Author: stuttgart547

Rothenburg

Weekend and well deserved break (from moving boxes). Meeting lovely friends from Shanghai in their home town Rothenburg ob der Tauber, famous for its Taubertal Festival.

I cannot believe that I have never been here before.

Very rare and environment protected: Silberdisteln.

It is beautiful, no wonder tourists from all over the world stop by and the town is prepared.

Christmas in summer and all year round.

A beautiful town in beautiful Franconia.

Franconia.

our home

Sea freight arrived. Moving in. Unpacking boxes. Being happy. Decorating. Cleaning. Being creative. Being happy. Falling tired asleep every night. Still finding boxes. Still missing things and cannot find them. Being happy.

We love to sit in our garden.

We loved eating our first picked raspberries from the garden (thanks to the previous renters).

We now have our own lavender in the garden. The smell is amazing. More flowers and herbs will follow soon…

And guess where we spent last Saturday? You wouldn’t imagine… it was a long night with our new washing machine. It wandered almost through the complete room… 2 engineers trying to balance it until giving up at midnight (daddies, where are you?). It took a friend the next day to give us the hint about the transportation screws… which was described on page 1 in the instructions… (don’t tell anybody). At least we had beer with us.

Many thanks to all helpers and the lovely gifts.

A traditional gift in Germany when moving into a new place: bread & salt:

And in between unpacking, cleaning, etc. we are enjoying the Schwabian food.

It feels like arriving. It feels good. It feels like home.

final destination: Hemmingen

Our new home in the countryside. Stuttgart is close.

Finally. After 12 weeks living a nomad life (we actually enjoyed again the simple & easy life we had for the last couple of weeks but now it feels like Christmas when you get all your stuff back)… our container has arrived. Yeah! It already had arrived 6 weeks ago but the German customs decided to open it up and check our staff… (somebody packed alcohol…!!!). Anyhow. Looking forward to an organized life including a wardrobe again 🙂

It was nice to get a first feeling of the Stuttgart city life. Now looking forward the daily view of the amazing fields of sunflowers, a garden (the BBQ season is on!) and parking spots in front of the door, just reserved for us 🙂 And no more screaming freaky people in the middle of the night (hopefully). And the best part: my way to work is much shorter.

First dinner in Hemmingen: American diner @ Hemingway

2 nights in an empty house waiting for the container to arrive.

Sunrise in the new home:

Somebody found already a new favorite spot:

We are ready:

Waiting for the container to arrive:

Espresso on moving days:

Traffic jam. Tight streets. Finally the truck made it with a 2 hour delay.

Unpacking 243 boxes. It may take some time. Happy to be here. For now: final destination Hemmingen. Visitors welcome soon. The first one already yesterday.


exotic

Exotic temperatures, exotic food. Feeling like back in Vietnam. We found this cute & tasty restaurant by chance walking through Stuttgart East. Wonderful refreshment.

So good. So delicious. So hot. Everybody finds their favorite place in these hot days.

Some cool days ahead. Rainy happy days.

Enjoy your weekend.

German summer

It’s the end of July. We are having record temperatures of up to 40C degrees. It’s summer. It’s great. It’s (one of) the best season of the year. It’s sunflower time. It’s ice-cream time. Aperol time. BBQ time. The color of my summer is yellow.

Things you can do living under the roof without A/C: hot yoga, make fried eggs on the window, make friends with your neighbors ground floor, run away to the beach or just chill out…

I love that it cools down in the night and you can sleep with open windows. Waking up to blue sky…

Tomorrow will be another beautiful summer day. Sunset over Stuggi.

Challenges

New in Stuttgart. Anywhere new and moving always includes some challenges in the beginning. Even (or especially) moving back to Germany.

– Driving within speed limit (never seen more speed cameras than along the B14 and I just love racing my little go kart).
– Not eating pretzels (they follow me. Everywhere. And around the clock. And they are so delicious, cannot help it.).
– Not to fall asleep before 6pm (first weeks are always exhausting).
– Using a German keyboard (y and z mixed up, all of a sudden there’s ü’s and ä’s again…).
– Remembering that almost everything is closed on Sundays…
– Remembering where I parked my car (at work as well as in Stuttgart; yesterday I couldn’t remember and felt like an idiot…searching and walking… and finally successfully finding it).
– Driving in, around and especially through Stuttgart: how can you limit your speed to 80km/h when you are allowed 120km/h? And why do drivers from Heilbronn or in a Mercedes think that especially the third lane belongs only to them? And those smartphone addicted people who seem to have forgotten that they sit in a car… and then the traffic light is green…. and they don’t move… and it turns red again… arghhhhhh! And yes, I’m still missing Mr Xu. Truly regretting to not have offered him a job… but I’m proudly adapting his driving style… Is this already the culture shock kicking in? I am hopeful, we are moving out of the city center soon…
– Returning bottles to get the deposit back (not sure if there’s anything more annoying, focusing on tap water and looking forward to Scott’s self-brewed beer…).
– Recycling (we decided to delay our start to August…).
– Commuting on Thursday’s – Thursday is the new Friday (Friday is home office day for most Stuttgarter).

Dear Stuttgart city, maybe you have to make a decision if you want to be a proud city of 2 OEMs (and people love driving their cars) or you want to be a green city (and then you can continue closing more and more lanes). For my part I’m counting days and cannot wait to leave you already after only 4 weeks… driving here is not fun. When I compare you to a 27mio citizen (and car owners) city… the way you control & monitor your traffic is really bad and not state of the art.

I believe Stuggi is a wonderful city and much to explore… for sure we’ll be back for the weekends but either on a motorbike or using public transportation, as you wish.