Day 116 - Traveling to Swansea! (With some turbulence)

31.5.12 - Donnerstag, Thursday

Wow, I'm not sure where to even begin. The overall day wasn't too bad. I think I was a little antsy about traveling so I didn't sleep too well the night before. Nevertheless, I made it to class and did everything I needed to and got myself ready to head to the train station so Rachel and I could make our way to the airport. We had everything perfectly planned. We would get there a little more than two hours early so we would relax, all we had to do was catch a train to Mainz and then transfer to a bus which would take us to Frankfurt Hahn. We get to the train station early, also so we can relax some, only to find out our train was 45 minutes delayed. Unfortunately we only had like 20 minutes between the train and bus transfer. Which would make us late. We were getting a little frantic because we've never seen a train this late and we had no idea what our other options were. We divided ourselves and Rachel went to talk to a desk and I went to talk to buy some deodorant because I completely forgot to pack it. I come back and the guy she talked to told her about some bus somewhere that could take us there and we had no clue what he was talking about. We went outside and looked around the bus stops and didn't see anything.

I wasn't sure what to do and figured I would go ask the man at the desk if the bus we missed ran every hour, because that means we would be able to catch the train still and make it there an hour early. He said it ran every two. More panic, naturally. He then mentioned a bus and said it was out the door and to the left. Surprise! There's a whole long distance bus travel station about a block from the train station that we had never seen or heard of before. We get there, there's a sign that says a bus left ten minutes ago and the next one wasn't for two hours. We didn't have any more options at this point. It was either show up 10 minutes before our flight's boarding was going to finish or an hour late. We didn't buy insurance because the flight was only like 30€ and we didn't think it was worth it at the time. Trains are usually punctual...

We eventually got ourselves on the bus that would take us straight to the airport and tried to calm ourselves for the next two hours by just chatting and then listening to music. It was rather stressful, especially when we ran into some traffic and the bus driver was moving the bus a good 20km under the speed limit.

We get to the airport and are literally running moments after we got off the bus. We get inside, try to go through security, I saw the ticket said "passport check" but it looked like the security woman was doing checks, not the right one. He had to get out of line to go half-way through the (small, very small, 2 minutes away) airport to the passport check where the line was super long. We waited, trying not to panic, but, well, we had 2 minutes to get through security. We rushed back, a kind man let us through, and then Rachel's bag was flagged to be searched. Again, small airport, didn't have to wait long. We ran again, and found two other families had only just arrived too. Everyone was very nice at the terminal, and we boarded as the 6th and 5th to last and found seats next to each other. We stowed our bags and sat down, took a deep breath and gave each other a high five.

We arrived in London! Yay! Now next on the itinerary was to travel from the Airport into London. Stanstead Airport > Liverpool > Paddington > Swansea. The itinerary that I had printed off was really odd and confusing in comparison to Deutsche Bahn. Their's was "catch train at 7:30->8:54, next train 8:54->10:20, next train 10:20>2:20 vs. DB: 7:30-8:54, transfer time 40 minutes, etc. I asked a guy behind the desk who explained it to me saying "Everyone takes those things so literally, this is how it works." In an accent, which was awesome. So, instead of waiting an hour and a half, we jumped on the one leaving in 4 minutes and made our way to Liverpool.

We got to Liverpool and decided to look around for some food because our next trip could be an hourish and we were hungry. We walk out of the station to see an iconic red double-decker bus going to Kings Cross Station! The picture makes it a little hard to see, but it's there! We wandered a little further and wandered into some British pub that had a tasty looking menu. We got there, sat down and weren't sure what to do. After a little bit, we went up to the counter and discovered we were supposed to order there. I got a "Traditional British" item called mature cheddar and pickle sandwich. OH MAN, it was soo good. The combination sounded odd, but the two were some of my most favorite things. Rachel got a ham and cheese with English mustard and London Pride beer. Apparently, it wasn't as good as she hoped. It's beer, I'm not surprised. :p

On our way to Paddington, we noticed there was a stop for King's Cross, still unsure about time, we hopped off and ran up to the train station from the tube to find a very different looking entrance than expected to the train station itself and to platforms 9 - 11. Turns out that 9 and 10 are separated by a track... are hopes were dashed and we continued onward.

We arrived at Paddington to catch our 10:45 to Swansea which arrived at 2:20. I was tired, a little cramped, and couldn't sleep. Not to mention, a lady 2 rows away had one of those loud, penetrating voices. When she finally left, two guys walked on with the greatest young adult welsh(?) accents ever. It was awesome listening to them talk. I could have also been extra amused because I had been up for about 19 hours. Who knows.

We got to Swansea and saw Cindy and Andi waiting. Mission accomplished! We made our way back and slept.

97-98 Happy Mother's Day!

12.5.12 - Samstag, Saturday

I really didn't do much, I woke up late, and went to sleep early. I watched another Star Wars, wrote a few blogs, a pretty typical day.

13.5.12 - Sonntag, Sunday

It was Mother's Day! Although I wouldn't be doing anything for it until about 6pm my time, I still was ready for it just about all day. The plan with my family was that my sister, brother and his two children would go out to eat with my mom at our new "traditional" Mother's Day place called Vickie's Place in McHenry and then I would get on Skype and we would chat through my sister's smart phone. It would be as if we were all together again, except I was just a screen rather than an empty seat. I think one of my mom's friends suggested it, I thought it was a good idea.

I figured it would be perfect timing for all of us because it would be my dinner time as they were eating their lunch. I wasn't sure what I was going to cook, maybe my usual meat, vegetable, noodle meal, but I think there was only one pan available so I went with making myself an Italian sloppy joe thing which was ground meat with a basil tomato sauce on my bread with cooked vegetables on the side. I figured I would cook it before the allotted meeting time so I would be able to spend as much time talking to my family versus cooking.

I got the call, we chatted for a while, then I was really hungry so I grabbed my food and they had just gotten theirs. We ate together, chatted some more and then the topic of "What do you want for your birthday?", which was still a month and a half away, came up. Normally, I would say nothing, I never really need anything, or want anything. Or at least, I can't really think of something at the time they ask, however... there was a very specific something that I wanted and waited for 11 years to play. Diablo III. Well, maybe not waited, but I watched my brother play Diablo II when I was younger (13-11 years ago), and then I played it when I was a bit older, etc. But it was still and exciting prospect because I had heard about the game coming out for about 4 years and recently everything starting popping up. Anyways, I asked for it, and then we chatted some more and then Jackie's battery was about to die.

Fortunately, my brother also has a smart phone, and he got me on for a moment, but the camera wasn't quite right. He turned off Skype to try again, but for some reason couldn't get a hold of me again. At least we were able to chat for an hour or so nevertheless!

Later that evening, I got an e-mail from my sister saying that they were going to buy the game for me that night! I was pretty ecstatic, considering the game was going to be released on the Tuesday of that week. I also received an e-mail that day or the day prior that ISU had a summer program at Hochschule Mannheim, I had completely forgot such a thing existed. It could make things interesting, maybe? I can't say because I didn't know any of the people. But, on that Tuesday, we were going to meet them. Herr Schad was going to take us all out to have a drink at a "traditional" German diner. When I say "traditional", I just mean Bavarian mostly, because that's the American stereotype of all the Germans. (It's still amazingly delicious though!)

We would see how the next week would pan out.

96 - WG Caribbean Party

11.5.12 - Freitag, Friday

So, after a few days of having no dish soap, my roommate had time to buy some! The moment I saw it, I basically cleaned up the entire kitchen because I was so sick of the mess that I couldn't do anything about. My roommate walked in towards me being finish and I could see that he was happy too because not everyone is always clean.

The rest of the day was just kind of bumming around, chatting with friends on the internet, but the evening is when it got... interesting. Our entire apartment complex was throwing a Caribbean themed party thing. I wasn't really sure what to expect from it, and Rachel and I figured we should check it out. Someone said that it should be Caribbean attire too, so I figured I would look like a beach bum with a tank-top, long shorts, flip-flops and my sun-glasses. I get down to Rachel's around 9:15ish because she told me that her roommate was having friends over and didn't want to be that social.

We ended up hanging out with her roommate, then a friend showed up, then another, suddenly we were having a 12 person mini-party in the kitchen. Each person brought a bottle of wine respectively and kept pouring it for everyone. And we were all around chatting. Everyone knew English, so that was spoken a lot, but also because one of the later comers didn't know German that well. It was interesting talking with everyone because they have all been to different places and come from different places. One guy was from Croatia, one girl talked about a wedding she went to in Russia some people were talking about going to Africa. It's so awesome that people here have so many opportunities to do things like that. I suppose it is a lot closer though. I just looked and driving from Mannheim to Moscow is about 400km shorter than driving from Chicago to Las Vegas. That's so crazy! If only I had a car and gas wasn't so expensive. I suppose there are always trains though!

The Caribbean flare party was supposed to start at 10, but according to the roommate's constantly coming friends that no one was down there at 10:30 even. I don't think we actually wandered down until about 12:30 because Rachel wanted to cook herself some eggs because she was hungry. No complaints. We get down there and this party was not the "Dorm parties" like we would call them in the US. This was like a club full of people dancing and dressed up. Rachel and I waded through the crowd and found our group of people and then decided to get ourselves a drink. That took about 30 minutes because the people trying to do the same were like sardines.

Finally we get out of the line and the group moved. After ducking through the crowds for another 10 or so minutes, we find them again. The music was loud, but at least you could understand each other just below a yell. Rachel and I didn't stay for too long, not quite our scene. We went back up to her apartment, just the two of us, where my sunglasses lay broken. Neither of us are sure what happened, but I'm assuming when I took them off, at some point during the continuous shuffle of shoving 12 people in the room they were broken. There was nothing I could do about it at that point, so I didn't bother getting upset, I would figure something out. I wasn't feeling so well, and it probably didn't help that I'm not into the evening's lifestyle and it was about 6am when I got back up to my room. I was so exhausted from not enough sleep the previous few nights as well and had been awake for 24 hours, that I slept so hard my neck hurt for the next day.

92-95 Eating Poorly is a Poor Choice. :p

7.5.12 - Montag, Monday

For some reason I had it so ingrained in my mind that our Midterm for our German grammar test was on that day. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out it wasn't until Wednesday, but still felt a little silly about getting my dates mixed up. The rest of the day was pretty typical.

8.5.12 - Dienstag, Tuesday

I had my one class of the day, and didn't have much to do. I had kind of was all studied out from expecting my test on Monday, when it wasn't. I ended up watching the third Star Wars episode. After recently watching the first two, it made me realize that the acting and everything seemed to have gotten worse. When I was younger, it didn't seem that bad. Now... wow. But, I still enjoyed it some because it was a Star Wars movie. Even though it's not one of the original ones. I got to talk to Jason a lot at least!

9.5.12 - Mittwoch, Wednesday

Normal Wednesday, the test went alright. It could have gone better, but I passed! That's the important part. :) Although later in the evening, I tried doing the examples that I had put off from the night before, I could not figure it out for the life of me. The Technische Mechaniks 3 class wasn't so bad the first few times, but now it was just getting ridiculous. I feel like the teacher would teach us a few simple equations and then the homework was expecting us to solve master course problems. It was tough and not exactly a pleasant feeling. I eventually gave up and decided I would just wait for the next day when he would go through the examples. Maybe it would make more sense then. I was just in an overall strange mood, probably from not eating anything healthy for a few days because there wasn't a single clean dish or pan in sight. Which probably just built on everything else. :/

10.5.12 - Donnerstag, Thursday

I went to classes, as always, man that TM3 is ridiculous. I have no idea how I could have solved that without having all the notes or anything. I tried at least, and I know how the teacher would have done it. Although, a student seems to mention several times "couldn't you just plug a into b rather than deriving all of these other equations?" they both got the same answer apparently. After talking to the two students who will be exchanging in the fall, they said that he's a bit of a hard teacher and that the normal teacher went through things very slowly and was good. He's been sick for a while, unfortunately, so that means we missed a third of our classes. Our teacher can't afford to be slow.

I got to talk to Jason again! But my mood from the previous day still wasn't great, maybe even worsened.

91 - "Grillen" im Luisenpark

6.5.12 - Sonntag, Sunday

Rachel and I got ourselves moving just a bit later than intended to get to Luisenpark at the allotted time, meaning there was no one there to meet us. We got off, I saw a sign that said "Luisenpark" and said, 'hey let's go that way!' we wandered a bit, it looked pleasant and green. I was so sure that it was the right way because it looked like a park, but Rachel kept commenting about how she thought it was the other way. I honestly had no idea, and wanted to keep looking. I'm a bit of a completionist so I had to see everything, just to make sure.

Of course, she was right, so when we went to the other side of the street there was a big entrance and an admission stand. I should have known, but who makes that nice of a park just to park at? We got in, then had no idea where we were supposed to go after that. I saw a sign that had a knife and fork and a roof, so I thought that was a covered place that we could eat at. Side note - I e-mailed one of the program coordinators about the event because it was supposed to rain all day, which it mostly was, and she said it was covered. Logic, makes sense. We follow the symbol all the way there [top left corner of map], to find it's actually a restaurant that was closed. We went to a nearby concession stand and ask where we can "Grillen" and he said at the fire pit place #41. Who would have known! We were on the wrong side of the park, but we got there nevertheless. We were probably about an hour late, which was fine because they hadn't started cooking anything, just playing with starting the fire, it seemed.

Aside from the rain, the day wasn't so bad. It ended up getting a bit sunnier for a little while. We played uno, chatted some. I made s'mores because I wanted some. No one else seemed to care, so I was content with eating them myself and chatting with a few people.

No one seemed to have any interest in making s'mores, aside from passing comments of 'oh, I've seen those in movies', until Rachel said "Who wants to make s'mores?" and then everyone got excited. It reminded me of children, although I can't blame them, it's a whole lot of sugary goodness.

After that, a few people wanted to go on the boats around the middle lake and some of us had to watch a guitar so we chatted and played Uno. Turns out one of the guys there was a German girl's boyfriend from Canada. I liked talking to them, they seemed more my type. Probably because they were studying Biotechnology.... After some time we decided that we were all ready to go home, not to mention it was starting to downpour and get really cold. Finally, someone came back, which meant we didn't have to worry about the guitar anymore.

Rachel and I hopped on a train and got home. For some reason, I thought it was Mother's Day so instead of hanging out with Rachel, I went to my room and waited waited waited for a response from my mom about when we were going to Skype. That's about the time I found out that it wasn't Mother's Day but did get to talk to her and my sister because they were going to our neighbor's Baby Shower. After chatting with our respective mothers, we decided to watch Star Wars! The best part was that Rachel had the episode on her computer so it was nice and easy to watch.

After watching it, we chatted a bit and then I was suddenly reminded of a book (series) that most of my family had read or at least me and my dad, called "Song in the Silence". We split ways, and then slept.

90 - Plans for the "Grillen" im Luisenpark

5.5.12 - Samstag, Saturday

I woke up probably sometime around 10am and then started investigating things to do for the following day's Auslandsamt "Gillen" im Luisenpark, which was a big grill out for people to eat and enjoy each other's company I suppose. When I say things to do, I mean a plate to bring with that seems 'typical American' that I could make without an oven. The later part was a huge issue. No oven essentially means no pies, cookies, or whatever your typical American would make. Sort of. I received a few mixes from Sarah's mom for cookies and I was determined to figure out how to make them without an oven. I stumbled upon a way to do it on the stove, treating them with pancakes, it could potentially work.

After Rachel and I traded ideas, jello, cookies, fudge, dirt dessert, etc. we finally came to the concenceus of making s'mores. It's so ridiculously American that even the marshmallows we bought were called "American Marshmallows, made in USA", the chocolate was by far the easiest part. Cheap German chocolate/ non-name brand > Hershey's. The next problem was the crackers. We had not seen and could not find graham crackers anywhere. We decided to settle for "Butterkekse" which is literally butter cookies. I was afraid it was salty but we decided it was our best bet and purchase our items.

After that, we got back to the apartment areas and watched Star Wars! May the Fourth be with you got me in the mood for the movies. I decided that I wanted to watch them all through in English before I did in German. And when I say all, yes, I mean episodes 1-6. Although, at this point it was just watching one per day that I decided to watch them. I also posted a blog at some point.

89 - Worms! (The City of)

4.5.12 Freitag, Friday

Class was class, but I decided on that day (well, with a little bit of planning) that Rachel and I were to go to Worms (the city of). It was one of the many nearby places we could get to for free. I got everything together and was all ready to go, scampered down to Rachel's place, only to find that I had woken her up when we were supposed to leave in 15 minutes and so we separated ways (she back to sleep and I to Worms!). I didn't really know what to expect when I got there, but the city name was so familiar. I believe there was a Treaty of Worms at one point. (I looked it up, there were in fact two there). I wandered around a bit, it was a little hard to figure out where I was supposed to go because there were no signs pointing me in the right direction. I decided to just follow people, turns out that worked. It got me to one of the main streets, which directed me towards the tourist information, supposedly.

Following the sign, I got myself lost. However, I found my way to Worms' Kaiserdom AKA massive cathedral, so no complaints. Here's a few pictures for you to enjoy: (As always, there's more on my kodak gallery website)

From this church, I found a tourist billboard pointing me in the direction of the tourist info. Fortunately, this also had a map attached to it so I was able to find it a lot easier this time around. I got a map, gave it a look over, saw a cool looking water tower, but I couldn't find the place that the picture was connecting to. I asked the desk lady, and she pointed it out. It was a lot further of a walk than I would have wanted, which makes sense why it wasn't on my map then. Of course, as always, I spotted a church nearby and made that my first stop. It was an oldish looking church from the outside, but modern looking Lutheran church from the inside. I find modern... boring.

Of course, there were always more churches, and I decided I wanted to go visit the other one in town. Unfortunately, I wasn't really sure what else there was to do. German town websites don't really seem all that descriptive. Like, I would love to find a map online so I could plan out my days a little better and decide if I actually wanted to visit the city or not. Oh well, getting lost is half the adventure. But! I had a map, and I knew exactly where I was going, and found the church too. It was odd because you had to enter the church from the very back side and walk through several different alleyways to get inside (maybe there was construction?). The actual entrance was quite beautiful though, it had a large garden that you could walk through with tables that you could sit at. The inside was always quite beautiful, probably because it really was an older church.

After that church, I decided I wanted to see part of the old town wall that they had, the map showed a few random spots that it was still standing, or so I thought. I walked down a direction that I thought I would find it, but never did. For some reason, I also started feeling a little sick, so I decided to walk back to the train station and make my way home. I could always come back another day, it wasn't too far away.

During my trip, I think Worms was preparing itself for a dragon festival or something, or they just have dragons (Drachen) instead of horses, cows, pigs or whatever decorative animals that cities have these days. It seemed that some locations just had a dragon for the sake of it, while others had dragons representing their store. Here's a few of them:

(Random named one? | Front side of clothing store dragon. | Back side of clothing store dragon.)

(Ford dealership. | DM (cosmetic/ walgreens type, hence the make-up) | Bridal shop.)

(I'm not quite sure where for this dragon is [probably what it says on the bottom, an attorney place], but it's definitely my favorite and "Justice"-y.)

For the rest of the evening, I just fooled around on the internet, watched some How I Met Your Mother, The Guild and then maybe did some homework.

86-88 Minecraft & Running around Mannheim

1.5.12 - Dienstag, Tuesday

Tag der Arbeit = Day of Labor/ German Labor Day = National Holiday = No school. What did that mean for me exactly? Nothing! Except I spent all day doing just about that, no where was open, I had nothing to do except blog and mess around on the internet. I ended up posting about 6 blogs that day. I guess I was still working! Later in the day I got on Minecraft and played some with Jason and chatted.

2.5.12 Mittwoch, Wednesday

Wednesdays are my long days, but not this time! Because the Tuesday section of the German class didn't have class, Wednesday didn't either, which means I got to go home. On top of that, my Linear Algebra teacher also decided to cancel class so I only had my TM3 class at 12 and that was it. It was a pretty regular class, nothing special. I ended up building myself a glass castle in minecraft because I had a lot of time on my hands.

3.5.12 Donnerstag, Thursday

I may or may not have forgotten to mention, but I had received a package from my best friend's mom, Shelli, full of delicious candy and socks. So, I was diving into the delicious gummy worms, pop tarts and jolly ranchers over the past few and following days. I posted a few blogs since it was one of my early days and I had a lot of time before me. I also made it into a very productive day. Aside from waking up like 3 or 4 times in the middle of the night to turn over, making me rather tired, I wandered around mannheim to get money, look at sunglasses, see the price of foods and buy cards and lead because I had just ran out of lead for my favorite pencil. I, unfortunately, did not get any new sunglasses even though my old ones were cracked. Who knows how that happened. I think I walked about 3 miles that day, it was good. I also decided to look into getting a new SIM card because mine was supposed to expire on the 11th. It was hard to understand exactly how it all worked because some companies are vague on the specifics. i was hoping I could get a card that would fit into the old iPhone my dad game me a few years ago. Still no luck. I also decided to send an e-mail to the Department of Residence because I really want to live in the UV apartments when I get back. It's a good location and cheap. I was starting to get nervous though because Rachel's boyfriend was trying to do the same for fall, but got kicked into a dorm way south of campus. Poor guy.