Advances in Communication and other things....

20 years ago my husbands sister moved to Germany with her husband. At that time our only means of communication with them was via letters written on paper and mailed back to the USA or very short expensive phone calls! We also recorded their favorite TV shows and shipped VCR tapes to them every few weeks!

20 years later we moved to Germany and we have multiple methods of communication back to the states. We have phone service that includes unlimited free calls back to the states. We have something know as a Magic Jack that for $19 a year we have VOIP calls back to the states and it is a 405 number so family back in the states can call us like it was a local number. We have IChat, Google Chat, Facebook Chat and Skype chat, but more importantly we can video conference with all of these applications except facebook. WIth face book we stay connected with friends and family and share pictures and experiences just like we were back home!

Plus we have internet with email programs that allow for instant email back to family. I can post a picture and within seconds family and friends back home have access. I can video tour my house live! We watched it snow with our friends from Oklahoma City last weekend after I showed them our new home.

And with our GPS we can drive right to a planned destinations. The GPS even checks the traffic and routes us around know heavy traffic patterns. This amazing gadget shows us the priority roads (very important because these are the ones that get snow plowed!).

We also have a gadget that allows us to watch live OKC TV and record our favorite shows for replay on our time zone. The Slingbox is a great!

My oh my how things have changed in 20 years!! These reasons are part of what allowed us to make this very exciting journey while staying relatively close with our family back in Oklahoma!