Sunday, October 7, 2007

Month One Update - Katrin

One month in, here is the quick recap. We arrived Sept. 3rd with our dogs and a couple of suitcases. Since we weren't equipped to live in our unfurnished house, we decided to stay at a hotel until the air-freight shipment of our bare essentials arrived, which we expected to be a couple of days behind us. Our landlord met us at Vulcano (Bosch) to show us how to get to the house (we had only been there once during our 3 day info trip in July). When we arrived at the house his whole family (and his brother's family) was waiting with a bottle of Champagne. I was a bit self conscious since we had taken the red eye flight, ran around the airport for 2.5 hours trying to figure out where and how to collect our dogs, and then driven 3 hours with no air-conditioning on a hot summer day (with dogs in cramped cab), so needless to say we looked rather haggard, but no one seems to have held that against us.

The first five days we spent in the hotel, and I must admit that a small European hotel room with two 50ish pound dogs is less than ideal. When we received word that our air freight was going to take another week (by air?) we decided to take our landlord up on his offer of letting us use their condo in Barra (read: beach condo) so we could be a bit more comfortable. So we stayed there the second week. I also managed to find the appropriate converter for my laptop (the one we brought didn't work), and then we managed to get a mobile web service so I eventually began a more productive existence than wandering the streets of Aveiro and napping away my jet lag while Dan worked those first few days.

We moved into the house on September 15th, complete with a futon mattress, a small box of kitchen supplies, and a borrowed table. Still, empty as it, it was nice to be "home." Of course in the weeks since then, we have only added a couple of curtains, a TV, and some appliances, so still a long ways to go, and hoping for the container with our furniture by the end of this week.
While we try to fit in fun and exploration in our free time, so far much of it has been filled with car shopping, appliance shopping, getting services like cell phone and cable, and bureaucratic nonsense like tax id cards. Recently the ratio of things we have to do versus things we want to do has been tipping slightly more in our favor, so here is hoping that trend continues. The beach is great, I will try to post pictures of it, as well as the town of Aveiro, soon.

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