Second Week

We are still pretty exhausted from jet lag and decision fatigue, but things are starting to settle into a bit of a routine now that we are in our second week. We are getting a better feel for the geography and roads, we have made steady progress on our to-do lists, and we are getting more comfortable attempting to speak German and accepting that we simply don’t understand how a lot of things work yet. (For example, we fed a parking machine euros twice the other day because we wanted to make sure we covered our parking time, only to have a German later tell us that the parking was free for the time we were there, which was clearly explained on the meter we were feeding.) My favorite German sentence right now is: Mein Deutsch ist nicht sehr gut, Englisch bitte? (My German is not very good, English please?)

Our routine so far is to get up, take the dogs for a walk (30-45 minutes depending on our morning plans), shower, eat breakfast, go to work for at least a few hours, check our phones at mid-day for messages, then usually leave work early to take care of various settling in errands. (I.e. set up bank accounts, get dogs registered on base and get them vet appointments, set up appointments & tour apartments, try to figure out the cell phone thing, attend a driving class and take a driving test for our German licenses, register our loaner car on base, get gas cards to save us money on gas, research cars to buy…. Seriously the list just keeps growing.)

Almost everything on the to-do list is 100x more complicated and frustrating than we expect it to be, but we have been making steady progress on all of it, despite the frequent urge to throw my phone across the room. By far the most important task we have is finding a place to live. So far we’ve toured 5 apartments, but none of them have been great for us. Luckily, we are at the start of PCS season in the region, so more places are popping up all the time. Right now we have 6 more places lined up to tour, and we have really high hopes for 2 of them.

Tomorrow we’re taking the dogs to the vet to get them flea and tick medication and make sure we can purchase Minnie’s prescription food. Once we’re done with that, we’re bringing the dogs back to the apartment so we can drive to Kaiserslautern (aka K-town), a town about an hour south of us that boasts a large U.S. military base, to look at cars we might want to buy.

So far, the single biggest frustration that we haven’t found a good solution to has been the cell phones. We were able to set up a German account and put an e-sim on our current phones really easily. The problem is that we need to retain access to a U.S. phone number — ideally our current numbers, but at this point we’re flexible — for 2-factor authentication on our U.S. accounts, which will not work with our German number. I set up a Google Voice account while we were in the States, but I didn’t port my number over before we left, and now I can’t port it from Germany. I also can’t figure out how to get Google Voice to work with my German cell phone number (honestly I don’t think it will work) and I can’t figure out if I can just kill my Verizon cell phone account and just run the Google voice number over WiFi and use that for 2P authentication. The whole thing is incredibly frustrating, and every time we think we have a solution, we find out a new annoying reason our bright idea won’t work.

But despite the frustrations we’ve dealt with so far, they are all the exact sort of frustrations we expected to deal with, and of course we get to live in Europe for a few years — so the frustrations are worth it.