Update

It's been a bit since my last post because not a whole lot has been going on. I went with some friends the other day to the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart. I was really impressed with it. The Porsche museum was neat, but the Mercedes museum was massive. I really liked the way it was laid out. When you start the tour you take an elevator all the way to the top, then start to walk down. As you enter each level of the museum the audio guide would automatically tell you a synopsis of the cars in the section, then you could push the guide button in front of any specific exhibit to get info about it. Each level was considered an "era". As you walked down between eras there were pictures and captions telling you about what was going on in the world at that particular time so you had perspective of what was happening while the cars you were about to see were on the road.

One thing that really impressed me was there open discussion of WWI and WWII in the 1914-1945 era level. The Porsche and BMW museum completely skipped over 1914-1918 and 1933-1945, but not Mercedes. They openly discussed it and even went so far as to talk about the forced laborers who made up over %50 of the German workforce from 1939-1945. They had a book with a list of names of all the forced laborers they used during the war, as well as a statement about how they apologized and made reparations to them after the war.

Aside from that, Shanna and I have been taking German language classes two nights a week for the past few weeks. We both really like our teacher...she's funny, nice, and most important, patient. An interesting note I learned last night is she is also the only female firefighter in the town she lives in. I'm definitely looking forward to the day I don't have to ask the locals if they speak English. I've improved 100 fold since we got here, but still have a ways to go.

Today we spent the day cleaning the house and getting ready for a friend to come visit this weekend. She lives up in Heidelberg, but this is the first weekend our schedules have lined up. We're both looking forward to seeing her again.

Not too much else to report. Deutsch Telekom is coming out tomorrow, so fingers are crossed that after 2 1/2 months of living in the house we'll FINALLY have home phone and Internet.

That's all for now...hope everyone is doing well back home. We miss you all.

Finally, I'll leave you with a picture I just took on our back deck of the sunset over Stuttgart.




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Location:Mühlrain, Stuttgart, Germany