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...