That Was a Close One...

After we thought we had paid the damage deposit on the place in Freiburg, we received a large foreign exchange wire transfer yesterday for almost the same amount. So, we figured it could be one of four options:

1. The place is rented to someone else, and they returned our damage deposit to us,
2. The money got transferred to a bad account (wrong account number),
3. Someone in Germany wanted to give us money for the deposit (like my work, highly unlikely, I know), or
4. A random bank error.

We went to our bank, and they told us that the account we wanted to transfer to was closed, so it turns out it was no. 2. Banks really make me mad. We paid around $150 in exchange when our bank bought euros to transfer, plus a $25 administration fee. Then, when the money came back, the bank exchanged the euros to Cdn dollars at a lower rate, and made another $100 or so. So, our money went no where and we lost $300 to foreign exchange transfers because our bank wanted to make money off of us for nothing. I realize this is how they make their money and euros are kind of scarce in Canada, but the least they could do was make the exchange at the current rates so that we wouldn't lose so much for a service that didn't work. Apparently, they are supposed to confirm too if the transfer was successful, which might have prevented this mess, and of course they did not. I think I am going to file a complaint, even though I know it won't do anything.

At any rate, after explaining the situation to our new landlords (through German translators at my work, which can be crazy in itself), they have agreed to let us pay the deposit when we get to Freiburg, which is a really nice thing to do. I think we will have to go through all this foreign exchange stuff again to get our money into a German bank account though, so we will have to find someone with the lowest rate, and I sure don't want to give more money to our garbage bank. Any ideas?

Jeff

What's Left?

The defence is done. After five years, I can't believe it is over. Thanks to mom and dad for the great celebration/get-together on the weekend. We have kind of found an apartment too, and we actually put a damage deposit down on it. That's the first time we did the damage deposit thing, so I am thinking this is the real deal, but of course, we are still keeping in mind it could fall through. We also got our visas/passports back this week. Things are looking up. There is a huge amount of things to be done before we go though, like finishing up work stuff (thesis corrections, packing up my office, training the new guy), repacking our containers we are taking on the plane, booking the rental car and hotel, selling our car, and a whole pile of little things like getting more passport photos (who knew?), buying voltage transformers/plug adapters, etc. We have ten days left in Canada and we could probably use an entire month and still not have enough time.

So, the new plan is:

1. Reese's party on the 16th, in Red Deer
2. Pack on the 17th, leave on the 23:59 flight
3. Clear customs/immigration in Frankfurt (May 18, 17:30 local time), get our car rentals (we are getting 2 cars, one for the stuff, and one for the people - cheaper than getting a van)
4. Get to Freiburg around 23:00 (it's a 2.5 hour drive, so we are giving ourselves some extra time here)
5. Enjoy hotel in Freiburg
6. Get keys for our apartment around 11:00 (May 19)
7. Go get some mattresses and essentials from Ikea
8. Return car rentals.

The apartment has no furnishings, like we thought. No kitchen (not even a sink), no light fixtures, maybe not toilet seats. All we will have is some clothes, blankets, and a computer, so it is going to be pretty crazy with a completely empty apartment. But, it is going to be great to have our own place for the first time in almost four months.

Jeff

Tough

Ok, this is a lot harder than we bargained for. I think we have contacted about 50 landlords in the Freiburg area and still no place to live (besides the rubbermaid containers we are taking on the plane). The market is completely in the landlord's favor, as people line up and even 'apply' for apartments in Freiburg. So, we have a huge disadvantage to start with as it is much easier to deal with someone you can meet personally than a flight risk from Kanada. We gave up on trying to do it ourselves and through rental 'agents' in Germany, and employed the services of one of Peggy's friends and a guy from the Uniklinik - where I am going to work. We found a pretty nice place about 5 km from my work and we have our application in the pile of ten, so 10% chance. Here's hoping...

Oh, and the visas. So the guy at the consulate says "apply when you get there, not here" even though everything we learned said to do it now. So, he reluctantly agreed, and made a couple of calls to make sure we would get them in time (we fly out on May 17). Then, he takes our passports, and attaches them to the paperwork for the visas. I was a little stunned, but after a short assurance from him, we all walked out sans passports, and a receipt Erika could have made at the craft table. Who gives away their passport to some stranger from a hole-in-the-wall office? I still can't believe we agreed to it. Not to mention the $360 price hike from the quoted internet price of $90. But we did get some cheap paper Bavaria/Germany flags out of the deal. I think it was the single worst case of consumer responsibility I have ever had. Here's hoping...

Jeff

Visa Day

So tomorrow is visa day. Should be a good time, standing in the consulate filling out forms with our good little kiddies. I am hoping everything is simple and that the turnaround time is short enough that we get them before we need to leave on May 17th. Oh yeah, we booked flights for all of us for May 17th on Air Transat. I've never flown Air Transat before. The flight is 9.5 hours long and we have to be at the airport three hours early for some reason or they may give our seats away. Add to that an hour or so for collecting luggage in Frankfurt and getting through immigration, and we will have a 14 hour airport/plane excursion that I am sure Reese and Erika will just adore.

I was reminded yesterday of how close the end of my degree is when we had a little farewell to another Ph.D. student, Yusuf. Most of my friends from the Biomedical Engineering department have moved on in the past year or so, and me and Rob are pretty much all that is left from our original cohort. It's sort of sad, I suppose, Edmonton and U of A were pretty decent for us, except for living in the projects.

Jeff

Back at it and Tigers Hockey

We left Medicine Hat a couple of days ago, and Jodi and the kids are in Red Deer and I am in Edmonton. Me and my Dad went to a Tigers game, and they got blown out 5-1 by the Hurricanes. A couple of highlight reel plays on the Hurricanes side made the Tigers' goalie look pretty silly. I haven't been to a Western league game since I think I was about 16. It's quite a bit different now, with people around us doing work on laptops during the intermission and lots of text messaging going on, and no more 'smarties' colored seats. I can't remember seeing that stuff at NHL games recently, but the show at an NHL rink is much more enthralling. The sound system at the arena is terrible; we could barely hear any of the music or announcements, so that hasn't changed much over the years. I don't know if I just don't like hockey enough anymore, but the game seemed really slow. No one really stood out, and poor passing and unpolished skating styles kind of detracted from the game. I suppose I tend to critique too much having played hockey for quite a while, but after getting around that, I found a couple of players on Lethbridge were pretty good. In the end, it was a really good time, and thanks to my Dad for the ticket. They had a pretty funny contest during one of the intermissions. They brought out five appliances from Leon's onto the ice and situated them in a circle. Then, they blindfolded a guy and put him in the middle of the circle and spun him around a couple of times, and then he was supposed to go find all the appliances in the alotted time of one minute. Each appliance he found he got to keep. I think maybe it was the first time they tried the contest because either a) they weren't too concerned about dishing out $4000 in appliances (unlikely) or, b) they had no idea how easy the contest was. Needless to say, they made the circle so small, the guy took ten steps, found the first appliance, took another ten steps, found the second appliance, took another ten steps, repeat ad absurdum, and he ended up getting all of the appliances with time to spare. Pretty funny. Another contest had participants either answer a Tigers' trivia question or shoot the puck from the red line into the net. All but one of the ten contestants picked the shot. I was quite surprised at how difficult people found it to hit the open net. Only two managed to do it. A couple whiffed it just outside the crease, and one even shot the puck directly into the corner.

We had quite a fiasco at London drugs trying to get our passport photos for the visa applications. We had to redo everyone's except Jodi, and I think I did around eight redos. After you get your picture taken, you have to wait around 4-5 minutes for them to develop it and make sure you faced the camera and there are no shadows. So imagine us with our two young kids trying to get them to first, sit still for the picture, and then occupy their time while we got ours done without destroying the store. By the end of the hour or so it took, Reese was swimming in my arms and Erika had opened up her own shop in an adjacent aisle, organizing and promoting a collection of notebooks. In terms of my photoshoot, I don't understand what the problem was. I'm no photography expert, but if you continually develop shadows in the same top corners of the picture, maybe you should tilt the camera up a bit so the flash catches the upper part of the exposure? Or just brighten everything up with more exposure. No offense to the girl who took the pictures, but as George Bush so eloquently put it:

Jeff

$50 for a Criminal Records Check?

There are a few things we need to do to be able to apply for a visa, like get some wallet-sized pictures done, get criminal records checks, and notes from the doctor saying we are ok, and don't have communicable, bird flu diseases. Jodi got a criminal records check a couple of years ago when she was working for the EUB in Calgary, and I think it was around $10 to get it done. We were pretty surprised when we got down to the Medicine Hat police station and it cost $50 each. Stuff like that drives me crazy. How hard is it to look on the computer and print out a report on somebody? I suppose they inflated the price so we could pay for some cop's peppercorn steak at the Beefeater. Oh well.

We are in Medicine Hat this week, and I think we are going to try to take in some of the things I never did growing up here, like the museum, and some pottery place. Maybe elkwater too. The visa is the pressing process now that we need to figure out, and then we need to do the bank account thing. Finding places over there is also proving to be pretty difficult. Furnished or not? And when I say not furnished, I mean completely unfurnished. The unfurnished apartments in Germany might not have a kitchen sink, or fridge, or oven, and sometimes not even flooring.

Jeff

Finally, some dates...

I start my new job in Freiburg June 1. The project wasn't supposed to start until 2009, so they had to extend funding back a bit for June to work. So, the defence is scheduled for May 1, and then I have to figure out if I am going to a conference in Toronto from May 2nd to May 9th. The most important pressing thing right now is getting the visas figured out, which can take a while to process. I guess we have a couple more weeks in Canada than we originally thought. Oops. More freeloading...

We also got an apartment lined up for April 1, although we aren't going to be there. It is in a student village complex (1300 students) on the 7th floor of a 1960s building. About 100 m away are two bars, one which gets really busy I guess, so there is lots of traffic on Wednesdays and the weekend. And of course, the usual stuff accompanies the student bar scene: stomach contents in hallways and outside, increased crime/violence, more drug trades, etc. Okay, so it probably isn't that bad considering Freiburg is a pretty safe place to live overall, but get 1300 students together (90% undergraduates), 50 cent shot night and zero responsibility = mess. If it was just me and Jodi, than ok, we wouldn't have that bad of a time with it. But I guess I just didn't picture having to raise kids in a seedy environment. Maybe I am overreacting. At any rate, we have to let the reservation go for April, and reschedule for June, and maybe there won't even be a place available then. German housing ads are still pretty tricky for me to figure out, and we don't know which areas in Freiburg are good or bad either.

We are in Red Deer for the rest of the week, and then on Monday I am back in Edmonton and next week we are going to High Prairie to visit (read: freeload from) Dallas and Kory.

Jeff

Phone

One of the nicest things about not having our own place is not having our own phone line. Over the past couple of years, I entered quite a few contests because of my success in the Pepsi Xbox contest. So, I had to divulge our phone number on a few occasions, and of course, that information got sold to all kinds of telemarketers. On an average day, I think we got around 2 calls from telemarketers. We also didn't have call display, so we answered every call. We'd be changing a diaper upstairs or something and the phone rings and one of us would run downstairs to the phone thinking it might be important or relevant and it turns out being a telemarketer. Thanks, I just got poop lodged into the buttons of my phone for nothing. The worst ones are when there is just some calling service on the other end, like the reverse of an answering machine. Used to drive me nuts. One of the frequent telemarketers we got was some guy selling meat. Honestly, like I am going to by a side of beef from a telemarketer. Or the "you have won a paid vacation cruise, the cost to you is only $400". They've gotten so ridiculous now they even leave messages on our answering machine. We'd come home from Christmas holidays and have 5 or 6 messages from Meat Guy. They call at the worst times too; I would say about 50% of the calls would come around the time we eat supper. We would almost know for sure it was a telemarketer if we were sitting down to a nice bowl of shrimp primavera penne and lettuce wraps and the phone rang. I suppose it is a good marketing ploy, because they know people are eating so that's when they call - after people get home from work, and before they rush off to soccer practice or Tai Chi. I think it's just downright inconsiderate. Recently, I changed my tactics so I wouldn't get so frustrated. When they call, I pick it up, and then say, "Can you hold on a minute?", and then I put the phone down and let it sit there until I can hear that annoying, loud tone telling me I left the phone off the hook. I figure, it they want to waste my time, I am going to waste some of theirs. Good attitude, I know. I wish Canada had a federal program like the States where they can put your number on a 'Do not call' list for telemarketers. Apparently, they actually enforce it too and hand out some hefty fines to violators. Anyway, all I am saying is, it's nice not to have to pick up the phone and get a useless caller on the other end.

This is my last day in Edmonton this week, and then back to Airdrie for a while. For those that haven't seen these yet or want a refresher, here's Erika's 'new' glasses and Erika and Reese at halloween.

Jeff

Moving Out Done.

Friday was the last day I will have to move our stuff for a long time I hope. It actually went pretty good, the new storage unit was close to the old one, so we didn't break our backs moving the stuff. Stopped at Vern's pizza for lunch. They have the most meat on a pizza ever. This past weekend we had the guys' weekend in Airdrie with me, Brad, Tim, Kory, and Bruce. The girls were in Red Deer, and I imagine they had lots of long, insightful talks about life. Hee hee. It was a good time; we played Rock Band, ate out, and watched Rambo. It wasn't the worst movie, although I don't think I would watch it again. We actually started out in "Meet the Spartans", which turned out to be the absolute worst movie I have ever seen. I guess we should have figured that before we went in. Well, 20 minutes into it we left and Rambo was just starting so that is where we ended up.

Sunday we were supposed to have our farewell party in Red Deer at Tim and Lesley's, but their sewer had a cracked pipe and was backing up, so we stayed in Airdrie, and some people came there for cake. We got one of those digital picture frames with some pictures loaded on it of family for a going away present. Pretty nice.

Tomorrow I am off to Edmonton for a couple of days, and Jodi is sticking around Airdrie unless the sewer has been fixed in Red Deer. Not too much else to say, we have decided to not do a whole bunch of planning and getting excited (impossible) until we actually know the date we are going to travel over there.

Jeff

Moving Out Done?

Well, not really done. The stuff fit in the trailer, but not in our storage unit in Medicine Hat. We have a little family thing next weekend with Jodi's side, so I am taking Erika back down to Medicine Hat to stay with Grandma and Grandpa, and then me and Dad will move the stuff out of the storage unit and into another one, double the size. Fortunately, the new one is in the same storage complex. So, I thought we would be done Thursday, but I guess not.

The move itself was pretty crazy. The piano needed to be dealt with, of course, on the day we move out. The movers came and picked it up, and then we hopped in the car to follow them to the drop off location. The place turned out to be a fourplex, and I had no idea which one we were supposed to drop the piano off at. So, being the smartie I am, I just picked one and ended up walking in on some large lady, not adequately dressed, making beef stroganoff and her pitbull barking its ugly face off. She seemed pretty surprised. Anyway, after apologizing profusely, I phoned Megan (which I should have done in the first place) to figure out the right unit of the fourplex. The snow drifts on the sidewalk up to the door ranged from 2 to 3 feet, so the movers said they couldn't do it, and took off. I figured I would shovel the walk so it was ready for the actual delivery, and it took about triple the time I thought it would. We finally got home and my Dad was waiting to load the trailer and we dove right in. The trailer was really slippery and I think it was -36°C when we finally finished at 7:30. After a little more cleaning and loading of our car and Dad's truck, we were done for the day, with no real end in sight.

Thursday we slept in longer than we wanted, but managed to get everything packed by 9:00. Now, remember the story I told about the walkthrough, and how things were set up to go bad? Well, everything that could have gone bad, did. They completely tried to get every penny they could from us, and because I signed the original walkthrough, we really couldn't do much about it. We got 'in trouble' for things like dirty walls, the outside of our door being dirty, dirty light fixtures, and my personal favorite: the heat vents being dirty. We actually took the vents out and put in new ones for the duration and then put their's back in, so they were complaining about their own poor quality cleaning on that one. What really gets my dander up is they have no maximum they can charge for damage or cleaning. For other rentals we have had over the years, they can keep your damage deposit and that's it. Of course, because we are in a student residence, they can charge above the damage deposit, and unless you pay whatever they want, you can't order any transcripts or sign out books or any other university service. There has to be some rule against that. Anyway, we got to Medicine Hat at about 6:30 pm and finished unloading what we could at around 9:00 pm.

The next morning, I went out to the car to go to the spectacular Medicine Hat mall, and I thought "the car kind of smells funny. A little sweet. Hmmm...". Well, turns out I left the bottle of Kriter - champagne me and Jodi have saved since our wedding night - in the trunk of the car, and it exploded. So I tried to get the stuff out, but the smell lingered. We had to get Ziebart to steam clean it. It smells ok now.

We are now at Jodi's mom's place for the next couple of weeks. Well, sort of. Tomorrow I am heading to work for a couple of days in Edmonton, and then Thursday I am taking Erika to Medicine Hat, and on the weekend we have that family thing at Red Deer.

Sorry about the novel, apparently there's been a little bit going on. Here's a nice picture of me in the hotel room getting ready for my interview in Freiburg 6 weeks ago.

Jeff