Highlights of the First Weeks

1. Day trip to Frankfurt (photos)
4. The smell of fresh-baked croissants every morning (goodbye skinni jeans, our front door opens IN TO a bakery).
2. My trip to the US Consulate (name change for my passport). It could have been worse, but the unique mix of American and German red tape was especially annoying. Luckily the line for Americans was empty, so I wasn't late even after they sent me back to the subway station to pay a guy in a portable kiosk trailer 6 bucks to hold on to my cell phone because there are no electronics allowed on the consulate premise. Then I was scolded for filling out the wrong application - "applying in person" - because I should have filled out the one entitled"applying by mail". But the best part was that the official passport photos that I taken at the US post office in Lansing were "incorrectly proportioned", and "no smiling is allowed". My bad.
3. Laundry. Of course there is nowhere in Wixhausen to do laundry. So on a snowy Saturday afternoon, we lugged huge shopping bags full of dirty laundry with us on the train to Darmstadt. It's supposed to be a fairly painless process once you get there - just drop it off and pick it up a few hours later, all clean and nicely folded. Well, we walked in to the place just as it was closing (sorry miss, you're not in the land of 24-hour service anymore...things close at 3pm on Saturday). I burst in to tears because every piece of clothing I had packed was dirty, and the two precious bath towels that we went all the way to Frankfurt to buy were also in the mix. Alfredo helped console me with a trip to the nearest bakery (espresso + cheesecake) and a shopping spree to get more towels and clothes to tide us over until Monday...

Welcome to Germany

This town is different than I thought it would be. All the physicists at MSU complained about how SMALL and BORING it is, with such emphasis on those words that I came to imagine a few small huts in the middle of an empty field with a dirt road going through it and nothing else. Now I see that it was a very different kind of small and boring they were talking about. The population is about 3000 here in Wixhausen (northern suburb of Darmstadt), and houses line the narrow streets in an arrangement that makes me feel like a rat in a maze. They have an eerie uniformity: all 3 stories tall, white, and all are spaced 5 feet from their neighbors in grassless, fenced-in yards. The problem is not that it's a small town, it just has too few resources for its size. There is a convenience store, a few small restaurants, bakeries, and drug stores, and a train station. The apartment we're subleasing for now is very convenient. It's connected to a bakery, just across the street from the train station, and a short distance from the GSI lab. It's an apartment with strange proportions. There are four equal-sized rooms, bisected by an open corridor that contains the staircase to the landlord's front door. I've never lived in a place where the living room and the bathroom are the same size. Don't be jealous though. The shower inside our opulent bathroom is a 3-foot by 3-foot box. Alfredo and I had to use t-shirts to dry ourselves off after our first few showers because there is nowhere in this town to buy towels.
Everything is smaller here. Showers, ovens, refrigerators (2.5'x3' including the freezer!), cars, everything. The biggest bag of rice I can find in the supermarket is the size of a large coffee mug. The single bed in our apartment measures 35 inches wide. Our first night was heavenly because we were exhausted and had been sleeping on the floor for a month, followed by a night in economy class airline seats. The second night was less comfortable, so we decided to move to the living room and give the pull-out couch a try. Drooling over the thought of being able to both lie down on our backs, on something other than the floor, we opened it up only to discover that the couch pulls out to a width of 40in. It's a little better than the bed, so we've been sleeping there ever since. I can't wait to get an apartment of our own and buy a new mattress...please tell me they're available in king size here!