game night

Enjoying game night at with my parents (just missing Oma in our round of 'usual suspects').

Hauskreis

Today one of the home groups we attend met at our place and we talked about prayer, specifically the prayer in Daniel chapter 9. It was so nice to talk about God's word together, share prayer requests and just hang out. We are looking forward to being part of that group over the next year.

no home group with out snacks and drinks :-)

Paperwork sucks

1.Schultag

We have a tradition in Germany that I have not seen practiced in any other country and it is called the "Schultüte". It is basically a cone-shaped bag that every first grader gets on his or her first day at school. Usually it is filled with sweets and school supplies.

Since Erlend started his Germany course today, my sister Chrissi and me made him his very own Schultüte. He loved it!
We would appreciate your prayers for him over the next months as he joined an advanced course. It will be a lot of hard work to catch up on all the grammar which was already taught in the basic course (for which Erlend is too advanced and which would only start again in January). Since studying grammar is to Erlend what going to the dentist is to most people, you can see why he needs all the prayer he can get.

 Proud Erlend in front of our landlord's very cool garage door

What was in the Schultüte

Mexican

We went to my favorite restaurant in the Hofer area today and had some awesome Mexican food. The restaurant is located very close to the boarder to the Czech republic so we went over to fuel up our car which Erlend thought was a totally blog-worthy fact and I did not see anything special in it... hello, cross-cultural marriage :-).

 we went with our favorite "we will be married in 3 weeks" couple :-)

Erlend and Fips desperately searching for the meat in the fajita while despising the vegetables :-)

it is official

Today Erlend and I moved officially to Hof. I have to say it was a lot easier than me moving to Norway and we are so thankful for how well it went today at all the official offices we had to go to.

Praise the Lord!

I was thinking what kind of picture I could post, but I guess, a picture of the number we had to draw to get in line and wait there for several hours today would not be too interesting, so I thought I would post pictures of the beautiful town we will be living in. I know it does not have a beach or mountains, but it is in general very hard to compete with the beauty of the nature of Norway. Nonetheless we think that  Hof still has its charms, we even have a lake :-).

 our coat of arms

 in German this is called the "Rathaus", even though there are usually no animals inside - 

it is just city hall

our "Untreusee" - literally translated it means Unfaithful lake

our piece of furniture

Yesterday we drove back from Austria to Hof and we stopped on the way at IKEA to get a piece of furniture. We are so thankful for the blessing of being able to move into a fully furnished apartment in Germany, but we have also learned that it helps to feel more at home if at least one piece of furniture belongs to you :-).
There was as much traffic jam in the Ikea as there was on the Autobahns outside so it took us a long time to get home. Today we had a relaxing day at church and with family.

Please pray for us tomorrow and the serious life begins, we will go and apply for jobs, language courses and try to figure out a lot of official stuff.

it will soon be filled with lots of German learning books :-)