We arrived the morning of May 27 to rain, cold and just dreariness, which Billy said it had been this way all the 7 weeks he had been here,Great!!!! It remained this way for about 10 straight days, welcome to the real Stuttgart weather I guess. Luckily after that there have been very few rainy days and warmer temps with plenty of sunshine. We are definitely spoiled by this mild summer weather.
On the first day Billy drove us by our house and took us to eat German schnitzel and out for the best ice cream ever. I am not an ice cream girl but I have pretty much had ice cream everyday that we have lived here, it is much lighter than in the states and my favorite flavor is mandel, which is an almond flavor. The ice team place that is our fav is in walking distance to our house, I guess at least we walk.
The first week we stayed in a hotel in the heart of Stuttgart and enjoyed great restaurants and city site seeing. It was fun and the kids loved that they had their own hotel room on another floor even. In Europe most hotel rooms are quite compact with one bed so it was a different experience for allof us. The language barrier wasn't and still hasn't been all that difficult because within the cities 90% of the people speak English. Still has me a little intimidated in certain situations but most of the time we get by with the little bit of German we know and the whole lot of English they know.
On June 1st we moved in with loaner furniture. Our entire shipment was supposed to be delivered May 31 and on May 30 we received an email stating that wasn't going to happen,it has been moved back a week:( now what, loaner furniture!! Not awful but let's remember we have beds and a table, sure,but no sheets, comforters, dishes of any sort!!!so what's that mean? Time to spend very unnecessary money. Something we do NOT like to do!
Anyway, we survived with more eating out and during that first week Tanya and all the kiddos arrived from Atlanta for the next month:) that was the bright spot and she had a rental car so now we can go around and do big sight seeing:) because let's not forget we shipped our car and it took 6 weeks, we actually just finished our first full week with it. It's nice to travel to more distant places but we have decided at least for now, one car is enough. We live in a city where you can walk to literally anything and everything and take a train to wherever you wish. Billy actually rides his bike to work daily. Up hills and all, it is quite a workout but allows us to eat ice cream, bread, and drink large beers:)
While Tanya was here we did more than I will ever be able to write about but I will cover some highlights.....
We toured the Bayern Munich stadium in Munchen, the European word for Munich??? They had literally just won the soccer cup, like winning the Superbowl for us!!this was awesome and a great intro for my boys into the soccer experience. We toured the stadium, locker rooms, the press rooms and everything .it was super cool! We all went to Munchen for a day and discovered this city is NOT for kids. There is NOTHING for them and no easily accessible bathrooms,pain in the ass!!
We survived someone and we allowed the kids to live another day:). We did goto the famous Hofbrau House and will try to take everyone there, it was super neat and yummy!
We spent a weekend in the Alps, which is documented in another blog.
We biked in the Black Forest,visited the Ludwig Palace in Ludwigsburg. This palace was a 3 hour tour and the kids loved every minute of it. We visited Rothenburg, the super cool German style city that is still surrounded by a wall. Is city is everything you think Germany would look like.pics are below. We took a cruise down the Rhine River, disappointing once we got off the boat and toured a town because they were under water a week before from the terrible floods:(( we didn't realize.
We made our first trip to the freibad, the community pool, which we love.
One night Billy took all 6 kids to his baseball game and Tanya and I were Able to have a night out. We visited a biergarten and had wine, haha then an Italian restaurant for more wine and dinner then we decided we were going to hit up the nightlife scene in my town. The first bar we walked in we sat and ordered a beer and after about 5 minutes we realized we were in a Gaybar. Oh we'll, we stayed and drank our drinks then we went to a so called "American" bar, eh,nothing to write about there. The best part,around 1 am we were able to just walk home from our "wild"night out. Well, maybe not wild but definitely oh so much fun.
I feel so lucky to have had Tanya here to hang out with me e first month, lets not forget, she speaks GERMAN!! I am sad at she is gone. And in her honor, I will do a whole nother blog on the GermanTrash Situation!!if I haven't complained to you about it yet you are definitely in for a treat.
Thanks for bearing through this blog post, now the random pics for you to piece together . I will try to put them in the order of the post but I have no control.
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