Home away from home

Hello people. Life is going on good over here in Graz. This week we had our orientation session for the German intensive course and overall for the studies in here. There is so much burechratic, byrocratic, bureaucratic whatever close enough, legal and system hurdles and hoops to hop through. We had to register to the city, but on top of that we have to do an additional registration to let them know we are staying here for more than three months. Also, the school system has unfortunately many little tasks and forms that evenings have gone mostly trying to sort them out. Hopefully we are through them soon as the intensive course kicks off on Wednesday.  The sessions have been nice and all the international staff from the Uni are really helpful. 

Since there has not been a great amount of happening, I thought I would keep this otherwise a smaller post and just talk shortly about our apartment and the neighbourhood. Our apartment is on the edge of the old town where the blocks start to turn into living areas. The name of our street Nibelungengasse, comes from some German legend based on my 30 second Wikipedia research : ). The place is nice with little over a kilometre to the different university campuses and to old town. So far we have been moving on foot, busses and trams, but today we bought me a bike and hopefully one for Anne in the coming days. Graz likes to advertise itself as a very biker friendly city, so we will see how it goes. 

Our apartment is on the top/third floor of an old building, there is no elevator so we get a nice little calf exercise every day in these old steps. There is not much in stores in the immediate vicinity, besides a corner Spar for groceries. There is a large church Herz-Jesu Kirche few blocks from us and it is the tallest building in Graz. The church looks great, but the only problem with it is its damn loud bells. For some reason they ring the bells once quarter past, twice at half and thrice quarter to and at the hour as many times as the clock is. That means its ringing quite often, but luckily its not that bad in our apartment. We can hear it if its quiet but I’m usually blasting music from something, so it gets drowned out and it doesn’t wake us or anything.  The apartment is a nice 42 squares so just about enough for the two of us. Our hosts live in the same building and they have been a good help with finding restaurants and other small things. They have two cats who roam pretty free and sometimes they pop into our apartment if our windows are too open, I ain’t too fond of cats but these two don’t seem too bad, they mainly want to scratch our couch. That should be enough for this time, later peeps.