Last week I opened my door to a lovely layering of snow atop the trees and covering the garden. I gasped and ran to grab my camera. That was my very first time seeing snow in Germany! At the end of January...crazy. It was a foggy, frosty delightful sort of morning. After I had finished marveling, I grabbed my coat and biked to the bakery to get the rolls while the snowflakes swirled around me, creating a fantastic blindfold, but lovely all the same. Once I got home I went to the kitchen and when Jojo came in I smiled and said, "Look outside, Jojo." She glanced nonchalantly at first but then her eyes expanded and she ran up the stairs yelling, "Gary, du glaubst das nicht, du glaubst das nicht!!! Komm schnell!" After which commenced a thunderous pounding of their tiny feet down the stairs as they ran to the kitchen window and examined all the magic spread before their eyes. After breakfast, I took a 2 hour walk through the fields and smiled, prayed, thought about weird things and enjoyed plodding through the powdery trails. I also ate some snow off a branch. It brought me back to the days when mom was so annoyed at the piles of snow all of us kids consumed that she took a big glass dish and melted the snow so we would see all the seeds and dirt and stop eating it. It never quite did the trick. We continued to hurl ourselves into the piles of snow on the deck and eat our way out.
My second semester of school started this week and ends in June. I enjoyed my bike ride but what I enjoyed a bit less were the endless layers needed to block out the cold. The last 2 weeks have been the only time I've truly been cold here. Last weekend I travelled to Bonn and met with some friends to see a concert. We walked through some streets and stopped at a corner that I would have passed by without noticing, but upon closer look there was, in fact, a bar. The minute I walked in it was as if objects were magnetized to my eyes one at a time, zooming in and catching my attention. First I noticed the wooden rafters that created an oddly pleasant claustrophobic atmosphere. Next came zooming to me the oldest piano I've ever laid eyes upon. After that was a rusty sewing machine propped in a corner, and lastly were the couches perched on a slightly raised platform. I enjoyed some wonderful folk music, wonderful people and had a flaming shot of Sambuca spill all over my jeans. All in all a memorable evening! The trains didn't get us to Dusseldorf until the middle of the night and I took a bus to my friends place during which we spoke with a crazy guy! Every time I asked him a question he would shove a handful of fries into his mouth. I finally dropped onto a mattress sometime after 3:30 and slept for 5 hours. Woohoo. But the upside is I got to ride on my friend's motorbike to church!!! That was sensational. I want one.
Karneval is beginning to begin and I'm really excited! It's time for me to collapse into the warmth of my bed. As always, I miss you all! Katie, I'm so proud of you for getting accepted into Marymount Manhattan College and will be praying for you. Mom, you somehow manage to make sense of my ramblings and questions and sort through all the thoughts and notions in my crazy head. Thanks for that! I love getting advice from you. To end this I would just like to say that sometimes I get a bit down about practically everything, but at this moment when I looked back to August 2011 I can smile and see how much I've grown, changed, and been strengthened. I am so immensely thankful for the opportunity to have this time away and experience the world. I feel very small sometimes, the more I see and learn about the world. But sometimes being small is quite fun.
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