Rants & Raves: Volume One!

I mentioned in my post about expectations for our blog that I would include rants and raves about all the things we love and miss while here. Here is the first installment of what I love and hate!

Rave: Walking

When I was growing up OTP* in metro Atlanta,  I remember my dad having to drive an hour or more back and forth to work. I definitely was not the only kid with parents who had long commutes, the average drive to work in the Atlanta area is 45-60 minutes! I hate driving, I'm miserably bad at it and I all around cannot imagine driving more than 30 minutes to and from work everyday. When I got my first "grown-up" job in Colorado only 5 miles from my house, I was so thrilled that it would take me less than 15 minutes most days to drive to work. Now that I live about a mile from my job here in Germany, I prefer to take a 20 minute walk back and forth rather than the three minute drive. Seriously, how cool is it that I can easily walk to and from work in under 30 minutes?
Actually, we can walk just about anywhere we need to in around 30 minutes. The downtown of our city is maybe 2 or so miles from our apartment, so it's definitely great to be able to walk back and forth. Although, I must say that waking is much less enjoyable at 1 AM going entirely uphill back from the bar. I mean, not like we ever do that, of course.

I'm sure I'll hate myself for walking to work the first day I get caught in a thunderstorm.

Rant: Housing

I know I've whined about this before, but I seriously hate living in on-post housing. It's a special kind of torture. I can no longer imagine a time when I could sit on my couch and not have my ears polluted with the sounds of dogs barking, children crying, construction happening and someone talking entirely too loud outside. Our windows have to stay open for a good part of the day in order to avoid our apartment turning into a giant sauna from the deepest corner of hell. The breeze blowing through is great but the sound of every single member of the armed forces in our community being as loud as humanly possible outside is much less nice. When you walk out from our apartment into the stairwell, you're immediately greeted by the sounds of everything your neighbors are doing. The guy across the hall is taking a shower? Yep, you can hear the water running for a 1 mile radius. The kid one building over is angry mom wouldn't let him eat mac and cheese for the 5th day in a row? The whole conversation is loud and clear. Downstairs neighbors watching The Pacific? Don't worry, you can sit outside and catch the entire episode. The other morning, I was sitting in my office at work and actually stopped to take a moment to appreciate the beautiful sound of silence before seeing any patients. It was magnificent. I seriously told Greg just yesterday that I'm pretty sure I'm slowly becoming deaf by living here because my eardrums are so bombarded 24/7.

*I would like to thank my wonderful Atl-living friends for introducing me to the terms OTP and ITP. Now I can pretend that I know something about living in the city, even if I grew up so OTP that it was practically in Athens.