Freude im Ausland

Last Saturday was absolutely awesome!  Spontaneity seems to be the rule over here.  We left the house at around 9:30 because we wanted to go find some place to eat breakfast.  Which we did.  We found this GREAT bakery north of Duesseldorf.  I mean…great by german standards.  All bakeries in Germany are good…WAY better than anything you will find in America, but there different levels of goodness.  The most common bakery chain, Kamps, can be found EVERYWHERE! It is the german equivalent of a mcdonalds.  It is pretty good, but it really can’t compare to some small bakery tucked in the corner somewhere.  And that was the kind of bakery that we found.  Here is what I ate:

This is also pretty typical german food.  Most germans eat a bread roll (brötchen) for breakfast.  Funnily enough, this would probably be a pretty typical german dinner as well.  In any case…IT TASTES GOOD! Here are some pictures of us enjoying our food:

Then we decided to go to a nearby river (the Ruhr) and go boating!  And now I am kicking myself in the leg because I should have taken a picture of the boat before we got in.  Someone else took one though, so maybe I can get a picture of it later and make everyone jealous. =)  However, I did take some pictures while I was on the boat…

Here is proof that I am still a weirdo:

But maybe you can pay less attention to me and more attention to the BEAUTIFUL background!  Because it was beautiful.  The whole way up the river was so gorgeous and wooded…And there were cute baby ducklings!  And you better believe I took a picture of them with their daddy.  I have decided that they are my new favorite animal…

Anyway…we were boating for about an hour and a half and then we went to a farm and ate dinner there.  I had asparagus cream soup (because asparagus is in season) and some french fries with mayonnaise ( that is also VERY german…or maybe just very european…not sure.)  I didn’t take any pictures there, but we had a lot of fun sitting on bales of hay and relaxing for a while.  There was one of those old metal slides there, and even though it was meant for all the really little kids, I figured that since I am only nineteen I still semi-qualify as a kid…so I made good use of the slide as well….

So now I am sitting here, a day later sunburned and (very gratefully) more hydrated (I didn’t drink hardly any water yesterday)…although I basically remade my not drinking any water mistake today when I went rollerblading for almost 2 hours…(I love rollerblading!) I forgot to drink water before hand and forgot to bring any with me, so I was very lightheaded by the time I got home…..but then I drank a lot of water and ate a lot of fruit and now I feel a lot better…(although I don’t even know why I wanted to eat fruit because usually I don’t…)

after getting frustrated if my sister doesn’t update her blog twice a week (which she does actually, because she is just that awesome) and being annoyed with my brother for not posting a comic for about a month, I decided to get of my horse of hypocrisy and write a blog entry myself. Unfortunately I don’t have this very well photo documentiert.  But I have my excuses…=D

Wales => 3 weeks ago, 6 people from the Nord-Rhein Westfallen region of Deutschland traveled with Ryanair across the English Channel to go to a college conference in Wales.  Here are 4 of the people even though it is blurry.  It was right after we were caught “squatting” in the Starbucks eating area eating the food that we bought from Tesco.

And yes…This was pretty much the only picture I took that weekend.  My Excuse?  I hate taking pictures.  Thank you.   But I did enjoy the weekend.  I enjoyed 2 words: ME and NOW!  Because who is going to build the church? ME and when? NOW.  We shouldn’t shove all the responsibility on someone else or tell the lord we will give ourselves to him sometime in 6 months or something.  The Main thing was that the Lord completely defeated me during Wales which helped me to enjoy… LONDON!

London => 2 weeks ago, 5 people from the city Duesseldorf traveled with Ryanair across the english channel to the international conference in London (Technically Romford actually). The title of the conference was “Living Under the Unique Headship of Christ and in the Unique Diving Fellowship to be transformed in life and reign in life for the body life.” Which is a mouthful I know, but I really enjoyed that we need to pay attention to our spirit and have a day by day church life.  And I only have one picture to show everyone.  It is a picture of me with Ed and Ruth Marks.  They are coming to Spokane very soon, and they promised me that they would say hi to everyone in Spokane for me.

Actually…that is not completely true.  There is another picture that I would LOVE to show everybody.  There were so many people from Spokane at the conference! And I totally didn’t know that any of them would be there so it was really a great surprise!  Anyway, we all took a picture together, and I don’t have it, because my camera broke.  Yeah…that is right.  My camera broke right when I wanted to take a picture for like the first time in my life.  So I am waiting for someone to send me the picture and then I will post it here.  But after the conference about half of the people I know decided to drive over to Dresden, and I wanted to have a little vacation for myself, so I decided to go to…DETMOLD!

Detmold => A week ago, Joy Clark traveled from Duesseldorf to a town called Detmold about 1.5 hours north of Duesseldorf by train.  She visited the family called Kelm and had a BLAST! … haha…I arrived on thursday night and then watched a James Bond film in German which was quite fun.  Then on Friday I went into the town center and looked around a little bit.  I played with the two little girls in the backyard all afternoon, then did a little rollerblading that evening.  On Saturday I went to the Flohmarkt (flea market) in the morning and found some great finds.  A pair of rollerblades for 5 euros?  Yeah…I’ll take them.  Then I chilled with Johanna and her friend in the afternoon.  We went to Hermans Denkmal:

And I got to see a bunch of cute little bunnies!:

And yeah…I did take some other pictures.  Mostly of my new hair cut.  But yeah…I refuse to post them on here because the pictures I can take with my new camera which was totally cheap did for the most part not turn out well.  I don’t even think the ones that I did post here turned out well either actually, but hey they are pictures.  And yes…I did buy a camera…with my own money…for 80 euros, which I figured was good enough, since I hate taking pictures anyway, i just need a camera occasionally to take a picture of something…

But whatever.  I need to get some stuff done because I have A LOT of stuff to do.  =D.  Which I will hopefully write about in another blog entry soon, but for now I do not have enough time.