week three & four

Good morning and happy Tuesday to you all!! Let the blog post fun continue...

The next few weeks looked something like this.

Checking out the local (and delicious!) chocolate museum cafe.

 Ok, you caught us, we didn't actually go inside the museum...but we did sample and I am pretty sure that is the most important part :)

The kids and I did a lot of exploring around the city. This is a little garden in the middle of town (sort of) which tells the story of an old folk tale with the statutes and flowers.

P is taking it all in and trying to remember it all :)

 We promptly got an annual zoo pass for the Köln Zoo. 

We have spent many, many days hanging out here. 

Ev loves this guy. Loves.

Hippo feeding is one of our favorite things to catch when we go.

The keepers throw apples to them.

Group spaghetti Eis outing. YUM! Might as well sample one from every ice cream spot :)

And an evening coffee date.

Explored the city some more.

The kids were so excited to find some baby ducklings.

 We utilized and familiarized ourselves with the local transportation. 

This has been super great to use! Some of us get a little more excited than others.

We got to go to our first soccer match! FC KÖLN!

 This really was a super fun event! I think we all hope to make more of these!!

We really began apartment hunting this week and went on a few showings. I cannot begin to explain how difficult and time consuming finding and getting a flat here can be.

We saw a lot of apartments this week. Most of them would not work for us.

 It was a hard week of reality when it came to housing options.

There is a high demand for apartments/flats here. When you find something online you are interested in you send an email with a little "family resume". Something like "Hello, we are the RosieQ Fam. We are new here. We are nice. Please let us live somewhere :) Here is why you should consider letting us rent from you." If they like what they see you get an invite to an open house essentially.  From there you fill out an application and are put on a list of possible renters. After that there may be another meet up to see if you "fit in" with what they are looking for in renters. This is not an overnight process nor is it something you just decide on your own as a renter. The owner of the apartment has all the power and decision making...based on what they do and do not like. I was not prepared for this. At all. 

You guys, this whole process was really really hard for me.

I wanted a place so bad!

I felt so bad for our friends and wanted to get out of their space as well as start our life here.

(So like I said, my 2 weeks tops with our AMAZING friends became longer. Much longer.)

*Spoiler alert: we didn't get to move into a place of our own for 14 weeks!*

In between appointments while apartment hunting we checked out local parks and

green space. People love to spend time outdoors when the weather is nice here.

It feels like everyone is outside trying to enjoy the weather and it is really nice

to see people doing just that...being outside just to enjoy the outside.

Those great friends I was talking about arranged some park time play dates for us! 

So we headed out to the park to meet up with more friends and get some sunshine in.

The parks here are really very nice and located all over the city!

We had more afternoons at the park outside our guest suite in their neighborhood.

We were introduced to a burger place one night, 

and our love affair with Freddy Schilling began.

Best best burgers. No lie, friends.

*OK, so they also have a GF option so that doesn't hurt or sway my opinion in any way!*

*That may or may not be true*

*I will let you decide*

We still had so many surprises to overcome that we didn't see coming. Everything seems
to run at a different pace and there is a lack of customer support in most cases that
caught us very much off guard and has been a thorn in our side since we landed.
The language barrier has not helped.
As we have been conquering the surprises one by one we have had a growing support system that has been über helpful and we would not be where we are without them!