We move from Bad Vilbel to Nieder Erlenbach

Greetings from our new location!

Friday 15 Jan 2009 was moving day in Germany - at least for us. We moved from a third-floor apartment in Bad Vilbel to a third-floor apartment in Nieder-Erlenbach. We were exhausted to the third-degree by three o:clock in the afternoon.

It was a gray day as we got our first chance to look out of the windows of our new apartment.

The move took us out of the historical center of Bad Vilbel where there was much to be seen that dated back to the times of the Roman occupation of this part of Germany into a relatively new community with so-far no discovered history.

We are in an area surrounded by industrial warehouse-type buildings in a fairly new apartment building. Our apartment is considerably larger than the one we had in Bad Vilbel, with at least three times the space in the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom areas. As missionaries, we didn't need the additional space to get along, but now we can invite some friends in and have space to be sociable. We have already taken advantage of the additional space by hosting a dinner for the three missionary couples that work in our office

The move was not our choice - we enjoyed the historic environment in Bad Vilbel, but the Church/Mission wanted to give up that apartment, and this one was empty.


The picture below shows our apartment building from the other side. The kitchen light is on so you can pick out our apartment.





We now have a garage. No more scraping of windows as we get ready for work.


We don't have telephone or Internet here yet. The man responsible for our housing forgot to arrange for that. We had those plus TV at the other place, but we never turned the TV on and only used the phone a few times.

We did have a church cell phone that got about as much use as our other phones. We used it to report our move status to our office, and our supervisor asked us to come into the office immediately before everyone else left. When we got there he provided us a "T-Mobile" plug-in for our computer that provides a satellite link to the Internet. We haven't been able to get much to work on it, but at least we can get into our email. None of the Church sites work with this satellite Internet connection, and though our Blog will come up we get a message that Internet Explorer has shut down whenever we try to add anything.

This is from the other side of the road that goes from Bad Vilbel to where we work. It will take about ten to fifteen minutes less to get to work now.

There is a big REWE grocery chain warehouse and store on the right. Our apartment building is visible just to the left of the REWE building.

With this temporary Internet connection our computer acts like it doesn’t like to do anything that involves international connections. None of the updaters will work. Skype won’t load. Norton Antivirus won’t work. I tried to load Mozilla Firefox as an alternate browser, because the message on the screen was that Internet Explorer had quit working, but after Firefox finished loading it tried to connect to the Mozilla site to finish the configuration and froze up. Every time I start it up it comes back to the same point. I’ve about decided we’ll have to work with a crippled machine until we get a better Internet connection. Since some of these things were going on in Bad Vilbel, it is possible we won't get it right until we go home.


This is now our view of the Frankfurt skyline over the roof of the REWE building. We had to wait for a change in the weather to get this one.

We are doing our home evening at the office tonight so we can have a connection that works. It's been a long time since we could post anything, so we hope you enjoy it.