days 52-76: ulm

So it's been a while since the last post...but a lot has been going on and I hope I can remember it all. At least this post is a little more interesting than last time.
Week 1 of July:
It was the Lasagna Cookoff 2008! Lasagna Cookoff 2007 was really good. Team Slackers vs. Team Make-Lasagna-From-Scratch. I think the Slackers team won. I think the Slacker team won again in '08, even with using the premade spices intended for another dish. That was on Tuesday...Friday was the 4th of July. I celebrated with Flo and the German band, Tomte in the park. They were playing at Ulmer Zelt...even though all the talking was in German it was still pretty good.
Then the next day Flo, Stefan and I went to their hometown in Edertal. The first night I bbq'd with Flo's fam, roasting bratwursts and making s'mores. It was kind of hard with the s'mores because it's almost impossible to get all the ingredients. I got "American style" marshmallows, chocolate and the closest thing to graham crackers I could find, but it wasn't the quite right. Next time I think I'll bring some Hershey's chocolate and real graham crackers from home. Monday we went to Kassel with some friends of Flo from back in the day. We walked up this trail in search of the fake castle, but ended up walking up a closed trail for a really long time then the castle was closed. But that didn't matter, it was still a cool looking castle, even though it was built in the 1800's. Good times.









(the cow is to show it was in the country)

Week 2:
Normal work week...That Friday I experienced my first festival-like event. I don't think I'm quite cut out for the whole festival thing. I like the music most of the time, but it was so cold and wet. The next day was really fun! I promised Laura if she came to Germany I would buy her a beer, so on the 12th I met her in the main town square in Munich and bought her a beer at the Hofbrauhaus. There was a Gay Pride rally in the square. Lots of drag queens and people in slave costumes...We walked around Munich most of the afternoon and she had to meet her group at some beerhall in the Munich suburbs. So after the Hofbrauhaus experience I tried to get directions to the other beerhall and could only find directions to another business on the same street. We took the s-bahn out of the city and got off at the stop and it looked like we were in the middle of a residential neighborhood and a factory...then we started walking through the neighborhood toward the biggest building we could find and somehow found the sign on a random road. that was really lucky

Week 3:

Now! It's been a pretty crazy week. Friday (18th) we went out to eat at Jonas' Asian place, Saturday we met Basti and Sarah for dinner then went to the Light Ceremony, the beginning of the Schwörwochenendes. We went to the Donau to watch thousands of candles float down the river at night.

The picture doesn't really show how pretty it was. Sunday was a pretty chilled out day. Then Monday was Nabada, (or NObada) because of the high water and random trees floating down the river it was cancelled :( So Saturday is Nabada 2, and we'll see if that happens.
Wednesday was awesome! We had our Team Event in Immenstadt. There was a high ropes course for 3 hours, then dinner, then an alpine slide down the mountain. I can't decide what was the best part...either the ropes course or slide...Right this minute I would say the slide because every muscle in my body aches right now because of the ropes. It was kind of hard at first because 1) the instructions were in German and when you're swinging around the trees it seems kind of important to know what exactly that guy was saying and 2) it was really really high.

1. floating candles down the Donau
2. the high ropes course
3. my coworkers, Sven, Michi, me

days 21-30: ulm

I keep starting to update, but something else is always going on, so I stop in the middle. Seriously, I started this post on Wednesday and now it's Friday. But last time I stopped blogging it was to finish the last 2 episodes of Heroes, and that was definitely worth it. So it's week 4 in Germany... Here's an update from the past week: Stefan got his Thinkpad finally on Tuesday. Here's a picture commemorating the event.
Last Thursday was a uni party with cheap drinks and it was all good until it started to rain and there was no way I could return my cup and get the 2 euro refund, so now Flo and Stefan have a new glass for the kitchen. The next morning, we started the 4 hour drive to Edertal. On the way there, we stopped by McDonalds. German McDonalds crack me up just because the promotion for Tex-Mex is called "Los Wochos". We arrived in the village of Bringhausen around 3, met the fam, dropped off our stuff and headed back out to the dentist and meet Stefan for coffee because we haven't seen him in a few hours. Saturday was a packed day. First, we drove up to the man-made lake at the top of a hill that overlooked the villages. It looked like it was going to rain, so we decided to skip the dam for now and go visit the castle. The Schloss Waldeck was not only a castle, but also a crime and punishment museum! All for the kinder/student price! After the tour, we got coffee at the castle. Actually, Flo got coffee and I got hot chocolate. [this is new] Flo just reminded me about the weird German hot chocolates here. They always ask you if you want cream or milk in the chocolate. I always say "milch, bitte" but they bring me a bowl of cream beside the hot chocolate anyway. I have no idea what's going wrong because even native German speakers are befuddled also...i'm giggling about writing the word "befuddled"...anyway, the hot chocolate at Schloss Waldeck was probably the best hot chocolate I've had in a really long time. If you see in the picture, they make a little pot of hot chocolate and bring you your own cup, so instead of the standard one cup of chocolate, you get about one and a half. And who doesn't like 1.5 cups of hot chocolate?
After coffee/hot chocolate, Flo started talking about sledding in the summer and I was just confused, so we took a spontaneous 5km drive to the sledding place. It wasn't until I was being pulled up the hill I got what was going on. And there were all these signs in German that looked important...like warning signs or how to operate the sled written in big red German words but it was all good and I didn't die. Sledding in summer was one of my favorite things we did that day. You were pulled up this hill on an automated thing and once you were at the top you could pull the lever forward to go faster or pull it back to slow down and it was kind of like sledding down a slide on a sled with wheels. It reminded me kind of bobsledding. By the time we finished that adventure, we went to the dam that was bombed by the British in World War II and had a waffle lunch at a restaurant there. The waffles came with ice cream and heaps of cherries. I couldn't eat all the cherries. By then, it was in the middle of the afternoon, so we went back to the house and hung out until we went out to dinner at the restaurant where Flo's brother works as a chef. I have no idea how I finished my plate, but there was so much fish, bruchetta and salad. After dinner, we went to Dorfest 2007! There, I met some German readers of this blog, so shout out to them! There, you can buy 10 beers on a handy carrier and you get the 11th for free. I think this was as close as I'll get to a German beerfest, but I kind of get the point. Even better, there was a guy dressed in lederhosen drinking beer from one of those 11-beer carriers. Sunday, we had a huge brunch late morning and I ate 2 croissants just so I could eat more homemade strawberry jam. Then we drove through the woods to attend Flo's 3-year-old nephew's birthday party. I still can't speak German, but I think I improved a bit last weekend. This week was pretty good...we went to Ikea yesterday, and it's always a good time at Ikea. The unlimited drinks is what makes half the fun. Then we spent a while at an electronic store, but we didn't find a radio, so we walked home and bought some wine and polished them off last night. Good times in Germany.