Alex and I recently took a week long trip to Cologne to look for an apartment. While we were in Germany we took a 4 hour road trip to Belgium, drank hot chocolate and ate pistachio macaroons and made our first real German purchase, a hair straightener (for me, of course). Finally, at the end of the week we met up with a realtor who took us to 5 different apartments around Cologne. At the end of the day we had to decide (rather quickly) which apartment we wanted. The decision was harder than we thought it would be. It seemed for some of the places, we loved the apartment but the area wasn’t great and for others, the area was awesome but the apartment was just okay. In the end, it came down to what was best for us. We picked what we thought would be our apartment for the next couple years. We found out a few days after that we didn’t get it. Apparently, the landlord decided that he only wanted to rent the apartment for 3-6 months. After much consideration, Alex and I decided that we weren’t going to choose any of the other places we looked at. For the time being, we are going to move into a temporary apartment until we find one we really love.