We know you’ve just been waiting with bated breath for our return. We moved about 4 weeks ago and just got Wifi installed 2 days ago, so we’ve been living in the dark ages for nearly a month (egad!)

This post is mostly to fill you all in on what’s been going on recently, and we’ll follow it up with more detailed blogs on the fun stuff later (and maybe the not-so-fun stuff; we’ll see how we’re feeling at the time). 🙂

We had to officially move out of our apartment with the beautiful Dreisam River as our backyard. The person who subleased it to us came back from a 2-month vacation/academic internship, and despite our efforts to convince her that she didn’t REALLY want to move back, we had to leave. Finding an apartment was insanity – I’ll let Brian tackle that blog since he spent countless hours scouring the Web to find just ONE apartment that two people were allowed to live in (oh, and a listing that didn’t already have 25 other inquiries as is common here in Freiburg.)

We did find one though, and just in the nick of time, too! Seriously, we signed the lease for the new apartment just 2 days before the lease was set to expire on the old apartment. It’s much bigger, and we really like it (especially now that we have furniture.) We have our own room with a separate front entrance, and we share a kitchen/eating area with a flatmate, but we do have the luxury of our own bathroom (even though we have to walk across the apartment to get there.)

We spent the better part of the first 2 weeks here trying to figure out how to furnish the place. Let me just tell you right now that if you think ordering furniture from IKEA Online will be cheaper and more convenient than going by bus to IKEA Freiburg, you’re wrong. Yeah, I know. We were confused by that, too, but we did eventually figure that out. As a side note, if you want to get to IKEA, you can catch the 11 bus in front of the Convention Center, and it comes at :21 and :51 of every hour during the work day. It will take you about 24 minutes to get there, and it’s 2,20€ per ride. But, no, I’ve not been to IKEA 8 times since we moved in 4 weeks ago.

Anyway, we have the essentials: a bed, a wardrobe (complete with Narnia), a dresser (graciously left to us by the former tenant), a pull-out sofa for all of the visitors we’d better get in the next 9 months, a table, and 2 chairs. We do love that we got to pick out all of the furniture, so the place not only feels homey, but it’s all new, too.

Our photo wall with the faces of many of our loved ones back home! Courtesy of Alison and Andrea. 🙂

Our separate front entrance.

Bed in a little alcove. It’s nice – the sun doesn’t reach back there! 🙂

Our sofa and wardrobe with more photos lining the top of the wall!

Despite what I’ve made it sound like, we did NOT spend the entire month going to IKEA and trying to get Wifi installed (just, like, 3/4 of the month.) We’ve picked up some classes at inlingua (the language school we freelance at), so we’re both teaching (a whopping) 4 hours of work per week (each). We travel to businesses in and around Freiburg and teach English to employees who need it for their job. It’s actually really fun, and we have different levels to teach, which keeps it really interesting. I’ve got a 1B class (probably the equivalent of my Spanish), and then a 3A class, which is practically fluent, so we just talk about business or anything that interests them, and I mostly just correct their use of the future simple and continuous tenses.

Sorry, I just slipped into nerd mode for a second, but I’m back. Anyway, we’re hoping to pick up several more classes each, so keep your fingers crossed for us!

We’ve also been taking small day trips, exploring the areas around Freiburg. We went to Basel, Switzerland and met up with a friend from the German lessons we took the first month; we took a trip to Konstanz (about 3 hours east); and we went to Waldkirch most recently, which is a small town about 20 minutes from Freiburg where I teach all of my English classes, actually! We’ll post about our trips in the near future, pictures included. And now that we have Wifi, we’ll start researching and planning bigger trips! More on that in future posts, too. 🙂

All right, I hear the “Grammy speech cutoff music,” so I should probably think about ending. Ciao! (Yeah, I know that’s not German, but about half the people here say Ciao, and half say Tschüs, so whenever I’m feeling fancy Italian, I go with the former.)