Company provided housing rocks!

As I mentioned, Novartis put Johanna and I up in Marburg and we are living in style.  Here are pictures from my apartment.  Given that I am trying to channel my inner-Stephanie (my older sister who is so good about taking pictures when she is on trips) and I have a ton of pictures, I have decided to start hardcore using Picasa's collage feature.

• Top left: My street name


• Top middle: Immediately after turning onto my street, you encounter a section of road that is way to small for two cars.  Zis is no problem as sidewalks function as roads in Germany (and most of Europe from what I have seen)


• Top right: my street


• Bottom left: My building is the further white one on the left


• Bottom middle: My building


• Bottom right: My front door

• Center Picture: My kitchen


• Top left: My limited supply of warm food (bread, rice, pasta, cookies, and Flinstones gummies vitamins)


• Bottom left: My limited supply of cold food (sandwich meat and cheese, coke, ketchup, mustard, and I have since added brats)


• Top right (2 pictures): My washing machine and my dryer (a rack)


• Bottom right: My ironing board (kitchen counter top)

• Top left: Most of the windows in the apartment have these gas heater...I can't tell if they work (it was cold enough to need heat during my first week) because they never feel hot even if I turn the knob to a higher number.  Maybe the have sensors and it never got THAT cold.  We'll find out when winter comes


• Top middle: My desk in my bedroom


• Top right: Closets in the bedroom


• Middle left: My small bathroom


• Middle right: Living room that I am never in with a TV that gets CNN and BBC in English and everything else in German


• Bottom left: Picture of my bathroom door looking through the front door (my room is upstairs so I have to go downstairs to pee, bleh)


• Bottom middle: Stairs to my place


• Bottom right: My bed with retro sheets (when I was sick with the flu I think I saw faces in the sheets but it turns out they are just crazy shapes...so I guess that means I was hallucinating a little bit...maybe it was the Nyquil...thankfully I brought cold medicine and headache medicine with me in my bags).

And of course, ze one embarrassing thing about moving here...

My name is Drew Hill, I attend MIT in a dual degree masters program, and I'm an idiot.



Do you see the little straps to the right side of the window (the picture above is two pictures of the same window)?  Apparently, if you adjust that strap the large wooden slats outside of the window drop down and block out the light  (see how dark the right picture is).  This is essential because it gets dark around 11PM and gets light at 4:30 AM.

[caption id="attachment_1236" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="apparently, Europe is much farther north than the US...who knew? In my mind, they were always a similar distance from the equator because the temperature ranges are similar...but that is obviously not the case"][/caption]

When my landlords came by my apartment after the first week they asked me not to drag the decorative curtains to the middle of the window (to block the light in my face) and instead use the wooden slats.  Boy oh boy did I feel dumb.  Two things in my defense though: 1) Johanna has slats at her place and did not know what they were for either and 2) in Florida I have seen similar straps on hurrican shutters (heavy metal shutter) so mentally I just discounted the straps. I'm still an idiot though.