Day 8 - Ice skating

Today was a great day. I came back sorta late from last night (sadly no clubs, but we did find this cool Irish pub serving 1 euro shots) and slept until 10 this morning. When I came down for breakfast, there was a real roll on my plate waiting for me! Have I mentioned how much I love the bread here? it puts most of the bread from back home to shame...enriched wheat bread, I'm looking at you! Anyway, during breakfast Annette asked if I was going in town today and when she found out that me and some others were planning on going to the Munster church for mass (remember the church from the tour with the two different building types?), she told me that there was a garden somewhere nearby the church and we should go see it.

The actual mass was...interesting. It was all in Germans so we had no idea what was being said at any point in time. That might have been poor planning on our part. Inside the church was absolutely gorgeous. The alter and the preist were so far waya, but everything had this feel that the sitter was back in rennaisance times with the old wooden seats and the paintings that adorned the walls and ceilings. There was even an elevated seat near the front that I think visiting royalty or equally important persons used to sit in. Unfortunately I have no pictures as I didn't wait around long enough in the church for the congregation to completely file out and I didn't want to interrupt the mass so I could act the tourist.

By this point, everyone was fairly hungry and we stopped at the place behind the castle wall where we had felafel before for some lunch. This time, I had some of the meat in a sandwich. WOW! the meat had been rotisseried and slow baked so that when the guy shaved off the chicken and I bit into it, the flavor exploded in my mouth. Much better than my previous visit and I recommend anyone in the area to try it. We met up with two more people in that little shop and found out that one of them was meeting up with their host sister and her friend for ice skating and that if we wanted to come along, we could.

Ice skating was a blast! I've never done it before, and so Linda (the host sister) helped me around the first time, but once I got the hang of it and realized it was basically a cross between roller skating and skiing, I got to be pretty good and even helped out some of the others when they didn't get it as easily. It was quite the experience, though after a while my feet and ankles started to hurt from balancing and most likely not having the best skates. I'm very proud of myself as I had never skated before and I only fell once about half way through. It was more of a slow, inevitable slide than a fall. About a half hour before I left, the disco ball came on and colored lights coated the ice. Unfortunately, I decided to leave before the rest of my friends with Linda and her friend because my feet were screaming at me.

We ended up going to this little cafe a few streets down to have coffee and hot chocolate. I am very proud to say that I got through the entire order without resorting to English and got exactly what I wanted. We talked a lot there (Linda, Lena, and I) about just random stuff; what to do in Bonn, why I was in Germany, the best musicals, stuff like that. At around 6 we decided to head back home as they had a long bike ride ahead of them and I needed to get back to my host mom due to the fact that I told her I'd probably be back at 4 or 5. The rest of the night was spent eating dinner, watching crime shows (Bones and NCIS are apparently really popular) and just enjoying each others company.

Now, it's time to do homework...for real this time! I have been putting it off, but the deadline begins to loom closer and I know I need to suck it up and get back to the real world at some point.

Ciao for now!
Erin Z


P.S.: For those who were wondering about last night, I stayed at home for 2 hours because I accidentally locked the door and the kids were at their dad's house and Annette said they didn't have keys, so I stayed to make sure they got in fine. Turns out, they had keys. Anyway, I met up with a group of people around 11:00 and we went to this cool Irish bar where they were serving 1 euro shots. That's just not a deal you pass up on. So I tried both Jaeger and Tequila last night. Woo hoo! There was also a guy who we met that told us about the best clubs to go to in Bonn, but by that point a lot of us were just ready to go home. So we did. Everyone got home safe, no one fell into the Rhine, and everyone was accounted for the next morning.