Four weeks down!

Hi everyone,
Well, today marks exactly four weeks from the day I left the US and two weeks for Andy. We are doing well, we are finally mostly settled in to our new home in the Beggen neighborhood of Luxembourg. Any day now I will find the time to take pictures and maybe some video of our new place. The furniture is all assembled, thanks to Andy's hard work while I was at training in Geneva! We have some rugs down to soften it up a bit, since the entire apartment is floored in ceramic tile. The walls are completely white, which, for any of you who know my penchant for bright colors of paint can probably guess, is driving me a little crazy so the next big project will be to find some artwork for the walls and a way to hang it on the walls, since the walls are sometimes plaster, sometimes drywall, and sometimes some sort of painted or coated concrete. I wasn't there to witness, but apparently the handyman we had to install our ceiling lights had quite a time drilling into them. Rumor has it IKEA sells adhesive hooks for just such a purpose, so with a few things to return and ONE MORE piece of furniture to buy, we will likely head back to IKEA this weekend to see what we can find. We are also planning to go car shopping either Friday afternoon or Saturday as whatever we decide on will then have to be approved by Deloitte for our budget and then ordered from the factory, as they will make our cars to order. Crazy, but I guess that is what happens when you are probably only about two hours from the factory itself. We have a day trip to Cologne, Germany planned for Sunday (about a 2.5 hour drive). There just happens to be a Hard Rock Cafe there, so again, any of you knowing my collection of Hard Rock shot glasses will fully understand the purpose behind this trip! I am sure we will squeeze in some sightseeing along the way.

Andy started work this week and it seems to be going fine, although I will let him fill you in more on that separately. We also have a trip planned to Vienna with some friends from London for a Christmas market on the first weekend of December, and are hoping to make one other trip somewhere sometime in early November.

We are having fun getting settled, our motto remains, "Every day is an adventure!", and we are doing fine. Tonight's big event will be to cook a real dinner with actual meat and vegetables. Grills are not common here other than in summer months, so we are hoping to get an electric grill cook up some chicken on our terrace. I cooked pasta on Sunday night and we had a bottle of wine with it, but other than a can of ravioli and a frozen pizza, it has been a lot of evenings at restaurants. We are both getting a little tired of that and are hoping to get into a better routine of cooking soon. Our freezer compartment in our fridge is the size of a freezer compartment in one of those 1.3 cubic feet fridges you find in dorms, so we will be making a lot of trips to the grocery! Speaking of the fridge, it is the size of a taller 1.3 cubic feet fridge, so there is not a lot of room for storage of cold stuff, either. Not to worry, though, we have managed to find plenty of room for our beer.

That is the main story from here for now, we are getting better at navigating life, the roads, the grocery, etc. Now if we could only get the VOIP phone and the Slingbox to work! Oh, and rumor has it our ocean freight shipment arrived last Monday in Antwerp, so hopefully soon we will have our 19 boxes delivered so we can then realize we still don't have quite enough storage for clothing and can go buy some more IKEA closets. Fun times! I will just be glad to have something else to wear other than the clothes I brought with me. I have been now wearing the same 5-7 outfits to work for nearly two months. I might burn them when the replacements arrive.

Hope you are well and happy and heavily invested in cash.

Love,
Lesley