This morning I got up and listened to some Christian music. It was wonderful to fill my head with words and thoughts of praise!
We left to visit some friends around noon. They live in Berlin, but on the weekend they go to their apartment in the country (it’s in a hotel). It is in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by woods: absolutely beautiful! The adults drank champagne and the girls and I drank a non-alcoholic beer-type drink. I’m guessing Mark or Nancy mentioned I didn’t drink to their friends because it wasn’t even offered to me. They had invited their neighbor over for dinner and he brought several bottles of different soft drinks for us.
There wasn’t enough room for all of us to eat at the same time, so the girls and I went to the pool while the adults ate dinner. They tried giving me directions to the pool and I thought I understood, but I don’t think we went the way they said to go. J We ended up walking out the garage and around to the front of the hotel to the reception area to get directions…in the cold…without our jackets. We walked as fast as we could! Nancy said the hotel was very touristy, so everyone would be able to speak at least a little bit of English. We finally found the pool area and changed into our swimsuits. It was painfully quiet in the pool area, so I didn't feel like we could make any noise.
The pool was very nice and just shallow enough that I could stand (which was good because the girls both held on to me at different times). It was large and had an area where there were jets. The pool also went outside to another big pool area. Of course there was snow everywhere and the air was especially frigid, so we swam out there, looked around and promptly swam back inside. I was looking forward to swimming for an hour or so, getting some exercise and working on my strokes, but the girls were bored and didn’t like the pool, so we got out. The girls wanted to go back to the apartment. I asked them what they thought we were going to do once we got back and they didn’t know, but they were done swimming. We only swam for about 15 minutes, if that.
We got back to the locker room and took showers, got dressed again and dried our hair. We handed in the locker keys and headed back upstairs to walk back to the garage. When we got back to where the car was parked, the door to the building was locked and we couldn’t get in. We tried the cell phone, but the battery died, so we couldn’t call Nancy to come let us in. So what could we do? We walked back to the registration desk. I told the girls we were “making memories!”
We aksed the registration lady for directions. Long story short, we had to go back outside to find the building and ended up going into two wrong ones before finding the correct one, but the door was locked. By that time it was dark outside and the girls were cold! Helena finally thought to look at the business card and sure enough, they were registered on the door under the business name, not their last name. We rang and they opened the door for us. The girls were so thankful to get warm again.
We arrived and were served dinner: cow cheek, mushrooms and gravy, and potato balls. It was very good and very filling. For dessert, we had a type of apple crisp and vanilla ice cream. It was delicious! The girls watched cartoons for the rest of the evening. I looked at a magazine pictures, watched a little TV and prayed the time would go by quickly. The men smoked several cigars. I was thankful for fresh air.
Everyone was extremely nice and wished me a nice stay in Germany and hoped I would be able to stay for a long time. I never really understand how people can say that because they didn’t really get to know me at all. I have to assume (and pray) they saw the Lord in me somehow and were struck by that.
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