Hey! Today has been quite a busy day... I've spent most of the day packing for our trip home, cleaning the old apartment from top to bottom, and moving things into our new apartment... Fun, fun! We then met up with Maike and Norbert for dinner tonight... They wanted to get together before we headed back to the U.S. for the holidays. We tried a new restaurant, called the Hacienda, which is located about a block away from our apartment... The food was delicious and the atmosphere was very fun and trendy! :) Too bad we didn't find out about this place a while back... or at least before we decided to move to our new apartment! :)
Last night was quite an eventful evening... to say the least! After the gym, Brian and I headed back to the apartment. As we pulled into the garage, we were chatting away about all of the things that we needed to get done before we came back to the U.S. I stood outside of the garage and watched as Brian closed the garage door... Literally, the second the garage door shut and locked in place, Brian stared at me with a look of panic... When I asked him what was wrong, he responded with, "I just locked the keys to the apartment in the garage!" Uh oh!! We suddenly had a huge problem on our hands... My set of keys were locked inside our apartment, and Brian's set of keys were locked inside of the garage... Not a good situation to be in. Especially when you're currently living in a foreign country!
We stood there for a moment trying to assess the situation. We finally decided to see if we could get into our apartment building, find the man upstairs who speaks English, and see if he had any ideas as to how we could get into our apartment. Now the problem with that was, being that we didn't have any keys on us, we couldn't even get into the front door of the apartment building... So, we decided to start hitting the buzzers of people living in the building, to see if they would "buzz" us in. Now, this sounded great (and logical) to us at the time...At least, until we both realized that we couldn't communicate with the people if they used the intercom system to call down and ask us who we were before "buzzing" us into the building... yikes! Well, the first person we "buzzed" didn't respond, so we tried the next person. This time a woman called down to us on the intercom system. She said "Hallo!" and then spoke something in German, which we didn't understand (of course!). Brian and I stood there and stared at each other while trying to figure out what to say. What felt like minutes, but was literally only seconds, passed by without either one of us saying anything. In the meantime, this poor woman is saying "Hallo! Hallo!" over and over into the intercom. I finally decided to put my German lessons to good use, so I responded with "Ich spreche kein Duetsch. Sprechen Sie Englisch?" (I don't speak German. Do you speak English?) The woman replied with a simple "Nein, nicht Englisch". (No, not English.) Now being that we had this woman on the intercom, and realizing that she could potentially let us into the apartment complex, which would be one step closer to getting into our apartment, I responded with the only thing I could think of... I said, "We just need someone to buzz us in..." and then, the teacher in me came out in full force, and to emphasize my point, I decided to make a long "buzzing" sound into the intercom... Lovely!
Apparently, that did the trick though! The woman quickly let us into the building... yay! After getting into the building and being so excited about it, we then stopped and looked at each other and wondered, "Where do we go from here??" Luckily, the lady who had buzzed us in, was one step ahead of us. She went out and found Dieter, the man upstairs who speaks English. He quickly came downstairs and we explained our situation to him, and asked him if anyone had a master key. He, in turn, translated it to the woman who had buzzed us in. This is where we learned, again, that they don't do things here quite like they would in the U.S. In the U.S., there would be a local person in charge of the apartment complex, who had a set of master keys, which could be used in situations such as ours. However, they don't do that here. The only two keys to the apartment are the ones we have, and the only other person who could potentially help, lives in Munich... a 3 hour car drive away... Ugh!
So, after learning that, we decided to try Option #2. While Deiter stayed inside and tried to break the lock on the apartment door, we followed the woman out into the garage and she let us into her garage, which is located 2 doors down from ours. Now, the garage in between ours and the woman's was completely empty, and no one seemed to know who it belonged to. At this point in time, Norbert had arrived to try to help, and all of us began tossing ideas back and forth (some of the ideas tossed around were: cutting part of the fence between her garage and the other garage, and then trying to shove me through into the other garage, or having me crawl through the small window in the garage on the other side of ours and then trying to maneuver my way into our garage, etc... You get the idea of how desperate we were at that point! :)). After about an hour of standing outside in the cold and trying to figure out what to do, we finally found a solution ... We used a long broom handle and pushed it through the fencing of the woman's garage and into the vacant garage. Brian then pushed a small lever and popped the lock, enabling the door to be opened. We were then able to use the broom handle to push it through that fencing into our garage, and popped the lock to our garage.... Yippee!! So, after about an hour and a half of total panic, we were finally able to retrieve the apartment keys from the garage! :) Phew!!
After we retrieved the keys, we came back to the apartment, and found Deiter still diligently working on picking the lock to our apartment door... He tried so hard to get us in there... It was very sweet! And, the woman upstairs, was a great sport! I honestly think that she really enjoyed being part of all the chaos... She was very eager to help! And, even though we didn't speak the same language, we all managed to work together as a group to get the job done. We definitely are very thankful to have such great neighbors!!
After all of the craziness of the past few weeks, Brian and I are certainly looking forward to coming home to the U.S., and back to a little bit of normalcy! :) We look forward to seeing you soon! Miss you much!
The guilty culprits... :)
This is how we finally retrieved our keys. We popped the lock on the middle garage, and then pushed the broom through the fence to pop the lock in our garage...
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