When I first entered my apartment in Ludwigshafen I mostly just felt tired. I live on the sixth floor of an apartment building with no elevator. That means I had to carry two 50-pound suitcases up six flights of stairs. Talk about a workout! After leaving the bags in the hallway, I examined my new home. There are four rooms, including a kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. I have to admit that I was not thrilled when I first saw it. All of the walls were white and all the furniture that was in the room was also white. It didn’t feel personal at all. To make matters worse, I arrived at my new home on a Sunday morning. In Germany, almost nothing is open on Sundays. Grocery stores, shopping centers, museums, libraries, restaurants... almost every place is closed until Monday morning. On top of that, my apartment did not yet have WiFi so I had no Internet connection. My roommate and friend, Cody, who is also American, found us one place that was open, McDonalds. We spent our first day eating burgers and using the free McDonalds WiFi to contact our parents. It was not exactly the beginning of my new life in Germany the way that I had imagined.
I’ve done a fair amount of traveling and moving in my life and I’ve learned that the first few days are always the worst.
