Death by Ikea?

Overall I had a very nice, productive first full weekend in Friedrichshafen!

On Friday night we tried out a Greek restaurant that happens to be directly next door to our building, and it was fantastic! I had a delicious souvlaki and Julian got a combo meal with souvlaki and gyros. We will definitely be frequenting this restaurant and I'm really excited to have good Greek food so close! It'll make me think of Gran and all of her delicious cooking. Other than setting up our balcony furniture to enjoy a glass of wine overlooking the Alps, Friday was pretty low key as we had had a long week and knew we'd be getting up early to head to Ikea on Saturday.

We were out the door by about 9:30 to head to Ikea in Ulm, which is about 90 minutes away. The drive went pretty smoothly and we got there right around 11. We started by looking at couches, kitchen tables, a work desk for me, a new bed, etc. We had all of that picked out by around 3:30, when Julian's dad arrived to help us with the biggest task - the kitchen.

We had done plenty of prep work on the kitchen, and Julian and his dad (an architect) had done even more before my arrival. We knew roughly what we wanted, what could fit in our space, and how to organize it, but things were pretty tight (the big question was whether we could fit a lower cabinet of drawers since everything was taken up by the dishwasher, sink, and oven underneath) so we had to arrange and rearrange. Ikea has this nice "Kitchen Planner" software where you can enter your measurements and then pick stuff off of their website to fit it. It's even 3D so that you can see how everything will look. I had NO idea how much work went into building a kitchen from scratch. We had to chose cabinet material, color, handles, counter top material and height, what to put in the space between the floor and the bottom of the cabinets, upper cabinets, sink, faucet, backsplash, drawer size, and on and on and on. Overall this part alone took probably 4 hours! Then we had to work with a consultant and print out our (VERY LONG) list of kitchen items while they went through to see what was in stock.

After all of that, we went downstairs to pick out some smaller stuff that we could take with us right away. New pillows, some lighting, and a few other things were taken care of and finally we were ready to check out. After the line and checkout though, we had to organize the delivery and kitchen installation, which also took plenty of time. We'll get everything (couch, table, kitchen, etc) delivered one week from today but unfortunately the earliest installation time we could get was June 7th, so we're going to try to find someone local that can install it for us. I'm getting anxious to have a real kitchen, especially since I work from home all day!

All in all, we spent TEN AND A HALF hours at Ikea! We didn't leave until 9:30, so by the time we got home at 11:30 (after a quick dinner at McDonalds - the only restaurant in town still serving food), I was so pooped that I just took a shower and immediately went to bed. It was an insanely long, exhausting day but also fun to be able to pick out everything for our apartment.

Sunday was quite a bit more relaxing! I slept in until about 11 and then spent most of the day reading and watching/helping Julian rearrange and clean our living room. It's in pretty good shape now so that when the couch arrives we'll just replace the futon with it and should be good to go!

I'm very excited because this is my last day of work this week - tomorrow we leave for London! We're flying with Julian's good friend David (who lives in Nürnberg) and meeting a few other close high school friends there. We'll all stay at their friend Anne's place, because her roommates are out of town so we can just take over the whole apartment. I'm really looking forward to a mini vacation and especially to stay with someone who lives there!

I'll report back after London with hopefully some good stories to tell :-)