European Vacation

If you've seen the movie European Vacation, you will get a kick out of our evening last night. I mentioned how it is extremely tough to find a house to rent here. We are visiting the housing office several times a day to see if anything new comes up. Apparently, this rarely happens, but between our morning visit and afternoon visit to the housing office, a 4 bedroom house popped up in Bamberg only about 3 kilometers (just over 1.5 miles) from the base. We are all excited picturing our dream house! So the lady that has been trying to help us at the housing office (who is German, but speaks English) gives us the directions and arranges a time where we can meet someone to see it. She does warn us that the man that will meet us speaks very little English. So, with the address in hand, we program the GPS and good old "Gabby" (the name we have given to our GPS) gets us right to the exact location of the house. Our big old Van doesn't even fit on the street, and the house is not at all what we were hoping for. Very Dissapointing!!!! In broken German on my part, I ask the man if he has any other house to rent. He seemed to tell us that in Bamberg city it is very difficult to find a house to rent. We understood him to say that he had a nice house to rent in another city. Again with very little exact communication due to language barriers he told us that we could follow him to the other house right that minute because it is only 3 streets away from his house and he is going home. So Bryan and the kids and I hop in the Van to follow this man in a Mercedes Convertable flying through the streets of Germany. It was hilarious because these little German towns have such narrow streets and although the Mercedes is perfect for this kind of thing, the Honda Odyssey - not so much! So we're driving as fast, yet carefully as we can to follow him and eventually we get to the new house. It appears very nice and we get out to walk around and again with miscommunication we find out that he doesn't have a key to get in, we can only look outside. We can't even peak in the windows because in Germany they use metal closing blinds. After conversing back and forth with no luck, he tells us that his wife speaks more English than he does so we should follow him to his house! We pull in the driveway and he waves to us to come on inside. Let me back up a minute and explain that we had to threaten the kids with their lives that they would be on their very best behavior because some people may not want to rent to a family with 3 kids. O.K. so with that said, they were so tired, bored, thirsty, hungry, irritable BUT they were very good! So next thing you know the 5 of us are standing in the kitchen of a German Family eating their dinner! They were very kind. The children of the man looked like they were in their 20's and were able to speak some English and we got enough info. to understand that we should call them tomorrow. Thank goodness "Gabby" was able to get us back to the Hotel safe and sound and now we will wait to see about the house......

P.S. I fixed the comments section of our blog so that anyone can post now and you don't have to be a "registered user"