Things I think about when I should be sleeping.

In Army life, you hear the term “on-post” quite regularly. It simply means “within the boundaries of an Army installation. Sometimes, the post is split by a road and people will say “North Post” or “South Post” or the airfield is across the street from main post and then you would refer to that location by the airfield name such as Davison AAF. It is a pretty easy concept to grasp. However, here in Mannheim “on-post” is not a simple definition. “Post” is actually a bunch of little posts. They are called “barracks, villages, and who knows what else, and travel is required to get from one to the next. It may be just across the street or 5 - 10 miles away but you have to leave one and then go back through security to get to the next. This is a challenge because the facilities available to us are spread out on all of these little posts. The commissary is on one, PX on another, PXtra still on another. No one stop shopping here.

Magic shades. Our hotel is equip with these fabulous little shades on each of the windows. They are basically little roll-up garage doors for each of the windows and they completely block out the light - any light. It can be high noon and if you lock down all these shades, you will be in a pitch black house. I guess that can be spooky, but when you want to sleep in, it is fabulous! We don’t have them on our apartment, but we’ll enjoy them while we are here.

They don’t have Coke Zero here. This could have helped me kick the habit except they have something called Coca Cola light which is neither diet coke or coke zero but it only has one calorie and it tastes pretty good.

I blew through the commissary today. I didn’t take the time to really look at the selection but I can tell you this, they don’t have Tillimook cheese, Kosher fat free hot dogs, or Coke Zero. They have a pretty small section of local German food, breads, cheese, and OK every section is pretty small. The only thing they ration that will affect us is coffee. Seriously? A coffee ration.

We can use 100 gallons of gas a month per car priced at the US rate (currently $2.99/gallon). After the ration amount we have to purchase gas on the economy which is going for about $7 a gallon. This should be plenty of gas for us unless we decide to drive somewhere in which case we will have to take this little gas situation into account.

Cell Phones. Cell fees here are very different than in the US. All incoming calls are free but you pay 30 cents a minute for outgoing calls UNLESS you are calling someone that has the same cell carrier in which case you pay 30 cents for the first minute and then the rest of the call is free. Now all I have to do is get this little fact in my head. Call from home unless I’m calling someone else’s cell phone in which case I need to use my cell but make it short and sweet unless the person I’m calling has t-mobile. Sure, I’ll remember all that. I had to ask Matt to explain it to me about 5 times now, and that was just since I started this post.

All in all, I think I’m OK with the differences and challenges life here in Germany will bring. The apartment is sooo small, but aside from the single toilet, shared laundry room in the basement, and no garbage disposal, it has everything we need. We were so lucky to get a ground floor, end unit apartment. We only share one wall with our neighbor and that is the kitchen wall. As long as the people above us are not stomping around, we might occasionally forget that we live in an apartment.

As soon as we get a license and a car we will be able to venture out a little more and learn more about this place. In the meantime I lay awake at night thinking about things like how cool the shades are, how slow the internet is and how much fun I'm going to have making the apartment our own.