A Whirlwind Weekend

This has certainly been a whirlwind weekend! Friday it rained most all day so I was quite a bit restless as I did not really care to go wandering around in the rain. Two pieces of good news though. Thursday I finally opened a bank account, bad news on that, the exchange rate seems to have increased a couple days before so I don't actually have any money in this bank account because it is silly to lose so much money if the exchange rate goes down this week. Friday we got the keys to the apartment! It was great. The apartment is so much better than I had remembered it being and I like it quite a lot. Its big with lots of windows. The sun never shines directly into any of the windows yet it seems bathed in sunlight.

So Saturday, with the assumption we were dropping the rental car off Sunday and would not have access to a vehicle again, we checked out prices at the 3 stores within 20 or so kilometer of our town. They were rather quick stops as we did not get moving to the stores until about 10:30 or so. A lot of the stores whether it be a major store or not, close Noon til 2 everyday! Apparently the French like to have nice leisurely lunches and since you should be enjoying your leisurely lunch like everyone else, then obviously you would never dream of shopping between those hours. We had our nice leisurely lunch at Buffalo Grill. This restaurant is more Texan than some Texan restaurants. We had a cowboy and an Indian greet us hello as we walked in and had an appetizer of buffalo wings, cheese sticks, chicken skewers and onion rings. Oh and they also gave us popcorn with our appetizer! It was great. If we hadn't known better, from the clientele, we would have also thought they were possibly Texans. They seemed to gobble it all down and make quite a mess while doing so. This restaurant was completely unlike any restaurant I have seen in France or Turkey. It is finally almost time to start our shopping again so we went on to the Leclerc to buy up the "big" items. We loaded up on all the essentials, fun: ( Blah, I hate we have to waste all our money on cleaning supplies, drying racks, vacuums! They add up so quickly. We could take a nice little vacation for what essential items cost. We spent the day heading back and forth between stores and finally ending up back at the Leclerc at the end of the day since it stayed open the latest. I did manage to also buy some flower pots. Yay for me! I will plant some flowers for our balcony. Cross your fingers they will not die on me.

We changed our mind Sunday about the car as we have no furniture in our apartment and we will have to make a trip up to Ikea towards the end of the week to pick up items GE does not provide (hoping they will actually provide these items before the end of the week though!) There is a holiday Thursday so everyone has off Thursday and Friday so we need furniture by Wednesday. During holidays nothing is open so it is almost silly to have dropped the car yesterday so we could turn around and pick it back up on Wednesday evening. So imagine this, bright and early on a beautiful Sunday morning. It looks like such a great day, the weather is perfect, the sun is shining and we get to spend the entire day cleaning! We arrived at the apartment around 9:30 and cleaned until about 8 stopping for a total of about an hour to eat. That apartment will be spotless and I plan on being in pain from cleaning it for about two weeks so send heating pads! I have pictures so I will post soon. The apartment is so nice. We have a nice large living/dining room, two bedrooms, one of which is going to be a huge closet (hmm not so huge, both bedrooms are actually smaller than my parents walk-in closet) and our kitchen is surprisingly large. Too bad we don't have a fridge, an oven, any countertops or cabinets... I am wondering how do you rent countertops... I don't believe you can just go to a store and say "I would like to rent countertops, what can you give me" and since you cannot do that, what does one do? Maybe we can find a huge chopping board at a good price and put it over part of our kitchen sink. We do have a kitchen sink so I guess thats something: )

This was my weekend, endless trips back and forth and a workout harder than anything I have ever done! I am off now to try to finish up the bathrooms! (Eww me and bathrooms do not mix. I really think Soner should have cleaned those so I would not have to visually imagine the things I cleaned over and over and over again like a movie in my head!) Enjoy your day!