Hello November!

Hello November!!! Gosh the time flies by when you're drinking belgian beers and eating waffles. Our deepest apologies for the delay in updates!! I will try my best to fast forward to our present date. 

THE DELIVERY:

Throughout the transition to moving to Belgium and all the trials and tribulations with moving and furnishing our apartment we came to anticipate quite the unexpected. Maybe our furniture would not fit through our window, or the neighbors might get angry about something, or worse maybe the movers would arrive and then find out that we needed additional paper work for them to send our stuff up to the third story window but to our surprise everything went remarkably smoothly! 

We woke up to Ryan's mobile ringing at o'dark thirty with a Flemish man rambling off foreign tongues.  Thankfully Ryan managed to get dressed, hold the phone to his ear and run upstairs all in one movement to track down Nathalie so she could translate our wake up call. It was the mover and he was going to be here in 10 minutes, exactly on time!!! Used to the standard three hour window of arrival leeway in the States, which far too often means arriving 2 hours and 58 minutes into the arrival bracket, we were SHOCKED and not completely ready!! Ryan ran outside while I ran around the apartment looking for our paperwork and clearing an opening in the living room for our new furniture, which didn't really take more then a second considering we were living in a practically empty space.   

We had only ordered a few key items so we thought maybe a van would be arriving. To our surprise a large semi came reversing down Geldmunt Straat and very delicately turned into our itty bitty street! And a small lift truck snuck right in front of him. I don't know how this was accomplished, but it was, sigh of relief!! I was very excited and a bit preoccupied documenting this miraculous day (the day we would no longer be sleeping on the floor) that I forgot that I was supposed to situated at our window and let the movers inside... I think they thought I was nuts. See in Europe this is a normal routine, people always bring their furniture through the windows because the darn stairwells are so small. The guy operating the very cool lift truck was making fun of me but I didn't care, I was excited and maybe I looked like a fool, but I got pictures, lots of them :)!  

Ryan and I spent the rest of the day assembling our house. We managed to receive everything we ordered in one piece and only had one minor setback. Ryan was thrilled (kidding) when we opened the box containing his desktop, he could finally work from a proper desk except it wasn't the wood color we expected, nope it was NEON green. :) So another trip to Ikea but all in all we successfully filled our apartment with the basic necessities and a few extra creature comforts like frames filled with pictures of our family and friends. It's starting to feel like home.