HS Friends Visit and Affenberg!

After we got back from our trip to France, we were lucky enough to get some visitors from Julian's high school! It was a few of the same friends that we were with in London in May. Anne (who we stayed with in London), Helle (who we stayed with in Berlin a couple years ago), and David all came down to the Bodensee! Although the weather could've been better, we had a really nice time going to Rutenfest in Ravensburg (a fun summer festival), and the highlight of the weekend - Affenberg! Affenberg literally means "Monkey Mountain" and it was surprisingly accurate. I could not get over this... you pay to get into this gated park and there are hundreds of monkeys just out loose in there! You get handfuls of popcorn and they just chill out on the railings of the park waiting to be fed their snack.

Julian and David monkeying around

Helle feeding David, with Anne and me

David and Julian

Paris, Etampes, and Bretignolles Sur Mer

Wow, I can't believe how long it's been since I've written! So much to catch up on from the past two months!



In July, Julian and I took a week off for a vacation to the western coast of France with a colleague of his (Georg) and his fiancee (Aline). Aline's family has a house in Bretignolles Sur Mer, which is a cute town in between Brittany and Bordeaux. On the way out there, we stopped for two nights to stay with Aline's parents in Etampes, just outside of Paris. We spent one day in Paris, and one day at a big family lunch with her entire French family :-)




Julian on top of the Arc de Triomphe





Me in front of Notre Dame





Aline's extended family (and me towards the left) at her grandparent's house. They live right across the street from her parents.





From L to R: Aline's dad, Georg, Aline's mom, Aline, her niece, brother-in-law, and sister, and me and Julian





From Etampes, we drove on to the coast! Bretignolles sur Mer is a beautiful little town right on the water. Aline's family's house was just a 5 minute walk from the ocean and we had beautiful weather!! We had such a great time; it was a week full of sunshine, French wine and cheese, fresh grilled fish, and relaxation!



Julian and me on the beach




Taking a break during our electro-bike ride along the coast







Another break on our bike tour





Julian on the beach at sunset




Me on the beach



We were also joined by two of Georg's friends from childhood and college - Karsten and Yvonne. the 6 of us went to Les Sables d'Olonne, another neighboring town on the water:





Here is another view in Les Sables:

Cute streets and my cute fiance!

Updated Apartment Pictures

We've done a LOT of work in the past several weeks so I wanted to post a few updated pictures!!

The kitchen!! Finally complete with upper cabinets, backsplash, and silicone (all done by Julian and his dad!) We still want to get a range hood, but that is lower priority.

Living Room

Living Room/Balcony

And just because it's a nice day out today, some balcony pictures too :-)

Visit from Mom and Dad!

Happy fourth of July! Mom and Dad flew back yesterday so I thought I'd post a few pictures from their visit. We had such a great time - they were here for 6 days, then flew to Barcelona for 6 days, then back here for the weekend. It was so nice to see them (and for them to bring a lot of my stuff!), and to show them around Friedrichshafen and other places in the area. They've been here before but just for one day and in November, so it was much prettier this time around :-)

They got in on Tuesday morning, and we didn't do too much on Tuesday and Wednesday since Julian and I were both working. Thursday was a holiday and we both took Friday off, so we had a really nice 4 day weekend! On Thursday, Julian's parents and godparents all came down from Karlsruhe and spent the afternoon with us. We made this traditional German meal called Raclette, after the cheese and the machine that you use to make it. There's a grill and a broiler type thing and everyone has their own tray that they pile with veggies and meats (the meats are grilled on top of the machine), and then Raclette cheese on top. The tray is put under the broiler until it is melty and/or crispy, then drizzled on top of cooked potatoes. It is delicious and we had all sorts of great veggies and meats to go with it!

The whole group just before eating - Frank (Julian's god father), Julian, me, dad, Herwig (Julian's dad), mom, Ilona (Julian's mom), and Jutta (Julian's god mother)

The table full of food - veggies, pork tenderloin, shrimp, deli meat, and cheese. The potatoes were off-screen :-)

Dad, mom, me, Jutta, and Frank

Enjoying the weather on the balcony

The ladies - Jutta, mom, Ilona, and me

The rest of the weekend was great! We went to Bregenz for their Hafenfest, which is the festival on the Harbour. We took a few pictures there but they are on mom and dad's camera so I will post when I get them. We also went to Lindau, to walk around the cute island and enjoy an ice cream.

On Sunday, they had a flight from Zurich to Barcelona, so I drove them to the Zurich city a few hours early to check it out. I've been to Zurich before but only in rainy or cold weather, and it is just unbelievable in the summer! Bright blue sunny skies, snow-capped alps in the background, people sitting outside, sailing on the lake, and eating outside in restaurants, shopping, cute winding streets, etc. We had a nice time and walked around a bit before I took them to the airport.

They had a great time in Barcelona and then got back to Friedrichshafen on Friday evening. I cooked a big Spaghetti dinner and we had a nice evening in. On Saturday, we drove across the lake to Constance and checked out Mainu, nicknamed the flower island (you'll see why below), then had a nice German dinner and beer at an outside restaurant in Constance. I drove them to the Stuttgart airport on Sunday morning and they made it safely back home last night. Overall it was such a great visit!!

Mainau fountain

They had these flower sculptures all over - ducks, peacock, and more!

First Visitors!!

After a busy week of kitchen building and apartment cleaning, our first visitors arrived on Friday the 17th!! Carrie and Adam flew into Zurich on Friday morning and took the train/ferry to Friedrichshafen. I met them at the harbor and luckily we had a beautiful day! Julian came home early and after a great evening of appetizers and beer, we headed to Lukullum, which is a really fun traditional style German restaurant. We had great German food - käsespätzle (the German/adult version of macaraoni and cheese), pork medallions with mushroom sauce, and a few other things. Our table was actually inside a barrel (below!) which topped off the German experience.

Hanging out at our apartment

The infamous barrel

On Saturday, it was cool and rainy - untypical for a summer day on the Bodensee! We slept in and then went to Weber and Weiss for cake. Weber and Weiss is actually one of the top 10 places in Germany for cake, and Germany has some unbelievable cake! See below for proof:

Carrie is excited for cake :-)

Fruit Torte, Chocolate Cream Cake, Strawberry Cream Cake, Rasperry Torte, and Champagne Torte. YUM!

On Saturday evening, we cooked a nice big meal at home (Maultaschen and Salad, another great German option) and then stayed in for drinks and hanging out, since it was pretty gross outside.

On Sunday, we had another relaxing morning and then drove to Bregenz, which is a nearby town in Austria, also on the Bodensee. We took the Gondola up to the top of the Pfänder mountain, which is pretty small but still provides a nice view of the lake. There is also a cafe and little zoo at the top, so we walked around and then treated ourselves to a beer!

Swingset in front of the Alps... nice!

View of the Bodensee from the Pfänder

Beer with a view!

On the way back we stopped in Lindau, which is an adorable town on an island in the lake. It's very old (we saw buildings from the 1300s!) and they have nice cafes and restaurants. We had some Wurst at a beer garden and just walked around for a bit.

We got back to Friedrichshafen and climbed up the tower outside our apartment to get a nice overview of the old part of the city. You can actually see our apartment in the picture below - it's hte one that's all lit up to the left of Carrie, and we're on the third floor.

It was so amazing to have Carrie and Adam visit! Definitely a much needed dose of the States and it was lots of fun to catch up and share our new place and lifestyle with close friends. Any other visitors are welcome :-)

German Wedding

Now that we have a little bit of a break from guests (my parents are in Barcelona until Friday and will then be back until they fly back to the US on Sunday), I thought I'd try to get a little caught up with what's been going on! On June 11th, Julian and I went to his friend Pascale's wedding. Julian, David (Julian's best man), and Pascale all went to Kindergarten together, so they've been friends for quite a while! The wedding was absolutely beautiful! It was in Baden-Baden, which is famous for its 5 star hotels and spa resorts. The day started out rainy but by 1pm everything cleared and it was a perfectly sunny warm day. There was a church ceremony at 2pm, followed immediately by a champagne (real champagne... both Pascale and her now-husband Nicholas are half French) and appetizer session just outside the church.

Pascale and her dad

Balloon release during the champagne/appetizer party

After a 2 hour break, the cocktail hour started with more champagne and then moving inside for the dinner.

I had some trouble finding an evening gown but I ended up buying this one just a week before the wedding!

Julian and David

First dance for Pascale and Nicholas



Our table


The dinner was unbelievable! Seven courses of fantastic fancy food. Dessert didn't wrap up until about 1am, since they did speeches, dances, and mingling in between. Afterwards, we all went downstairs to the club portion of the building for the party. Julian and I stayed until about 3:30, but we heard the next day that other people (including the bride and groom!) stayed until 5am!

Overall I was very impressed by my first German wedding and we had a great time. I think this one was more formal than typical, but it was really neat to see all the similarities between German and American weddings, and also see the traditions that are different.

Guest Preparations!!

This week has been pretty busy!! Julian's dad came back with us on Sunday night, as we were up near Karlsruhe for a wedding on Saturday (more on that later, once we upload pictures!). Like my previous post suggested, Monday was spent intsalling most of the remaining parts of the kitchen. It was a holiday in Germany (apparently the whole country decided to celebrate my dad's birthday!) so it was a long but productive day. Yesterday, Julian's dad worked on the backsplash while I worked from home, and Julian helped out once he got home from work. The backsplash turned out to be much more complicated than expected, requiring trips to the hardware store to have them custom saw something, and then to another specialty store for specific screws. It's more of the same today, and they're hoping to finish it by 6:30 at the latest because Julian and I are going to the beach to barbeque with some friends tonight, and his dad has to catch a train back to Karlsruhe!

In even more exciting news (difficult, because not much is more exciting than a finished kitchen), our first guests arrive in less than 48 hours!!! Carrie and Adam are coming to visit Friday - Monday, and I could not be more excited to see them! We are working hard to prepare the place so that it's all put together and organized for their arrival :-)

The fun will keep going because on Tuesday morning, my parents get in!! I am so excited to have them here! I will actually go to Munich on Monday morning (Carrie and Adam have to take a 6am ferry so I will leave at the same time) for an Accenture Community Meeting, stay overnight in Munich, and then get up early to drive to Stuttgart to pick up mom and dad and then back to Friedrichshafen! Lots of time on the Autobahn! Julian and I have lots of fun things planned for both sets of visitors so I am very excited!

Still plenty of boxes to go through and stuff to clean up before Friday morning, so we will be busy until then!

I'll try to upload some pictures from the (unbelievable) wedding we went to this past weekend soon!

The men hard at work

Julian and his dad are spending their holiday working on our kitchen. Plenty of progress so far but still lots to do. I'm helping where I can but mostly on DJ and food duty :-)


And just a few hours later... we have upper cabinets! Now the only thing missing is the backsplash (to be done tomorrow morning) and the hood above the stove, which we haven't actually picked out yet (but I think is much less important/urgent).

A Kitchen (kinda)!!

Julian and I both had somewhat rough Tuesdays. I suppose his started Monday night actually...

But first things first. Last week was pretty uneventful other than a fantastic holiday on Thursday, which we spent playing beach volleyball in Constance and grilling with some friends. We had a great weekend up in Karlsruhe spending time with Julian's mom (his dad is in Berlin working on a project at the moment), and Julian drove back down to Friedrichshafen on Sunday afternoon. I stayed up in Karlsruhe one more night, as I was heading straight to Frankfurt Monday morning for a 2 day orientation of my new office/geography (there were people from all Austrian, Swiss, and German offices), and Frankfurt is somewhat close to Karlsruhe. Julian's mom Ilona and I watched Germany's Next Top Model with Heidi Klum (very entertaining!) and spent some quality time hanging out with only minor communication issues. I was nervous since Julian is always there to help translate when one of us can't get across what we're trying to say, but everything went really well.

On Monday, I had my orientation, which was mostly repetitive of things I already knew about Accenture, but it was nice to meet some new people, be in an office, and spend the entire day working on my German. We also had a networking event on Monday night, which included good food and wine, and then those of us not from Frankfurt headed back to our hotel for a beer and some more informal networking. I was placed with the experienced hire group (people who have had previous work experience and are not right out of college) for our break-out session so I got to meet some interesting people with different backgrounds from levels all the way up to Senior Executive.

Back home in Friedrichshafen, Julian was expecting our Ikea installation man to come on Tuesday morning, so he was busy putting together all of the "prep" work on Monday night. Shortly after starting to drill things together, he noticed that Ikea forgot our order of a very vital piece - the feet that go underneath the lower cabinets. Without them, we wouldn't be able to do anything because they are the base that the lower cabinets (and therefore appliances and countertop) sit on!! So he jumped in the car and drove the 90 minutes to Ulm, found his way through Ikea, bought the feet, and drove the 90 minutes back to Friedrichshafen. He stayed up until 2 or 3 am building things and getting ready for the installation guy to come.

On Tuesday morning, Julian and the installation guy worked for 6 hours straight (the maximum Ikea allocates for some reason) on putting together the kitchen, which included sawing the countertop (and sawing out holes for the sink and stovetop), assembling and securing the appliances and lower cabinets together, mounting them on the feet, screwing everything into the concrete wall behind them, hooking up the water and electricity, and installing the countertop. Apparently the Ikea guy was amazing and only took about one 10 minute break the entire time, but unfortunately that's as far as the kitchen got. The good news is that ALL appliances are working!!! We now have a kitchen sink, dishwasher, and stove/oven, on top of the already working kitchen!!! SUCH a relief! The bad news is that we still don't have a backsplash, our upper cabinets installed (although the corpses of them are put together), and the drawers/doors of the lower cabinets. We're going to see when this guy has availability and whether we can hire him independently because he already knows the layout and pieces, doesn't charge too much, and was a really great worker. Julian says that he could do the rest with some help from friends, but we would both prefer just to have the guy take care of it.

I took a picture of how the kitchen looks so far:

Hopefully the rest will be done soon! In the meantime, we've already been able to run the dishwasher and use the oven so we are able to reap the benefits of having the applicances hooked up :-)

While Julian was busy with manual labor and fixing minor crises, I was trying to get home from Frankfurt. I was planning on leaving around 6pm, but I found out that the last 5 hours of orientation was going to be spent introducing the newbies to their laptops, Accenture applications, etc, so I decided to leave a little bit early so that I could get home to help out a bit. After enjoying a nice coffee and chat with the HR lady that stepped in and was amazing throughout my transfer process, I got on the 2:10 S-Bahn to the Frankfurt main train station. I had looked up several itineraries on my cool new smart phone, and had plenty of options. When I arrived, everything was delayed (NOT typical for the Deutsche Bahn!) My first choice would miss the connection, so I took the second choice which was only about 5 minutes delayed. Long story short - what should have been a 4 hour, 3-leg, tolerable train experience ended up taking almost 7 hours and included 3 delays, one broken down train, 2 missed connections due to the delays (one by only 2 minutes, argh!), and 4 legs plus Julian picking me up at the less convenient train station in Friedrichshafen. I left 3.5 hours earlier than planned and got in less than an hour earlier than I would have! On the plus side, with the way things were delayed all over, I guess I'm lucky that I did make it home!!

Needless to say - Julian and I were both exhausted when we got back, so we stopped at the recently reopened grocery store right by our place and picked up frozen pizza to make in our brand new oven. We were originally going to cook but just had no energy and needed something quick and easy. We did have a microwave with oven capabilities previously, but it only had heat on the top so everything had crispy cheese and soggy crust. I don't think either of us has ever enjoyed frozen pizza more than last night!!

That's it for now - back to working from home and lots to do in the apartment before our first and highly anticipated guests arrive just one week from Friday!!! SO excited to see Carrie and Adam, and shortly thereafter my parents!!!

London Baby!

This past weekend, Julian and I went to London! We took off on Wednesday afternoon, and met up with Julian's oldest friend (and best man) David near the airport in Memmingen, which is Ryan Air's "Munich" airport (although it's a good 75 miles outside of Munich). The three of us flew the 1.5 hour flight to London and took a bus into the city to meet up with one of their good friends from High School, Anne. Anne has been living in London for college and several years of work now and her roommates were out of town so it was the perfect weekend for a group to come in to visit. Also, it was the first time to the UK for both David and Julian so they were well overdue for a visit!

Another of their close high school friends, Chrissi, has also been living in London for a while now, so we spent Wednesday - Friday hanging out with Anne and Chrissi. Then on Friday, two more high school friends came in - Cem (another groomsman and very old friend, who is an ENT surgeon resident in Heidelberg) and Helle (originally from Denmark, now living in Berlin where we visited her two summers ago).

We had such a great time! On Wednesday night, things were pretty low key - we walked along the Thames and went to dinner but didn't do too much sightseeing since it was evening and also rainy when we got in. We did however have a rousing Rock Band Session at Anne's which was a lot of fun.

On Thursday, we got up and cooked a huge traditional English breakfast (see below), with eggs, bacon, roasted mushrooms and tomatoes, beans, and toast. It was delicious!



On Thursday morning, we got up and went on a bus tour! We saw all the typical sights briefly, which gave us a good overview of the city.

On Thursday night, the five of us had a couple drinks at Chrissi's place and then went to a really good Indian restaurant for dinner.

The above picture is me, Chrissi, David, and Anne (Julian was forever the photographer so missing in many pictures unfortunately)

On Friday we got up and went straight to Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard. It was PACKED and we didn't see too much but it was cool to be there anyway.

Julian and me at Buckingham Palace

After Buckingham Palace, we walked around (the below picture is in front of Westminster Abbey)



We also went to the Tower of London, where we saw all of the old armor from Kings and the Crowned Jewels. There was also a great view of the Tower Bridge from there.






Friday night, David, Anne, Julian and I all went to see the Lion King, which was unbelievable!!! I think it was the best musical I've ever seen, so engaging and the costumes were just great.



After the musical, we went back to Anne's to have a few drinks and wait for Cem and Helle to arrive. They got in and we ended up staying up way too late playing Rock Band and hanging out!



Me and Chrissi rocking out :-)

On Saturday, we all got up and went to the London Eye to get some great views of the city. It was actually really cool and well worth it to do.

The rest of the day we walked around, enjoyed the beautiful weather at an outdoor cafe, and just relaxed. We went out on Saturday night until Julian, David and I had to leave to catch our bus to the airport at about 3:30am. We were exhausted and slept the entire ride to the airport (and the entirety of our 6:20am flight), but it was nice to get back in the morning and have the rest of Sunday to nap, do laundry, and get ready for the week.

Overall it was just such a nice weekend! So great to spend time with some of Julian's oldest friends and see such a cool city!