Our new home is on the west side of Graz in the Schloss Eggenberg neighborhood. It is an apartment that is really an AirBnB owned by the Minutillo family. They are renting it to us for 6 months. It is attached to their own home, which is a 250 yr. old manor house. Johannes and Gundi with their five children live on the top floor of the home and his parents live on the bottom floor. We are all under one roof, but have our own private entrance doors and space. The large 1.5 acre garden is shared.

As we placed our luggage in the house and had a look around with Anita and Birgit our host Johannes came to the door. He was on his way to take his eldest daughter, Rita, to school. She is 7 yrs. old. Johannes was just as friendly in person as he had been via all of our emails the past 10 months. It was nice to finally meet face to face!

The apartment was a bit bigger than we were expecting. It’s always hard to get a sense of scale in photos, but we expected the rooms to be smaller than they actually were. You walk in the front door and immediately to your right is a Harry Potter sized toilet only. To the right is the coat rack and then you walk up 5 steps into the main living space. At the top of the steps is a little nook with built in drawers and then the main staircase up to the second floor. Directly in front is the kitchen, dinning, and a couple of chairs that are the “living room”. It’s basically one big room for everyday living. To the left are double doors that lead into the first large bedroom that has a desk and chair, couch, a plush chair, what we would call a king sized bed, and double wardrobes.

Back through the kitchen you go up 21 steps, which round the corner to the top floor. A little hallway at the top contains three doors. To the left is the bathroom with a tub/shower, another separate shower, sink, storage, and a little washing machine. On the right is a room that mirrors the one downstairs in size, however it has wall-to-wall deep closets with several shelves and two clothes hanging rods. The boys share another king size bed, an oversized chair, and a desk and chair. At the end of the little hallway is Faywen’s little room. It has a smaller double sized bed and nightstand, and three walls of windows. She will be keeping her clothes in the boy’s room, since there is no storage in her room besides a clothes peg stand. However her room faces the south and all the sunlight and fresh breezes come in through the large floor to ceiling windows, so I’ve been using her room to dry our clothes on the drying rack provided for me. There is also another little rack built into the wall over the tub that gets a nice breeze from the window. Gundi also has a clothesline in the garden that I’m welcome to use for sheets etc.

We said our goodbyes to Anita and Birgit and began settling into the apartment. Johannes returned about 30 minutes later and showed us various things about the apartment. He also

answered our questions. While giving us the tour Johannes’ mother and father came over to say hi. They live in the first floor of the main house. Elizabeth and Christoph Minutillo were very kind and she gave me a bunch of beautiful yellow and red tulips as a welcoming gift! We met Johannes’ wife, Gundi, later that afternoon and their 4 daughters and son…Rita, Flora, Fanni, Cilli, and Camillo, who is only 2 months old! The rest of our first day in Graz was spent taking a nap and then walking down to the two local grocery stores to purchase food. Anita and Birgit had already purchased some food and had it in the apartment, but we needed a few extra things and it gave us an opportunity to check out our new neighborhood! I will say it’s a lovely view of Graz on the hillside where our apartment is located, but the last 100 meters or so up the steep little road knocks the breathe out of you while carrying grocerie