Starting work and the Autobahn...

Well finally our 3 enjoyable months of slacking around as unemployed bums had to end. We started on Thursday because here everything seems to run by the calender month. It started by rushing flatout down to the trainstation to get down to Munich. Because its a good 5 or so hour journey down there we had to catch a train at 7.30am and the trainstation is a sweaty 15 minute 'walk' or a comfortable 20 minutes effort - we left ourselves the choice of the former. As per usual the train managed to be late and we missed one of the connecting trains - extending our journey by another hour. Anyway our first two days were fairly casual, just getting computers, phones etc set up. Best of all we got the work car that we had been waiting for - with fuel card... On Friday we tried to get on the way home before the rushhour, but due to stuff to do and then trying to find *anything* to eat in Freising before heading off, we managed it about 4ish. Pretty soon all my boyhood dreams of hooning on the Autobahns here were being fulfilled. Screaming along (in my eyes) at a heady 160kmh. Then cars started passing us - doing who knows what speed. At one point we had been heading along at about 140 for half an hour or so and then I realised that apart from the trucks etc in the slow lane, I wasn't passing *anyone* - I was being passed constantly! All this in a country where petrol costs roughly double what it is in NZ! So anyway, in order to live the dream, I had to go faster, so although I wasn't about to break my NZ record of 200kmh due to the rental car being speed limited to 190kmh, I went faster and can now say that Germany is the only place where I have ever been overtaken while I was doing 180kmh. So anyway I had to try everything so next I decided to stop completely in the fast lane just to see what happened. No one seemed to care at all! Ok so they were all stopped too in what we like to call here a 'Stau' or for you uneducated folk, a traffic jam, but still... So thats about it for this update - 'tick' one boyhood dream mostly achieved (just have to wait for the new car once it is finally delivered). At the start I was commenting how I was amazed how there were no limits, and that you would think that 150kmh would be a generous limit (to avoid the extremes that can occur between lanes), but once I discovered that the average speed can be that... Oh well, I'm sure that soon it will be nothing - we head back down again tomorrow morning. Have to try and break my bosses record of 2 1/2 hours between Munich and Frankfurt (I think about 412km) - hmmm I don't think so.

New Flat

Well we've made the big step now finally and now have a flat. We've kinda had one for the last 3 weeks or so, but the landlady didn't want to sign us up until we had our job contracts. She held it for us anyway, because apparently we made a good impression?

Its actually quite big as far as german flats go - 95 square metres. Enough to have two bedrooms (actually one office...) and a living room. It feels huge because it has a 12 foot ceiling and even the door ways are a good 1/2 foot higher than usual for NZ (and about 2 foot higher than K's grandmother's place). We only have to walk up 3 (large) flights of stairs - hopefully high enough that we'll still get the sun in winter...

Although we are now living in the city (Wiesbaden - about 270,000 people), we still seem to be quite able to find ways to walk huge distances each day - although we are going to look for bikes tomorrow, because my feet are killing me.

We are slowly starting to accumulate stuff again now. We've bought a vacuum cleaner, clothes drying rack and K just got back from getting a massive 70 piece cutlery set. So if anyone wants to come visit, feel free to bring 9 other friends - they'll have to eat off paper plates, but they can have a knife and fork...

Other little things I forgot to mention in my last posts were that I bought a bottle of real (application control, or what ever it is) bottle of french wine for €1.60 or about $3.00 - basically half what you could get cheap NZ wine for (in NZ)...

Also, when we were in Liechtenstein the other week, we were eating lunch up at the top of the chair lift that we took to the top of one of the mountains. I accidentally dropped my pocket knife over the edge. It was then that we discovered that I had actually dropped it into Austria... so had to do some rock climbing to retrive it.