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Well it has been a while since I last updated this blog – and I guess a lot has happened.

Firstly we sucessfully moved to Germany and we have moved in to a great flat in a quiet part of a small town about 5 Kilometers from Nicole’s family. It took a while for us to settle in as we have been doing quite a lot of travelling for work and social reasons.

In May we found out that Nicole was pregnant which was great news – but has obviously changed our out-llok on life and encouraged us to think about settling down in one place for a while. The baby is due on the 31st of December which should bring 2009 to a fantastic close.

At the start of July I asked Nicole to marry me and she luckily has said yes.

I think that brings everything up to date.

One of my reasons for coming and living in Germany was that I would like my German to improve rapidly. My goal is that I can sit down for dinner with all of Nicole’s family and follow the conversation without needing any help from Nicole. I am still a long way from this and get very frustrated with my pace of learning – especially as I am also very busy with work which cuts the amount of time I have for studying.

Anyway that covers everything new – hope to find more time to write about living in Germany soon.

So last month we made another one of those decisions. After living in Valencia since last May we have decided we are going to have to move to Germany from April this year.

The reasons are not simple to outline but they roughly break down as:

• Nicole is travelling a lot with her job and currently a 2 hour meeting in Frankfurt takes 3 days with irregular and badly connecting flights
• When I have to meet in the UK I lose a lot time on travelling to the UK – it is not cheap either since Ryanair left the airport here after an argument with the city government.
• We have been here 8 months yet still know very few people
• There is more to life than fantastic weather and a wonderful city

We have yet to find a flat in Germany but we don’t expect things to be quite as complex there – we will move to a town which is about 5km from where Nicole grew up.

Thats the news for now  - sorry it has been a while – but maybe you want to follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/grouchal

Sport is an obsession for Nicole (watching it at least) and she really enjoys both the winter and summer Olympics every two years.

Part of it is to support the German team, but mostly it is about the stories behind the people and understanding what this all means to them.

For the last winter Olympics that we were in the UK for – Nicole watched the German coverage on our TV but also had a laptop showing her the BBC interactive coverage so that she could see every event going on – and follow any news and updates in English and German from various websites.

This year is not so good though – although the first two channels in Spain have coverage all day of the Olympics – they are very focused on Spain – and keep reshowing their great moments – forgoing live action for endless repeats of cycling and other things they are good at. The have a web streaming service but mostly this just rebroadcasts what is on the TV – which is not really the point.

As we are in Spain the BBC and German internet streams are not available to us – so Nicole is coping with text based updates and the odd illegal feed over the internet.

However Gary has just said that he can do some technical jiggery-pokery and help Nicole watch the BBC coverage from here across the internet. Hooray for Gary – what a great and fine (if a little short) man he is.

It is Nicole’s birthday in a couple of days and this is the best present she could get at the moment!

Thanks to Gary!

We have just spent the last hour waiting around for someone to make a nice signed photocopy of our passports. In 3 months this has been our first run in with bureaucracy in Spain and ironically it happened today after we signed up with our Gestor, who is the person who is supposed to sort all of this out for us.

A Gestor is a sort of cross between an accountant, solicitor and administrative assistant. They sort out all of the messy stuff for you and tell you where to sign and if you should sign. On top of that they provide advice on tax and accounting and complete you tax returns.

As you might imagine to get someone to do this for you requires a degree of trust and we chose ours based on a recommendation. Unfortunately the person who recommended our Gestor lives outside of Valencia and so it took about one and half hours to get there.

It is with relief though that we travel back to Valencia knowing that tax, health insurance, our status here and that of The Big Green Monster are all in hand. On top of that our Gestor was a nice and funny lady who gave us great advice on many things.

We are just returning from the airport after saying goodbye to Nicole’s sisters, brother-in-laws and nephew. They have been with us for a week and it is the first time that we have had people stay for so long and also using both spare room and living room as bedrooms.

In all it has worked well-even when Nicole’s nephew Luca has taken-over the livingroom whilst sleeping the large terrace has made this not a problem. I have been able to work during the day fairly normally and they have even taken care of most of the cooking so it has in some ways been better than normal.

It took a bit of work to persuade them to hire bikes as it cost €40 each for the week and they were not sure they would use them. In the end it turned out that we went out on the bikes everyday and most of the days more than once. I had hoped that the bikes would also help them feel independent-and that seemed to be the case.

All in all a good week but it has made us grateful we have such a large flat(and terrace). It has also made us realise a few things we would change when looking for a new flat.

Yesterday I went with Nicole’s two brother-in-laws to see the last day of the July 2008 bull fighting in Valencia.

I really do not know what to think about the fighting – I went because I wanted to decide for myself what to think not just think what others think.

I found myself changing my mind several times over the time we were there and there are several things that I did not like immediately. Firsty I expected it to be a single man (the matador) against the bull but it was a man on a horse and several matadors that were in the ring against a single bull. On top of this the man on the horse changed his horse every 8 minutes or so once the horse was tired. All of this for me made it not fair match for the bull and enhanced the enivtabilty of the bull’s death.

Maybe I went with the wrong expectations, but I thought the bull would at least have chance to live. I thought that if the bull was good enough and put up a good fight then it would live, but this was highly innocent. For one thing if the bull won then the matador would lose and this is not something they would easily cope with-it is all about machismo.

I also did not understand how much it was entertainment and show. To kill the bull they must put a very nicely decoraated skewer into the bull where the spine is. Instead of doing this once with one skewer they do it many times ending with a final skewer that is very long and then kills the bull. Once this long skewer goes in three matadors run out and surround the bull knowing it is no longer a danger. If it is that easy – then why not use the big skewer at the start? ANSWER: Entertainment.

The entertainment part was the cruelest part for me which is strange aas it has nothing to do with the well-being of the bull just the morals of other people which does not help the bull at all. This really got me thinking about the fight from purely an animal welfare perspective. It is not easy to do this – you can black & white about it and say it is cruel to kill the bull – but what does this have to do with animal welfare when you are a meat eater and already responsible for aniimal deaths that you do not see each day.

The next question for me was is this a bad way for the bull to die? I found his hard to answer-clearly there are better ways, but for a bull the chase and fight with multiple wounds seems very natural – the dignity of it for them means nothing. So I still can not answer this question.

I left the stadium feeling like I wished I had not paid to see six bulls die in the same innevitable way. I did not enjoy it particularly but I think it is something that people should see to make up their minds and better understand the experience.

As previously mentioned we had great weather on the day we left.

I had packed most of the van the day before, but we were up at 7 to finish the packing and then at 8 Nicole’s dad and two Brothers-in-law helped load up the heavy stuff onto the roofrack.

We had a final breakfast with Nicole’s parents and Nicole’s sister Kerstin and her husband Timo stated saying our goodbyes and then I started having problems with the vision in my left eye. The vision problem always happens when I am going to get a migraine. So I took a pill and said my goodbyes not properly being able to see, and not feeling great expecting the headache to begin. Normally when I get a migraine I goand sleep for a couple of hours – mostly to avoid the numbness that I get in my right hand.

We then popped around to see Nicole’s other sister Silke and Nicole’s nephew Luca to say goodbye. Luca (18 months old) has been a great little friend for me while I have been there. He got attached to my name because it was so easy to say – Al, and I got attached to him because neither of us really understood most of the conversations and everyone talked to us in simple words. I spent a lot of time chasing him around and playing with him.

Once we had done our goodbyes we went to do the next most important thing – buy some bread to take with us (the Spanish bread is not as good!). Finally after all of this we got going at about 10:30.

It was about 20 minutes before we crossed the border to Luxembourg and followed the Mosel into France another 20 minutes later. Just as we crossed into France there was a call on Nicole’s mobile (Handy as they say in German) I saw it was Nicole’s dad so handed the phone to her smiling and saying “What have we forgotten?”.

The phonecall was Nicole’s mum (Hanne) saying that we had a letter from the car insurance company saying that we were no longer insured with them. Hanne had phoned the company up and found out that because we had still not proven that we had a large no claims bonus in the UK they were terminating the insurance. This was particularly frustrating as we had spoken to them the week before about this and they said all we needed to do was change the insurance from Nicole’s name to mine and all would be fine. At this point my migraine started feeling even worse.

So there we were just inside France and completely illegally driving – what to do next? Well it seemed there were a few options – either we got some insurance and carried on driving, turned around and went back or we drove on illegally. Nicole was convinced we would not get insurance sorted over the phone (as I would expect in the UK) and I was not happy about going back (“Never go back”) but we are also not the type of people to have taken the risk on driving illegally – so what to do?

After much discussion we decided to try and sort out the insurance over the phone and after 2 hours we were insured again – phew! (if you look carefully at the picture above you will see Nicole on the phone in the front of the van gong through the long winded negotiations). The reason it took so long was that the situation was not simple with us already being in France – me being British and us needing the insurance that day. It became more complex when Nicole’s German phone ran out of pay-as-you-go credit. Then her UK phone refused to phone a German number until we drove back into Luxembourg and were in range of German mobile phone signals again.

The rest of the day went quite smoothly – we drove through France with ease, occasionally stopping but mostly just trucking along. The migraine got better for me – but Nicole started to get some stomach problems.

We got within about 200km from the south coast of France by 10pm and decided to look for a campsite. This proved to be quite easy and we got to see some nice bits of France off the motorways.

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Day 2 of our journey went much more smoothly, the motorway went along the south coast of France and then into Spain and along the cost in Spain. The motorway had (selfishly) been built often as far away as 15km from the actual sea – so we only got glimpses of the sea – but it was still a very pleasant drive.

We got to the flat at 4:30pm and then had to wait an hour or so until the Landlord turned up to let us in – but that was it – the start of a new adventure. By 7pm the Landlord had left and we were in our new home.