May Reflection

Woohoo! We have been here for over a month! Time is such a vortex in seasons of transitions, negotiating the nine-hour time change from Washington sure doesn’t help that! We have been enjoying our time in the city in our cozy AirBnB room. We’ve clocked more miles (or kilometers to be correct) on our bicycles than ever before, took a quick trip to Neuschwanstein Castle, and are grateful for the many parks spread across this charming city. Our job right now is primarily to set up our life, but we have been enjoying a weekly Young Life Zoom club with an awesome group of students!

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Here are a few lessons Chase is learning:

1. Turns out the intensive German course is as advertised. Intense! We’ve been spending 20+ hours just on that. Meg is an all-star student and has already won the admiration of the teacher and our classmates. Chase is more of a long-term memory kind of guy. Once it gets in there, it’s in the vault!

2. Our best analogy for our arrival in Munich is like a person meeting a significant other in person for the first time and discovering that they have Mono...not looking their best, not knowing when they will get better and not being able to share a milkshake! Thankfully Munich is opening up as more people are getting vaccinated and the weather is getting nicer (it’s been an unusually cloudy, rainy and cold May). The city feels like it’s waking up and we are enjoying its unveiling, like this field of wildflowers!

3. It seems like we are in an escape room of bureaucracy. If you’ve ever been in an escape room, you know you must solve logic puzzles sequentially in order to move forward. Here is a little example: In our current situation, in order to fill out our visa, we need a permanent address here. In order to get a permanent address, we need to find an apartment to rent. In order to get an apartment, we had to German bank account, in order to get that we had to acquire German cell phone numbers, but to get a cell phone number we needed to get an EU bank account. Lots of mental gymnastics!

Where we saw God: Thank you for your prayers regarding housing! We were worried

about finding an apartment because 1) there is intense competition amongst

renters; 2) we aren’t ideal candidates because we don’t have a German record of rent history and we don’t speak German; and 3) it’s common for Germans

Just a few minutes from our new home!

to rent a flat for decades (rent control is strong) so our 3-5 years seems dismal in comparison. Despite this, we found a place as close to Munich International School as we could get! The landlady is really nice, speaks decent English and understands the importance of what we are doing. “These kids do not have roots. My family has lived here for decades but these kids don’t have that. They are poor. They may have money, but they are poor.” We don’t know if this lady is a person of faith but that’s basically a club talk right there! Anyway, somehow we wooed her and she chose us to be her tenants. Woohoo! We are simultaneously excited and daunted by our new task of making a new home.

*Insert kitchen here*

What we hope for: Turns out that German apartments often don’t include kitchens...like it’s just a rectangular room with a water hookup! We have to outfit the entire thing! We hope that this isn’t too big of a stresser. We also hope to find a car in the next few weeks so we can travel between our Munich hotel and our apartment more efficiently (we will sleep at our AirBnB through June). Finally, we hope that some iteration of Young Life camp will happen this summer. We’ve been doing our weekly zoom call with students but we look forward to being in person with them.

Biking to pick up a soda stream, a hike in Garmisch, and Neuschwanstein (not a green screen we promise!)