A little of this, a little of that

As has been requested, I am going to write a blog entry, and maybe write about what happened when Katy and Rachel was here, but then I also have Berlin, and then when Dean visited, goodness!

Hmm, all right, some highlights: Katy and Rachel visited me about a month ago. They live down south in Hessen (around where Frankfurt it) and their two week Easter break came after Easter. Katy thought that it would be good to come visit before the Berlin conference, and I agreed, and then we invited Rachel to come as well, because she is lovely. They got here on Tuesday (April 1st) later than they were expecting, but when you are doing the car pooling thing, you can't say exactly when you will get somewhere. Oh well, we then missed the bus to go to the beach, but it was such a great day out that we walked it down there. We were about an hour late to Frisbee, but there were still 7 people on the beach, so with the three of us, that was 10! I always love watching Katy play, and she is getting better and better. Plus the students from Greifswald are always fun to play with, we seem to have a really great team dynamic so far.

Hmm, another thing we did was go to Rügen, yeah, I am jumping ahead a few days, but that was really the grand highlight of trip, other than going out after Frisbee on Thursday with a few other players and staying out at the bar for a few hours with lots of laughing and slapping people's head (sorry Katy). Anyway, Rügen was great. It is the biggest island that Germany has, and the smallest national park. We took the train up there. It was quite the overcast day, so there weren't too many people out, but we enjoyed the time anyway. Before we hit the park, we walked around a port, and there I had an incredibly yummy fish sandwich (which was less than a euro!) and Katy and Rachel both got waffles. I took about 300 pictures that day, we ate sandwiches that probably had some sand in it (since we put everything in my bag, and my bag was recently on the beaches of Rimini). And the hike was beautiful! The island is on the Baltic Sea and has white cliffs facing it. No, I don't know if they are like the cliffs in Dover, seeing as I have never been there, but these were breathtaking, even in the cruddy weather. A highlight from that trip was meeting an older gentleman on the path. We were about to turn back, but he informed us that we were about 400 meters away from a gorgeous outlook, and then there was also a little restaurant we could go to if we wanted to rest. So we found the outlook, which was great, and then went to the restaurant. Katy and Rachel got some coffee and cake, I got some hot chocolate. Oh yeah, there was also a little children's play area! It definitely revitalized me and the sun came out for our walk back to the train station.

I will write about Berlin tomorrow, but here is what is going on right now: really not much of anything. I have been able to chat with some friends from home recently. Heather and I are going to have the greatest combined party ever! But I am afraid that her all important 23rd birthday will over shadow my homecoming party, since it is Michael Jordan's number. We are gonna play a mix of jock jams and German pop the whole night, get excited. I also talked with Emily, which was amazing! I have been running more, and that makes me feel really great. There is a half marathon in Crystal Lake in September, and I am pretty sure I am going to sign up for it, which means I have get running. On thursday, I ran my first practice ever! We had eight people show up, which is fine, enough to do drills and it makes explaining things a lot easier. I tried to run a hard but fun practice, and the people who were there said it went really well. And we will be heading to our first tournament in May, and we have 13 people signed up to go, woo!

And today is April 26th, which means exactly 2 months before I fly home, some people are really excited and some people really aren't, I am both.