Unbelievable, at least in part

After doing a play-by-play of our first few days, I got a little bored with the format, so I'm just going to give you general updates on life. We'll try putting headings to them, because these are the general items people are interested in. If you're not interested in that topic, you don't have to read! Easy as pie. Or schnitzel.

The House
My last entry introduced you to the house that we are planning on getting. I know it's been about a week since I last wrote about it, so you would think that more would have developed, but apparently not. For some reason, there has been a large influx of lieutenants to Vilseck, and the name of our realtor (who could forget a name like Burger?) got around to pretty much everyone. Because of this, he has been very busy and has recently taken to not returning phone calls, emails, or getting the contracts ready. Luckily for us, he's still answering our phone calls because we were one of the first couples to contact him.

Matt just got the contract from Burger into the housing office today, so we should be able to start moving forward on things shortly. We don't really need to go anywhere soon because not all of our stuff has arrived yet. We shipped the furniture that my parents very generously gave us a couple of months ago, and that arrived yesterday. All of the wedding presents and day-to-day items were shipped just over a month ago, and will be arriving in about a week and a half.

So, since the house we're moving into is not completely renovated yet, and all of our household goods have yet to arrive, we have tried not to pester Burger too much. Not to mention that since we have no kitchen in our little hotel room, we are getting paid a very nice sum every day we stay here.

Cars
We are still driving around in our little Smart car, and we've really begun to love it. We drove it all the way to Italy this past weekend on our way to Venice (will talk about that later), and you can see from the picture just how fast it goes, and just how fast I drove it on the Autobahn (155kph = 96 mph).

Matt's car should arrive in a few weeks, and we'll have the rental car for a few days after that. Two cars will be nice. Because Matt is scheduled to leave in early/mid-July for 5 months, we're just going to keep one car until he gets back. When the men get back, a lot of them will be PCSing (Permanent Change of Station, i.e. moving to another post, likely back in the states), and therefore trying to sell their cars. At that point, we'll look at buying a cheap car for me to have while we save up for a new car (BMW??).

Rachel's Job Search
I don't know what I want to do. I haven't heard of a single other spouse who works for an engineering firm, and the employment office gave me the number for the military unit of engineers...not very helpful to me. I've thought about teaching, but that doesn't start until school starts in August, or about going back to school to get my master's, but they don't have the degree I want here. Just the other day I was with some girls to the craft store to get a picture framed, and the guy there offered me a job simply because I knew how to use a computer. Very nice of you, but no thanks.

I'm looking up the information for the Army Corps of Engineers, and I'm just going to have to send a cold email. I think this is anything but standard, and I'm not even certain if they would have a job for me, but it is definitely worth the try. Two incomes and no children is a very sweet deal indeed.

Culture Experiences & Friends
Matt's CO (Commanding Officer) took us and a few other lieutenants and their spouses out to a tapas (Spanish hors d'oeuvres) place, and then out salsa dancing. The food and the dancing was amazing, and not at all what we expected to find in Germany. As the evening of dancing wore on, they did the electric slide, and then another line dance I wasn't familiar with. Of course, because I love dancing, I was out on the floor trying to learn it, and I had the instructor yelling at me over the music to tell me the steps...all in German. Very interesting! Oh, and the menu items had the titles in Spanish, and the description in German. Language overload!

One evening last week I found a little restaurant online that was in a little town of no more than 20 acres and the same number of houses, so Matt and I decided to try it. We drove there, missed it by driving past it, drove back to it, parked and went in. No cars were parked outside, but there were a couple of other tables taken. The odd part here? Everyone was American. VERY disappointing! I don't know how a little German restaurant in the middle of a very German village could contain all Americans, but apparently it happens. Next time I'll look for a restaurant that is further away from post.

Because Matt and I are living out of a hotel room, we are getting very bored of frozen meals, Subway (on post), and eating incredibly rich German dinners at German restaurants every lunch/dinner. When I mentioned this to one of my friends here, Veronica, she just solved all my problems by giving me a couple of plates, some silverware, a few glass mixing bowls, and her crock pot. Then she even took me to the grocery store and helped me buy the right food for making meals in the crock pot. Man, I can't believe the generosity of the people here. She and Krista specifically have gone out of their ways to make me as at home here as possible. And they're really cool too.

Matt is getting to know the guys in his squadron pretty well and is enjoying interacting with the NCO's (Non-Commissioned Officers, enlisted guys who have been given authority; sergeant is an example), since prior to Germany, he had interacted mostly with officers. Almost every morning the squadron does PT (physical training), but Matt's squadron likes to change things up a bit. On Thursday morning they got to play football, which Matt found to be an awesome exercise. Then yesterday morning they played paintball (so cool), which he also found to be great tactical training and practice. Basically, he's really enjoying it here, and we're loving all the time we get to spend together.

Vacation in Venice

Goodness me, I've already written a lot and there's so much I could write about still. If you want to stop reading and come back later, now is probably a good time. I just promised a few people I'd get this out tonight, hence the huge brain dump all at once.

So, Memorial Day was this past Monday, which means we got a holiday! For his first trip in Europe, Matt wanted to go to Venice. Venice has always seemed ridiculously gorgeous to me and I've always wanted to go, so I spent some time the week before figuring out how we were going to get there and where we were going to stay. Trains and planes were too expensive, so we decided to drive.

We couldn't leave until Friday evening, and we didn't want to make the 7+ hour drive at night, we drove to Innsbruck, Austria, to split up the drive. We stayed at Binders Hotel, which was very nice, and comparable to the Czech Inn in Prague (for those of you who know it), except with a private bathroom.

Innsbruck, just outside Binders Hotel

Saturday morning, we got up early and started making our way to Vicenza, Italy, where a US Army post was located. Through an interesting series of events and with the help of a very nice old man, we ended up parking about 2 hours outside of Venice and taking the train in. After we got there, the first thing we did was get gelato.

Since the city is small and totally walkable, we decided to get a map and make our way to our hotel. Matt got the good map of the city from the tourist office, we sat on the steps of the train station looking out at Venice, oriented ourselves, and took off. I was the official navigator for the trip and got pretty good at reading the map. For those of you who have been to Venice, you have an idea how ridiculous the streets are, and how there is absolutely no semblance of a grid. I didn't really go by street names, my mental directions were generally as follows:

Go straight until the square with the church ("straight" being very relative)
cross to the opposite side of the square and continue until you hit the bridge
cross the bridge and make your second right
etc.

There would be about 5-10 turns within 1/10-1/4 mile. Craziness I tell you! Navigating the canals was interesting, but admiring all the bridges was definitely fun.

Just off the train, walking through the city to our hotel

The hotel we stayed in was just two "blocks" from the Plaza San Marco, which is the big tourist attraction in Venice. Sadly, the quality of the hotel was as bad as the location was good. I'll just say that you could hardly stand at the sink without sitting on the bed, and our full private bathroom was across the hall. BUT, the breakfasts were great and we had a fantastic time nevertheless.

Everything was beautiful, a very common thing in Venice

Every street looked like this, and better

Another one of my favorites

That day, we walked around a lot, took loads of pictures, had a delicious dinner, more gelato, and
then a gondola ride. I had heard how expensive gondola rides were, but I couldn't believe my ears when we actually walked up to a gondolier and asked how much it was. Matt was set on going on a gondola ride, but I was more than hesitant to spend so much on a 20 minute outing. In the end, Matt won the debate, because "who goes to Venice and doesn't ride a gondola?"

The token gondola ride. We saw the house from Casino Royale

The ride ended up being pretty cool, even though it was short. Those boats are so ridiculously long, I don't know how they manage to steer them around the tiny canals, sharp turns, and low arched bridges. I was amazed. Oh, and another thing about gondolas: they're all unique, not a single one is the same.

That night we went back to the hotel, slept very soundly, and woke up the next morning with barely enough time for breakfast. We spent the whole day meandering around the city checking out "Points of Interest" on our map. My parents had just given me a new camera for graduation, (digital SLR for camera lovers, and thanks Heather for the great suggestion!), so we spent a lot of the day taking photos as well. We walked away with about 300 photos from the whole trip, which is a lot for a day and a half! Most of the rest of the trip can go without narration, and I'll just let you enjoy the photos.

Big door. Small Rachel
Clearly, they love Civil Engineers...;). We saw this nebulous "CE" all over the city

Venice- the Unbelievable Part
Where to start? It was Monday morning and Matt and I had packed everything up and were making the trek back to the train station. To mix things up a bit, we decided to go a different route back to the station than we had come (I marked where we walked both days on a map). Now, the map we had was awesome, but I had seen at least two points where it had been wrong (a bridge where there was none indicated, or no walkway where it said there was). On our trek, we came upon a canal with no bridge across it, and no walkway where it was indicated on the map. Just for kicks, I wanted to see if the supposed path was just under the water, so I took a few steps down towards the canal to have a peek around the corner.

Around step three, my foot slips on some icky mud that was stone-colored and therefore camouflaged against the steps. I promptly land on my bum, and then slip down another step. Because of the ickiness, another step goes by. After passing the next step my foot is in the water and I know all is lost. I fall full-body into the canal (save my head, thank God), holding my backpack, purse, and new oil painting we just bought. Thankfully the bag holding my purse and oil painting had landed on muddy on the steps, instead of drenched in the water with me. So yes, I have fallen into a canal in Venice.

While this happened, Matt saw that I had slipped, and being the gentleman he is, he tried to step down to save me from going fully into the water. He himself ended up slipping. Luckily for him (and for my camera that he was carrying), once I was in the water, he kinda kicked me to prevent himself from entering the water. But even though he wasn't wet, he was still muddy with the icky mud.

Picture taken for your entertainment. At least we could laugh about it :)

Well, I was able to crawl out of the canal, and after rudely being refused help by the nuns and the public restroom attendant, I ended up washing off in the middle of the street. I had one clean dress in my bag so I was able to put that on (they let me in the bathroom to do that), and Matt ended up changing on the train.

Overall, nothing got damaged, so what we're left with is an incredible story and some very interesting photos of me wet and muddy. And that was Venice!