Early on Monday morning, we drove from Marietta to the airport in Columbus. We were sad to leave the grandkiddos, but we were also ready to start this next part of the journey.

Our travel day (days?!?) couldn’t have really gone much more smoothly. Our flights were on time, and we had no trouble with arrangements or luggage. We left ourselves A LOT of time for connections. It all was as expected, really. The hard part was, of course, trying to get some sleep on an “overnight” flight when it didn’t feel like night to our bodies. It was a bit of a struggle.

We landed in Berlin at around 6:30 am. We still needed to take a train from the airport into the city and then another train to Leipzig.

Mistake #1: not really researching the public transportation options beforehand and not refreshing ourselves on how to “train” in Germany. It wasn’t really a big deal, as we learned and remembered on the fly, but it would have been a bit easier had we figured a few things out before we arrived tired.

We arrived in Leipzig around 11:00 am, but we couldn’t check into our apartment until 3:00 pm, so what to do with all that extra time? We put our heavy luggage into a couple of storage lockers at the train station and found a walking tour of the city center’s music history sites that we could follow on our phones.

A note here: we are normally travelers who go carry-on only as much as possible. However, since we are here for a long time and potentially need clothing for four seasons, instruments, laptops, and a few other things that we didn’t want to buy new, we have more luggage than usual. That is not our favorite thing, since it’s all heavy and awkward and slows us down a bit. OK, back to Leipzig…

We were a bit worried, as the weather forecast said it was going to rain most of the day, but we started wandering with our umbrellas on board and hoped for the best. One thing we noticed early on is that the city is surprisingly quiet. We haven’t completely figured out why, but we have our theories. However, this is a city that has church bells, and I personally enjoy that.

Much of the city center is closed to cars, so it’s really walkable. They say that more than 500 composers have lived here, including Bach, Mendelsshon, the Schumanns, Mahler, Wagner, and Greig. The orchestra, opera, and boys’ choir are all very old and very famous. We walked around and saw the churches, university, and opera house. We were fighting our jet lag by trying to stay awake, stay active, and getting as much sunlight as possible. We stopped at a restaurant for lunch that had tree trunks as part of the decor. It was different! We walked a bit more before returning to the train station for our bags and to catch the bus to our new home. Surprisingly, it didn’t rain on us a bit.

Travel tip: in Europe (and elsewhere), you often have to pay to use the toilet in public places like the train station, so carry coins! Restaurants will usually have a restroom, so use theirs if you don’t want to pay a Euro to pee.

By the time we took the bus and dragged our tired bodies and our heavy baggage to our Airbnb in the northern area of Gohlis, we were pretty happy to be there. Shoutout to Nathan for hauling our giant suitcases up 85 steps to the 4th floor (which is really the 5th floor, because Europe). It’s a cute little one-bedroom apartment that seems pretty typical for the area. I was still fighting off my cold, so I took a one-hour nap. Then we went out in search of groceries, we ate a very simple dinner at home, and that was the end of our first day!

The rest of the week has been pretty great, but fairly quiet. The temperatures here are in the 70s during the day and high 50s at night and we’ve had just a bit of rain. The neighborhood here is made up of buildings that are generally 100-150 years old. Many of them have a main door that leads into a courtyard and then into the individual buildings. There are lots of trees and parks and the streets are cobblestoned. It seems most people who have a car park on the street, so there are little cars lining pretty much every side street.

We have explored the neighborhood pretty thoroughly and mostly everything we need is within a mile or so. We haven’t needed to use the trams or buses again yet.

One of the first things we did on Wednesday was to walk to a local music store so that Nathan could try out keyboards. He brought his violin and his travel guitar, but he likes to practice the piano and renting a place with a piano is way more expensive than just having a portable option. He found a good candidate with nicely weighted keys, so he bought one and carried it home! We even stopped for lunch on our way back and the keyboard waited in the corner while we ate :D.

We’ve spent time this week adjusting to the new time zone, trying to open a German bank account, figuring out the whole visa process, learning more about our new city, exercising, trying to speak German, and taking walks.

Mistake #2: We didn’t check some of our electrical equipment thoroughly enough and we blew out two charging ports before learning our lesson. Unfortunately, Nathan caught my cold, so now he is feeling rotten just as I’m getting better.

We have booked this apartment for a month, so we are trying to decide what our next step will be. Will we stay here in Leipzig? Will we do some other German city instead? Will we stay in Germany until it gets cold and then wimp out and head south? We will figure things out as we go. For now, it has been a good first week and we have settled into more of a normal routine, except we’re in Leipzig!