Much Ado About Littles: Wet 'n' Wild 'n' Mostly Cold

Anja finally slept well last night. Ian was up every few hours. I would alternate between giving him a show to watch or a bottle to drink. But his sleep pattern was basically: sleep, bottle, sleep, Bubble Guppies. repeat. My sleep pattern was slightly different: suspect Ian isn't sleeping, get confirmation, put him down, fall asleep with him screaming for 20 minutes, wake up to suspect Ian isn't sleep, put on Bubble Guppies, repeat.

Susi had a meeting in the morning with the kids and we skipped it entirely. It seemed more important to try and convince Anja to eat a breakfast than it was to try and get everything out the door any earlier than we did. The students had a swim-morning planned and we joined them at the "Freibad" which is a nice out-door water park with a few pools, including a children's pool with a small water slide.

It rained. It rained and it was cold. Neither of those two weather conditions prevented Anja from having a thoroughly good time in the water. She loved the slide, loved the foam water balls, the water fountains, everything. I was just glad I had a hearty breakfast because the chill went straight through me. Had I slept, I would have probably been in a better mood but cold+wet is not a good equation for me regardless of my treatment by the Sandman.

After swimming, we returned home to concoct a plan for lunch. Despite the great kindness of our host, we really did not have the necessary items to make a lunch. Nor did we have time to run to a major grocery store like Real. Instead Susi and I went in our little VW van down to the Aldi-esque grocery store in town called "Lidl." Lidl is a fascinating little grocery store. Featuring every item you could really desire in a grocery store, including but not limited to:

- Fashion! Well, "clothes in a bag," but they did have "New Fashion Denim Skirts" (translated) and "Trendy T-shirts" (literally, this was on the bag).

- Power tools! A cordless electric drill was available for 30 Euros!

- Booze! Because, damn it Minnesota, booze is a grocery store item!

While we didn't get any fashion items, power tools, or booze, and I really tried to find booze worth drinking, we went home to make some lunch. I made up some traditional German fare with sausages and sauerkraut. With no sleep and a full evening ahead, Susi and Emily let me take a nap. Naps are glorious. I wish Ian would take them.

I needed to be awoken by Susi pushing on my nose. Yelling was ineffective she claimed. I'm not sure she tried or whether she just wanted to poke my nose. Regardless, we needed to get some phones. Obviously, we are not living with our primary host this trip and it would be nice if Susi and I could contact each other while apart, without incurring substantial charges to our regular cell phones. And since we weren't going to be staying long we thought some prepaid arrangements would be a nice way to go.

German cell-phone sales staff must not make a terrible amount of money on prepaid cell phone sales. It also didn't help that the USB-stick she recommended didn't work particularly well with Macs. In all honesty, it works just fine now, but I don't know enough German to explain the concept of "updated drivers" to someone. They probably didn't know enough about computers to understand what I was saying even after I crossed the language barrier. I decided I could get it working with updated drivers and paid the little amount of money it took to escape the office with the hardware I needed. I will skip some of the drama with my "o.tel.o" USB stick and SIM card but recommend that anyone looking to this type of travel get Vodafone or T-mobile. "o.tel.o" is technically Vodafone but, really, it's Vodafone without any support and without a website that makes recharging your SIM easy. The other two have both of those things and have better connectivity.

I was at least able to get enough pieces of hardware working at the same time to have my weekly staff meeting with Ben and Zach. Things are going well at work, even without me there on a Monday, we haven't scared off any customers or burned the building down. All signs point to success.

We've found some play grounds for the kids to use around town but the real fun was for Anja at tonight's "Welcome Dinner." I've historically found that when new people are handling a program, and they are nervous about its success, something will undoubtably go wrong. I find that our German hosts got fairly lucky as the only failure of the Welcome Dinner was the food arriving roughly an hour late. At least it felt like an hour. It may have only been 20 or 30 minutes but Emily and I intentionally came 20 minutes late with the kids and it was another 20 minutes before there was any food on a table. In the interim we were entertained by a student band, with the ever catchy name, "Catchy Tune." They played all American rock 'n' roll, loudly and with a heavy German accent. I won't be too harsh on the boys as the oldest didn't look like he could order his own beer. And the drinking age here is 16.

None of this mattered to Anja. Micheal, one of our German hosts, has brought his expansive collection of sporting equipment to the welcome dinner. Anja entertained the high-school-aged-girls with her dancing antics -- more than once asking me to get off of her "stage." "Stage" being defined as the top-most step of the staircase. And she then had an entire group of high school boys playing frisbee and attempting to hula-hoop with her.