What a perfect way to start December: sitting in the lecture hall, listening to Louise and Alyssa beautifully singing along to the piano, no longer stressing about my completed bible study project (there was a reason why my dad left me a fb message saying that my blog has been lacking, I've had no time!), and best yet, I turn my head, look out the window and gaze upon my first German snow. It's perfect.
Well, almost perfect.
December isn't for another 3 hours here, but that's close enough. D
o any of you guys find it hard to believe that it's almost December? I sure do! Time here has flown by incredibly fast.
Last weekend my sing team went on a weekend outreach to a town about 45 west of Munich. It was really cool. We were assigned to host families and guess who was the odd one of the group and ended up staying at a house all by herself? Alicia? Indeed. But do not fret for it was good. I stayed with a girl named Joanna and her Mother (who's name I forgot about 5 minutes after I met, I was just to embarrassed to admit it) and the two of them, along with Becky the Dog, were incredibly sweet, fed me lots of food and even let me use their bathroom scale (Something apparently foreign to Bodenseehof). It was great. On the Friday we went to a school and sang 3 songs, as we had been told to expect, in 6 different classrooms, which was a surprise. Then we went back to a church and had a 'youth' service... it seemed more to me like a service for 14 year olds and their parents, but that’s okay. We sang a couple songs and the drama team did a drama. On Saturday, we went to Ubersaltzburg... (or something like) and spent the day on the mountain were Hitler lived. I've always liked history, but it was nice to hear it from a German perspective. The best part was that we got to go through the underground bucker system that the Germans had begun to build in case they ever were attacked. But because Hitler had so much faith in the Germans, it wasn't a full-hearted effort nor was it even used because Hitler committed suicide in Berlin around the same time the French made their way up the mountain.
So... side note. Out of the chaos of noise that there is in this room, right behind me Kristy and Stephanie are talking Eggnog and whether or not they have it here. And upon that note I realised that you guys have probably been drinking egg nog since the beginning of November. I am slightly envious. Drink an extra glass.. or 5... for me. Please and thanks.
Not our last lecturer, but our last, last lecturer was Ray Andrews: a rad mixture of preacher, physiologist, Australian, English and Irish. Interesting combination? Indeed. I think he was definitely one of my favourite speakers because he took his focus away from the Bible and how to apply it to our lives, but he focused on us and how we can relate to the Bible. He made us do a basic personality test and my results were 50% thinker, 60% feeler and 40% doer (or something close to that) which to him, means that I am a feeler/ multi-flaccid phlegmatic. Feelers = energy (check), not good at mornings (check), subjective (check). Phlegmatic = regeneration is sleep (check- now i have an excuse mom!), needs peaceful situations (check), emotionally stable (check)... funny how that works out. Meet Alicia, your neighbourhood feeler/pragmatic. He was also really funny and told rad stories. My favourite one (can you guess why?) is the one about the time he got fed up with his daughters messy room, took all her stuff, threw it on the porch and said 'if this isn't clean and properly put away before I get home from work, you'll never see it again" .. or something along those lines. (sound familiar mother?)
Anyways, I think I'm going to go outside and frolic in the snow for a few minutes before lock-up.
So, without further adieu happy December!!
Love you all lots.
Hopefully this was a nice little update :)
Monday, November 30, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
Alicia in Austria
My bad. Yes, I do realised I lied. In my last post I said if you checked back in a few days, chances would be in your favour to find a new post... but that was back in October. I'm sorry. I've been busy.
Busy?
At least I'm pretty sure I was, as I sit here trying to think of what huge time consuming activities I was apart of... I'm drawing blanks.
Think wayy back, Alicia, think way back. It's funny how two weeks can seem like forever.
Okay, got one.
Two fridays ago:
We had a school activity: a photoscavenger hunt.
It was pretty sweet. Some of the pictures we took were pretty ridiculous. For example some of the things on the list included: the whole group doing headstands, with a person un-realated to Bodenseehof, with a statue, on a bridge, accidents that shouldnt happen - we all splashed water on our pants... apparently we all have really bad bladders, with something that has a 'Made in Canada' label -hard enough to find in Canada, let alone Germany!, in a staff members kitchen, by a tombstome, making a pyramid, on eachothers shoulders, "I can't believe we all fit in here" - we fit 8 people in a tiny phone booth and closed the door.. it was tight!, Here at Bodenseehof we...," and last but not least, with at least one person soaking wet - 4 of us girls decided to go for a swim and splashed around in the freezing lake until we were soaked, it was good fun!
Thats probably less than half of the stuff that was on the list! It was tres amusante. And, my group came in second which was somewhat impressive because we spent a good 15 minutes at the begining doing nothing.
Two saturdays ago:
That friday was also the same day that about students came back from "English Camp" outreach. The next day, Ashton, Mandie, (A student from last year who came back for English Camp) and I just so happened to decided to go on a walk to Immenstad, this quaint little town about 3.5 km away from the school. On that fateful saturday, instead checking out the clothes stores, walking to the pier and possibly having some coffee, our expectations and plans were thrown out the window. It all started out pretty innocently, we left Bodenseehof. But then, we detoured. Mandie showed us this sweet abandoned brick wearhouse that the studens last year had found. We didn't go inside on account of not having any flashlights, but our interest had been sparked. After the short side trip, we continued along to Immenstad. Upon arriving in town, we came to an icecream shop and decided to get icecream. That was also not unusual at all, apparently icecream is very popular here. But the after that, the fun started. Haha, okay well, it wasn't anything super exciting, but on this perticular saturday there happened to be a travelling market? I don't know what it was but they had the most random, interesting selection of stuff ever and it was also somewhat strange as many of the booths were selling the exact same things... odd. Some stalls had old lady sweaters and old man vests, some had teenage type clothes and fashionable looking sweatpants (if that is possibly to say), some even had jeans with stretchy waists (Someone told me that Europe is 2 years ahead of North Americans in fasion... if that's the case, you have been forewarned...don't throw out your streach jeans just yet), some sold food / candy and others sold medical supplies (yes, you read that correctly, medical supplies. Like.. scalples and tweezers and stethescope things... it was unusual). Some sold toques and others sold bra's and underwear... it was somewhat strange and all of it was expensive.. not what you would expect from a street market. But by far the strangest thing were theses little skirts with all these coins attached.. like for bellydancers and gypsies... that were sold at nearly EVERY booth.. the old lady sweater booth, the strechy pants booth, the teenage booth.. the toque booth (there were also scarves at almost every booth... but thats something fairly normal and non-surprising.. right?). We were intreged, so Mandie asked one of the booth-people how much one was.. and they said 15Euro. Haha. See? Expensive. We were fine with that until we realised that it was hallowe'en and we had no idea what we were going to dress up as and that gypsies would've been a sweet idea. (Possibly not politically correct in Europe.. but seeing as we are North Americans, we didn't exactly think about that) Walking out of the market with the intent of heading back to Bodenseehof, we saw this one rack of stuff with a sign that said 5E... and can you guys take a guess what was hanging on it? If you guess 'more gypsy coin skirt things,' you are completely correct! So we bought 3. Two greens and an orange.
On the way back, we planned our super awesome spur-of-the-moment hallowe'en costumes! We were pretty excited by the time we got back to the school because we had also realised that the man had given us 4 instead of 3 so we could include another person in our sweet costume club (in the end it turned out that 7 girls dressed up as gypsies, it was sweet!) Then, to top this off, we come back to school and the first person we see is Alyssa who, to our surprise, instead of letting us tell her about our sweet advencture, says "Go find Leah." We found Leah and had a moment of girly screaming as she pulled out her hand and told us how her boyfriend had completely surprised her and flown here and proposed. It was so cute :)
Saturday was a fun day :)
Sunday, monday, tuesday:
... all seem to blur into nothing and I dont really remember anything from any of those days.
Wednesday:
Was interestesting. Wednesday was a day of prayer and silence. We were allowed to talk at meals, and there was a biblestudy/ lecture in the morning and we were allowed to pray with staff and students in the morning, but the rest of the day until dinner was to be spent in silence. It was good. I went for a walk and sat by a stream for a while... and had a nap and... erm... that was about it. At first it was really strange and quiet and I had no idea what to do with myself, but when i look back it was just a nice way to spend an entire day with just me and Jesus. You should try it sometime.
Thursday- Sunday: TRAVEL WEEKEND! :)
Thursday morning was a bit of a struggle. For some reason my group, which had until 2 in the afternoon to make a 3 hour trip, decided that we would catch the 8:08 bus which, on a normal day would've been no problem. But the previous night, there was that there was no lock-up and no lights-out that night. Groups were allowed to leave as early as 12:01 thursday morning and so they left the building unlocked to accomodate those with unreasonably rediculous travel scheduals. Free to do whatsoever I pleased that night, I stayed up practically till 3. Not really a big deal, it's been done before but apparently I've become acustomed to a nice full 8 hours of sleep here at the Bode. Even though sometimes I feel like 11 / 11:30 -7 / 7:30 is not nearly enough, thursday morning opened my eyes (... haha.) to the joys of a good sleep.Needless to say, the morning was somewhat of a struggle. Plus, Rachel and I shared a backpack and hadn't finished packing the night before (We had all night... but apparently that wasn't enough time) so it was a bit hectic. But all was good and we managed to squeeze onto the bus, all 30 of us with our huge backpacks and suitcases... the bus was packed to begin with, I don't think any of the other people on it were very impressed with us.
Bus -> Freids. Train -> Lindau. Train -> Immenstat. Train -> Obserstdorf. Bus -> some mountain ski villiage. Van ride up the mountain -> HUT! Quite the adventure.
After we got to the hut we went on a short hike up on an attempt to get to the peak of the mountain. It was pretty sweet! We didn't end up going all the way to the peak because it was getting dark but we did climb up this one really sketchy part that was like.. a 70-80 degree incline (... yes, I did learn something in math) and it was snowy. Before we started that part we stopped and Steve gave a short speech and said, "Have fun, and don't think about what you're doing." Okay? Then halfway up I started thinking about what I was doing and I realised why he said that. And then we had to climb back down which by then was twice as slippery as a result of 20 people climbing up.
That was the only hike I did because my shoes were SO soaked after that and me being me, wasn't smart enough to think about putting them on the heater to dry.
But the next day Rachel, Manuel, Kelsey and I decided to walk down to the little town and then walk around there for a little while. We had been told that there was a path a short distance from the hut that would take us directly to the town... we didn't use the path. I don't know what we were thinking but we ended up going straight down the mountain on this steep ski trail that I wouldn't dare to ski down... I'm not really a good skier so maybe that doesn't really count... but still, it was really steep. And wet and muddy, it was snowing and the ground was soaked so it was quite the adventure. Then we got down, walked around for 20 minutes and went straight back up the mountain to the hut. Fun fun! And to clarlify, that actually was not sarcasm. It was a delightful trek back up.
I also went for a walk up this mountain road on the saturday, but the large extent of the weekend was spent playing games - set, cribb, hoopla... Cities and Knights (I won. It was great!) and eating tones of food. And by tonnes, I mean that they had a pantry stocked with more food than imaginable that we could go into whenever we want. I'm pretty sure all of us ate the ENTIRE weekend and my guestimate is that we only ate about a 1/3 of the food. We ate all of the oranges and all of the bacon, but those were the only things that we ran out of... and we ran out the morning we left. Then we get back to the school and find out that some groups had to pay 5 insane amounts of money for food and so they just didn't eat. For anybody who is planning on comming here and reading this: heed my advice, go to the hut! Even if you don't really enjoy hiking, you'll still have a blast. There was one guy who didn't hike at all and still had a great time.
Looking back, what was my favorite part you ask?
Oh, good question! Hmm. Well, I think I would have to say that it would have to be a tie between the drunk Bavarian marching / parade band with members aging from (it looked like) 14 - 40 in the other half of the hut (with paper thin walls) that wore spartan helmets, cow costumes and played their trumpets, trombones, tubas, drums and french horns from 11 pm - 4 am only to resume again with trumpet calls at 7 am and taking the wrong train and ending back in Oberstdorf.
At the time, the drunk bavarian marching/ parade band was somewhat annoying but looking back, it was actually quite a glorious experience. Who else can say that they've experienced their own personal full-force bavarian marching band show at 3 am in the morning... not too many I'd bet.
And taking the wrong train actually proved to be quite the amusing experience. I'm glad that I was with the people i was with because they were all the type that would find that sort of thing amusing and not freak out about the whole thing.
..
Ya. It was good.
Busy?
At least I'm pretty sure I was, as I sit here trying to think of what huge time consuming activities I was apart of... I'm drawing blanks.
Think wayy back, Alicia, think way back. It's funny how two weeks can seem like forever.
Okay, got one.
Two fridays ago:
We had a school activity: a photoscavenger hunt.
It was pretty sweet. Some of the pictures we took were pretty ridiculous. For example some of the things on the list included: the whole group doing headstands, with a person un-realated to Bodenseehof, with a statue, on a bridge, accidents that shouldnt happen - we all splashed water on our pants... apparently we all have really bad bladders, with something that has a 'Made in Canada' label -hard enough to find in Canada, let alone Germany!, in a staff members kitchen, by a tombstome, making a pyramid, on eachothers shoulders, "I can't believe we all fit in here" - we fit 8 people in a tiny phone booth and closed the door.. it was tight!, Here at Bodenseehof we...," and last but not least, with at least one person soaking wet - 4 of us girls decided to go for a swim and splashed around in the freezing lake until we were soaked, it was good fun!
Thats probably less than half of the stuff that was on the list! It was tres amusante. And, my group came in second which was somewhat impressive because we spent a good 15 minutes at the begining doing nothing.
Two saturdays ago:
That friday was also the same day that about students came back from "English Camp" outreach. The next day, Ashton, Mandie, (A student from last year who came back for English Camp) and I just so happened to decided to go on a walk to Immenstad, this quaint little town about 3.5 km away from the school. On that fateful saturday, instead checking out the clothes stores, walking to the pier and possibly having some coffee, our expectations and plans were thrown out the window. It all started out pretty innocently, we left Bodenseehof. But then, we detoured. Mandie showed us this sweet abandoned brick wearhouse that the studens last year had found. We didn't go inside on account of not having any flashlights, but our interest had been sparked. After the short side trip, we continued along to Immenstad. Upon arriving in town, we came to an icecream shop and decided to get icecream. That was also not unusual at all, apparently icecream is very popular here. But the after that, the fun started. Haha, okay well, it wasn't anything super exciting, but on this perticular saturday there happened to be a travelling market? I don't know what it was but they had the most random, interesting selection of stuff ever and it was also somewhat strange as many of the booths were selling the exact same things... odd. Some stalls had old lady sweaters and old man vests, some had teenage type clothes and fashionable looking sweatpants (if that is possibly to say), some even had jeans with stretchy waists (Someone told me that Europe is 2 years ahead of North Americans in fasion... if that's the case, you have been forewarned...don't throw out your streach jeans just yet), some sold food / candy and others sold medical supplies (yes, you read that correctly, medical supplies. Like.. scalples and tweezers and stethescope things... it was unusual). Some sold toques and others sold bra's and underwear... it was somewhat strange and all of it was expensive.. not what you would expect from a street market. But by far the strangest thing were theses little skirts with all these coins attached.. like for bellydancers and gypsies... that were sold at nearly EVERY booth.. the old lady sweater booth, the strechy pants booth, the teenage booth.. the toque booth (there were also scarves at almost every booth... but thats something fairly normal and non-surprising.. right?). We were intreged, so Mandie asked one of the booth-people how much one was.. and they said 15Euro. Haha. See? Expensive. We were fine with that until we realised that it was hallowe'en and we had no idea what we were going to dress up as and that gypsies would've been a sweet idea. (Possibly not politically correct in Europe.. but seeing as we are North Americans, we didn't exactly think about that) Walking out of the market with the intent of heading back to Bodenseehof, we saw this one rack of stuff with a sign that said 5E... and can you guys take a guess what was hanging on it? If you guess 'more gypsy coin skirt things,' you are completely correct! So we bought 3. Two greens and an orange.
On the way back, we planned our super awesome spur-of-the-moment hallowe'en costumes! We were pretty excited by the time we got back to the school because we had also realised that the man had given us 4 instead of 3 so we could include another person in our sweet costume club (in the end it turned out that 7 girls dressed up as gypsies, it was sweet!) Then, to top this off, we come back to school and the first person we see is Alyssa who, to our surprise, instead of letting us tell her about our sweet advencture, says "Go find Leah." We found Leah and had a moment of girly screaming as she pulled out her hand and told us how her boyfriend had completely surprised her and flown here and proposed. It was so cute :)
Saturday was a fun day :)
Sunday, monday, tuesday:
... all seem to blur into nothing and I dont really remember anything from any of those days.
Wednesday:
Was interestesting. Wednesday was a day of prayer and silence. We were allowed to talk at meals, and there was a biblestudy/ lecture in the morning and we were allowed to pray with staff and students in the morning, but the rest of the day until dinner was to be spent in silence. It was good. I went for a walk and sat by a stream for a while... and had a nap and... erm... that was about it. At first it was really strange and quiet and I had no idea what to do with myself, but when i look back it was just a nice way to spend an entire day with just me and Jesus. You should try it sometime.
Thursday- Sunday: TRAVEL WEEKEND! :)
Thursday morning was a bit of a struggle. For some reason my group, which had until 2 in the afternoon to make a 3 hour trip, decided that we would catch the 8:08 bus which, on a normal day would've been no problem. But the previous night, there was that there was no lock-up and no lights-out that night. Groups were allowed to leave as early as 12:01 thursday morning and so they left the building unlocked to accomodate those with unreasonably rediculous travel scheduals. Free to do whatsoever I pleased that night, I stayed up practically till 3. Not really a big deal, it's been done before but apparently I've become acustomed to a nice full 8 hours of sleep here at the Bode. Even though sometimes I feel like 11 / 11:30 -7 / 7:30 is not nearly enough, thursday morning opened my eyes (... haha.) to the joys of a good sleep.Needless to say, the morning was somewhat of a struggle. Plus, Rachel and I shared a backpack and hadn't finished packing the night before (We had all night... but apparently that wasn't enough time) so it was a bit hectic. But all was good and we managed to squeeze onto the bus, all 30 of us with our huge backpacks and suitcases... the bus was packed to begin with, I don't think any of the other people on it were very impressed with us.
Bus -> Freids. Train -> Lindau. Train -> Immenstat. Train -> Obserstdorf. Bus -> some mountain ski villiage. Van ride up the mountain -> HUT! Quite the adventure.
After we got to the hut we went on a short hike up on an attempt to get to the peak of the mountain. It was pretty sweet! We didn't end up going all the way to the peak because it was getting dark but we did climb up this one really sketchy part that was like.. a 70-80 degree incline (... yes, I did learn something in math) and it was snowy. Before we started that part we stopped and Steve gave a short speech and said, "Have fun, and don't think about what you're doing." Okay? Then halfway up I started thinking about what I was doing and I realised why he said that. And then we had to climb back down which by then was twice as slippery as a result of 20 people climbing up.
That was the only hike I did because my shoes were SO soaked after that and me being me, wasn't smart enough to think about putting them on the heater to dry.
But the next day Rachel, Manuel, Kelsey and I decided to walk down to the little town and then walk around there for a little while. We had been told that there was a path a short distance from the hut that would take us directly to the town... we didn't use the path. I don't know what we were thinking but we ended up going straight down the mountain on this steep ski trail that I wouldn't dare to ski down... I'm not really a good skier so maybe that doesn't really count... but still, it was really steep. And wet and muddy, it was snowing and the ground was soaked so it was quite the adventure. Then we got down, walked around for 20 minutes and went straight back up the mountain to the hut. Fun fun! And to clarlify, that actually was not sarcasm. It was a delightful trek back up.
I also went for a walk up this mountain road on the saturday, but the large extent of the weekend was spent playing games - set, cribb, hoopla... Cities and Knights (I won. It was great!) and eating tones of food. And by tonnes, I mean that they had a pantry stocked with more food than imaginable that we could go into whenever we want. I'm pretty sure all of us ate the ENTIRE weekend and my guestimate is that we only ate about a 1/3 of the food. We ate all of the oranges and all of the bacon, but those were the only things that we ran out of... and we ran out the morning we left. Then we get back to the school and find out that some groups had to pay 5 insane amounts of money for food and so they just didn't eat. For anybody who is planning on comming here and reading this: heed my advice, go to the hut! Even if you don't really enjoy hiking, you'll still have a blast. There was one guy who didn't hike at all and still had a great time.
Looking back, what was my favorite part you ask?
Oh, good question! Hmm. Well, I think I would have to say that it would have to be a tie between the drunk Bavarian marching / parade band with members aging from (it looked like) 14 - 40 in the other half of the hut (with paper thin walls) that wore spartan helmets, cow costumes and played their trumpets, trombones, tubas, drums and french horns from 11 pm - 4 am only to resume again with trumpet calls at 7 am and taking the wrong train and ending back in Oberstdorf.
At the time, the drunk bavarian marching/ parade band was somewhat annoying but looking back, it was actually quite a glorious experience. Who else can say that they've experienced their own personal full-force bavarian marching band show at 3 am in the morning... not too many I'd bet.
And taking the wrong train actually proved to be quite the amusing experience. I'm glad that I was with the people i was with because they were all the type that would find that sort of thing amusing and not freak out about the whole thing.
..
Ya. It was good.
Erm.. ya. I hope that was satisfactory!
Javier, you requested: the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains.
Hope you guys are all having a lovely day.
So long, farewell, aufwiedersehen, goodbye.
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