We moved!

Hello, dear friends. It's been a busy week! Last Tuesday Alex and I moved to a new apartment. We had known all along that the first one was just temporary, but the actual move cost me more energy and organization time than I thought. Well, but there's good news. We were told originally that after the end of February there were no free two-bedroom apartments and we'd have to make do with a smaller (and cheaper!) one-bedroom. I had already made my peace with it, but last Friday evening I got word that there had been a last-minute cancellation for another two-bedroom place in the same complex. It is free only until the beginning of June (so we'll have to move again...), but I decided to snag it.

It's what they call here a Maisonette apartment which means two things as fas as I can tell. The apartment itself is on two floors with a spiral staircase connecting the floors and on the top floor it has slanted ceilings. The whole place is great - and big! It's on the top floor of 4-story building just about 200 yards away from our original apartment. It has a small kitchen and tiny bathroom (no tub!), but a huge living space/dining room combo with a balcony and then upstairs two huge bedrooms and a gigantic balcony. The bedrooms are bigger than they need to be, but Alex has turned much of his floor space into an imaginary city he set up with blocks and superhero figures and the batmobile etc. I don't know why our bathroom and kitchen are so small given the size of the apartment, but the whole place is lovely and will make an excellent home for us for the next three months - as well as accommodate all our visitors! Please come and see for yourselves.

Our dear and amazing friends Sherry and Christian helped us move. I spent part of Monday and all of Tuesday packing our stuff. We don't have all that much, of course, but I hadn't packed quite as tightly as I did for our flight and instead had things in tons of shopping bags. It was fine, but annoying! Thankfully, Christian had brought his bike trailer and we just loaded tons of stuff into there and transported things that way. Of course, we didn't move far at all, but getting from the 7th floor in one building to the 4th floor in another was still really annoying. The whole thing didn't even get started until after I picked up Alex from school on Tuesday evening and we didn't have all our stuff over here until after 7pm. I put Alex to bed with just a yoghurt and went to bed myself right after him. Hence, all the unpacking was left for Wednesday and parts of Thursday. Ugh. This cost me almost a whole week, but it was worth it. I know you're all interested in pictures, but I haven't even taken any yet. I promise, I'll include some in a future post. Suffice it to say that the place is spacious, modern, practical, and I'm thrilled to have it.

For those of you who have our address here, you need to make two small changes:
our street address is now 370, not 371
our apartment # is now 69

If you forget to make these changes, however, the mail will still find us, as was evidenced by a letter filled with drawings by Alex's old school mates that reached us in our new mailbox today. Thank you, Mrs. Hamm. Alex LOVED the drawings and immediately sat down to draw some things to send back.

In addition to the move, we did a bunch of other fun things this week including a few lunch and coffee dates with friends and a birthday dinner party on Thursday night with our new friends Kristyn, Dave, and Irene for Kristyn's birthday. The kids have really hit it off - as have the adults. Kristyn whipped up a huge amount of delicious food for dinner (including lasagne of which Alex had two big pieces) and her husband and daughter had decorated their place with banners. It was fun to hang out with them.

Today I took Alex to Mannheim to another science museum, and there are photos of that trip, but I'll share them and all our adventures in a new post tomorrow.