Some photos of our house

Our house is not a single family home.  It is the middle unit in a three-unit row house.  So there are two end units and then we are in the middle.  Both of our neighbors on the corners are also Americans.  So much for German neighbors.  I asked our housing guy why the Germans aren't interested in renting this place and he basically said it is because the rent is too high (rent + utilities exceed $4100 per month at the current exchange rate).  Any German that could afford to rent this place would want to buy it instead.  Of course, the money is largely irrelevant to us as long as the total cost stays under our annual living quarters allowance.  Our landlord has another house that he also rents to Americans.  He seems to be keen on this because he knows the Americans mostly don't care how much it costs (as long as the total cost is less than their allowance) and the rent will always be paid on time.

Our place has four levels -- a basement, a main level, and two upstairs levels.  Here are some photos of our house.

Kitchen:

Dining Room (I am standing in the kitchen):

Living Room:

Small back yard (not big enough for a garden):

Bathroom (we have two and a half but this is the only one with a tub):

Bedrooms (we have five; only two are pictured):

The boys are in the bedrooms on the third level.  These have limited standing space for an adult because the roof is directly overhead.

The stairs are not kid friendly:

Laundry room in the basement:

Location Location Location

An old adage says the three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location.  Our house is nice but the location is not.  And that's a real bummer.  We live near the top of a hill on a pretty busy street.  At the top of the hill, the street dead ends into a T and traffic must either turn left or right.  There is no traffic signal at this intersection -- just a one-way stop sign.  Traffic on the cross street has the right of way and does not have to stop.  As a result, traffic on our street is often backed up down the hill.  Most nights I have to sit in this traffic before I can pull into my own driveway.

Separately, there are four different buses that stop right in front of our house.  Each comes once or twice an hour.  When it rains, people wait under our covered porch so they don't get wet.  They leave so much trash on the sidewalk (cigarettes, coffee cups, soda bottles, general trash) that the landlord has been forced to hire somebody to come and clean it up on a daily basis.  Thankfully that cost is built into our rent.  On Saturday nights, the drunks get off the bus and make lots of noise.  For a rental property, it will suffice.  But I wouldn't want to live in this house for the rest of my life.

Here is a photo of the bus stop taken from the guest bedroom on the 2nd floor.

Moving Day

After 32 nights at the Hyatt in Mainz, we moved into our house on August 4th.  Somebody from church watched the boys while the household goods were being delivered.  That was a big help.  A few days before we moved in, the movers placed a "no stopping" sign in front of our house.  This was rather humorous to us because the house is right in front of a busy bus stop.

 The movers arrived with our stuff right on time.

In the States, our stuff was loaded onto a huge 18-wheeler.  In Germany, they use smaller trucks and make multiple trips. We had seven "crates" of stuff.  The truck could only hold four crates so they unloaded four creates in the morning and then came back after lunch (and a trip to their warehouse) to unload the other three.  Here's a photo of one of the mover guys opening one of the crates.

Everything in the crates had a numbered tag on it.  The numbers were placed on the boxes in Maryland.  My job at delivery was to check off each box as it was unloaded from the truck.  At the end of the day, the movers expected me to sign a form saying everything was delivered.  Of course, this sounds like it shouldn't be a problem but in practice it is very hard to keep track of everything.  Several boxes came off the truck with no labels; others had already been checked off when I went to check it off again.  The experience was confusing and stressful.  While I was doing the inventory, Tina was telling the guys where to take each box. Here is a photo of me with the clipboard, checking items off the list.

When we were done, there were several items on the list that were not checked off but all of the expensive stuff had been delivered so I figured the rest were just oversights or mistakes.  In time, everything that was packed did turn up.  We are not aware of anything that was stolen by the movers during the moving process.

One curiosity is that our mattress and box spring (queen size) would not fit up the stairs.  So they had to come in through the window in our bedroom.  Fortunately there is a balcony so the window is actually a door.  The guys did a nice job lifting it up and over the balcony and sliding into the bedroom.

The movers were very nice.  A few things were damaged in transit and we are filing a claim for those.  Overall the move was very successful.  We know people who have had horror stories with moving ($20k worth of damage, entire crates that get left behind in the States, etc) so we feel fortunate to have gotten through this without much difficulty.

After the movers left, a German neighbor brought us some flowers from her garden.

 

Hyatt Regency in Mainz, Germany

We spent 32 nights at the Hyatt in Mainz.  Tina was pretty sick most of the time we were there -- throwing up several times a day and generally feeling like a woman in the first trimester of pregnancy.  The morning-sickness-that-lasts-all-day did eventually go away but that didn't happen until we had moved into our house.

We had two connecting rooms at the Hyatt -- one for the boys with two twin beds and one for us with a king bed.  The rooms were on the smallish side but I had negotiated free parking, internet, and breakfast into the price.  The all-you-can-eat breakfast was fantastic.  Unfortunately, I don't have any photos.  Just picture fancy German meats, cheeses, croissants with jelly from Vienna, fresh-squeezed orange juice, the best herbal tea you've ever had in your life, balls of chocolate that you dissolve into heated milk to make hot cocoa, and more.  So good.  Did I mention it was all-you-could-eat?  Regular price is something like €30 per person.

Here are some photos of our rooms.  The shower was one of those fancy "rain from the ceiling" shower heads.

Rainbow on the Rhine

Sometime during our fourth week in the hotel, it rained really hard for a few minutes and then the sun came out. I took this photo of the resulting rainbow on the Rhine.

Third week in Germany

During our third week in the hotel, a Beer Festival came to the banks of the Rhine River.  We wandered down to see what all the noise was about.  We found some food to eat, drank soda, and wandered amongst the crowd.  Predictably, the Germans were drinking lots of beer and eating lots of meat.

Tina discovered the Mainz Volkspark and the Fasanerie in Wiesbaden.  The boys went to both places to play.  These pictures are from the Fasanerie.

On Saturday, we drove to the Army base in Kaiserslautern to participate in a service project -- making Christmas decorations for troops deployed in sandy places.

Before coming back to the hotel, we went to lunch at Chili's on the Ramstein Air Force base.

On the way home, I took the Odyssey up over a hundred miles an hour (legally).

Second week in Germany

One of the strange things about our hotel was the "art" on the walls.

Tina bought Candyland to keep the boys occupied in the hotel.

Calvin was the winner.

Oscar wanted to be the winner.

Ten minutes later, Oscar still wanted to be the winner.

Mainz is the birthplace of Johannes Gutenberg (of printing press fame).  There is a train called the Gutenberg Express that travels to a lot of historical sites in the city.  The route went right by our hotel so the boys wanted to ride it.  We finally scheduled it for a Saturday afternoon.

The boys wanted piggy-back rides while we waited for the train to come...

Finally it showed up.

One of the stops on the tour is the Dom (Cathedral) in Mainz.

The  Dom has a beautiful flower garden nearby.

The Guttenberg Express also stopped at the Johannes Gutenberg Museum (we did not go inside).

Other things we saw during our second week in Germany included Smart cars (lots of them),

cigarette machines (again, lots of them),

and the hotel parking machine that wished us a gute Fahrt (fahren is to travel by automobile) each time we ventured into town.