A Summary of Days 1-7

Wilkommen! 

Joe and I in front of the Nymphenburg Palace

We've been welcomed to Munich with some absolutely beautiful weather. People in Virginia/North Carolina know it as "perfect late fall football weather" where the high is around 75-80 and the low is around 55-60 and there's no humidity and a light breeze, and this lasts approximately 2 days between sweltering summer heat and oppressively cold winter weather (which also varies by day, but that's another story). 

We survived our little-sleep-getting, multiple-plane-changing, surprisingly-not-so-terrible flight over last week and then proceeded to nap for several hours. We woke up way later than planned, found groceries for dinner (and breakfast for the next day), came back to our temporary apartment, and then slept for like another 14 hours. We originally had planned to "beat the jet lag" by staying up all day when we arrived... yeah that didn't go as planned. So we spent the rest of the week attempting to continue to beat jet lag and we just never really got there. Hopefully this week with Joe starting to work, we can get into a better routine.

More of Nymphenburg Palace

Pretty building facade 

Last week consisted of surviving on €60 in cash while we waited for our bank appointment with the English speaking banker, trying to figure out which train tickets would be best value for us without knowing where we are actually going to end up living, realizing we can survive in a kitchen with approximately 15 total dishes (maybe a few more, but not many!), continuing to be asked by other people for directions (we must really look like we know what we're doing), and a really suboptimal apartment tour where our tour guide spoke like 3 words of English and we were trying to make small talk and it was just completely laughable if you were an outsider, probably. 

The good news is that we have an application in for that apartment! It is very nice looking, although I didn't get pictures. I was too busy trying to hand gesture "we need an apartment quickly because ours is a temporary placement really far away from everything except Joe's work because it is basically a hotel room in the lab building." I didn't do a great job, in case you were wondering. We also managed to get a bank account and German phone numbers figured out. Joe's is currently working, but mine will have to wait as Sprint finds it necessary to keep my phone locked for a totally not inconvenient period of "7-14 business days after termination of our contract." 

Our "temporary apartment" really is like a hotel room on a separate wing of the Max Planck building where Joe is working. It's convenient for work purposes, but otherwise, it's about 20 minutes walk or train ride to much of anything. In case you forgot/didn't know/wanted a reminder anyway, Joe is working at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (say that 20 times fast). It's located just north of Munich, in Garching, which is a very quiet place. There's some farming fields, a LOT of apartments, 2 grocery stores, 5 restaurants, and not much else. It's right across the street from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), which is at the end of a train line (the U-Bahn), so luckily we can make it to a train that takes us to Munich city center pretty easily. 

Morning walk into Garching

Evening walk into Garching

Joe's first day going into lab!

Total cost: 2 Euros. 

We're navigating our way around pretty well. We've done a TON of walking around, not always taking the easiest or shortest route to help ourselves get used to it here, at the expense of our calf muscles and feet. Thankfully, the beer here is pretty cheap so at the end of our 3 long days of walking ~25-30 miles total, we had a weekend of watching soccer (fußbol), having a beer with dinner, and making popcorn. And also finding gelato once or twice. Obviously. 

Tonight's adventures include being really cranky, via the internet, with SunTrust for telling us that it would be easy to transfer money online, which is false, as well as a "BBQ" put on by German scientists. I'm not sure if they mean the northern term (grilling out) or the southern term (pulled pork in sauce),  or the secret German meaning of BBQ, but we will find out soon enough. Adventure awaits!