My new apartment. The Pauluskirche, aka the church down the road.
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Guten Tag from Osnäbruck!
With a new year overseas, the blog is back for your reading pleasure ..or distaste.. But I assume if you make it to the bottom of this page or if you are one of my 30 loyal readers (thanks!!) then you have good taste in reading material! ;)
This first post comes after a lonnnnggg day and night of traveling yesterday. I left San Diego at 11:30am after my first flight, meant to leave 8am, was delayed due to mechanical issues. I guess that does happen in other places than Kodiak, Alaska, where I swear every other flight is delayed. That meant my 4:15am wake-up was almost for nothing and the next hour would be spent rebooking as I could no longer make my connecting flight from Atlanta to Düsseldorf. No harm done, other than I had to listen to an angry vegan harass the staff at Qdoba for "her burrito touching that piece of cheese on the counter... Now you have to throw it out and make a new one!!" I guess cheese molecule transfer to tortilla officially makes the tortilla a milk product.
My flight from Detroit landed in time for me to power-walk to my next flight, which left for Amsterdam 40 minutes later. The 8 hour flight was rather miserable. I was smashed between a college student from Uganda studying in Nepal (interesting) and a Dutch lady who was a bit bigger than the seat and incidentally took up a bit of my space. It wasn't all too bad until the kid from Uganda fell asleep on my shoulder after having a serious talk about the conditions in his country. I felt like not waking him would be some sort of tiny U.S. reimbursement for not helping more with the terrible 94' genocide in that region of Africa.
Well, now I can officially say I've been to Amsterdam, although I didn't find the airport too exciting other than it smelled like Europe again...and yes, apparently Europe has a particular smell to it because a whirlwind of memories from last year came flashing back as I stepped out of the flight-bridge-connector-thingamajig.
Fast forward to Düsseldorf and my bag is no where to be found. Apparently it was still on it's way from Atlanta, Georgia. (Not surprised, it didn't call the airport customer service like I did). Nonetheless, my coach and the team manager picked me up and we made the 1.5 hour drive to Osnäbruck. During that ride, I felt like that kid in class who didn't get enough sleep and was stuck in a boring lecture because I could not keep me eyes open for the life of me and felt pretty rude when I woke up and realized we were at our final destination.
The backside of the Pauluskirche, you can see it's crack and everything. (haha)
After a really weird night of sleep, I woke up to Sunday church bells ringing like they were right outside my window. It wasn't until later on that I realized the ringing originated from the Pauluskirche, a church only 300m down the road. Not a bad alarm clock though if I do say so myself. A few of my teammates took me to brunch later on, and after eating 2 months of non-fat Wellspring food, it was like heaven (no offense Wellspring, hehe). After the big breakfast, I was happy to go exploring around my neighborhood and found the coolest little gardens.
Apparently people over here rent out spaces and grow all sorts of things from flowers to fruit. I even saw some kids playing, so make that flowers, fruit, and kids. I instantly thought that had my mom been there, she would of have wanted to move into one of the little garden sheds and see how green her thumb is.
On the way back home I stopped by the cigarette vending machine and got some smokes. NOT! But this particular vending machine was on a random street in the suburbs, what the heck?! Europeans and their smoking, I mean really guys, it's not the 1960's anymore!
Stay tuned :)
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