Posting!

Ok, here's the first real post, so I should try to catch people up. Sorry about the delay. Or maybe I've done this intentionally to weed out all of the non-serious blog readers. In any case, I've now been in Germany for about one and a half months and I'm just now starting to feel close to settled.

A large portion of my initial time in Germany was spent dealing with the bureaucracy which Germany is notorious for. And this is much more difficult when your German language skills are not very good. Not knowing anyone doesn't help either. When I got here, I needed to get a bank account, an apartment, health insurance, a residence registration, a work contract, a work visa, etc... Each of these things is non-trivial (for instance, it took me 6 tries to successfully acquire a bank account) and they also need to be done in a particular order. This would be a tall order, but doable, if each of the relevant administrations could agree on what that order is. But, it seems that they have different ideas on this. For instance, you could go to get a bank account and be told that you need to have a work contract first. And then, when you go to get a work contract, they'll tell you that they need your bank account information before they can process it. A bit frustrating....

But, now I have all of these things and more and so I'm feeling a little more settled. My most recent acquisitions were hot water in my apartment (maybe this will be a post of its own...), internet, and a washing machine so that I can clean my clothes. On Monday, I have to apply for a special insurance in the case that one of my water connections breaks and I damage all the apartments below me (I live on the 5th floor, which would be the 6th floor in the U.S., so I really hope that doesn't happen).

Of course, when I came to Germany, I packed my bags tightly with as many things as possible so that I could try to have most of the things I needed when I arrived. Now, it turns out that some of the things I brought I haven't used at all, and a couple things I wasn't sure about have turned out to be quite useful. Hands down, the #1 most useful thing I brought was this bag that Karen had given me for Christmas a couple of years ago (Thanks, Karen!). I use this thing all the time and it has saved me quite a few hassles.