Pfingsten

Hello dear readers! It's been an exciting couple of weeks...

Here's a belated picture of me with my cake! I got to eat THE WHOLE THING. It was awesome.

I made a list of things I want to do while 23. One of the items was "make my own pop." So here is my attempt...I got my recipe from foodnetwork.com. I made peach-strawberry soda.

To start with I made a simple syrup, then cut up the strawberries and peaches and put all of that in the blender with lemon juice & zest.

Then I blended it together and added sparkling water. It was good, but too sweet for me.

Lidl's having America week again, so I got some popcorn for the microwave. (As opposed to microwave popcorn for some other appliance?)

On Saturday Cathy, Doria, and Melody came to visit. I showed them Erfurt a bit and we made fajitas for dinner. It was delicious! (And rather hot outside...) Then on Sunday we went hiking at the Kyffhaeuser. Since the entire train station was closed for Pentecost weekend so that the train station can be improved to accommodate the new high-speed line from Berlin-Munich that should be completed in 3 years, we had to take a bus from the train station to Erfurt Ost, where we caught our first train.

 On the way, we had 30 minutes between trains, so we found a playground!

Once in Berga, we had to take a bus from the train station up to the park. This bus was just a van, and we had to call in advance to make sure it would stop for us! Once we got to the top, the view was great!

This is the Kyffhaueuser memorial. It's a gigantic statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I - it's built there because according to German legend, Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa is sleeping in a cave in this area until Germany needs to be united and some people believed that Wilhelm I was the fulfillment of this legend. We went all the way to the top - it was pretty much a really long & narrow spiral staircase

There was some sort of VW club there as well. Through the middle arch you can kind of make out the statue of Barbarossa.

There was a second tower that we also climbed. It wasn't as pretty to look at though.

After we finished looking at the tower, we found a nice place to eat our picnic lunch. Then we wandered for a few more minutes before deciding that it was too hot & going to an ice cream shop where we all had apple juice and then made the lady there mad because we ordered 1 large bowl of ice cream and 3 spoons. After that we took the van-bus back down to the station where I left Melody, Cathy, and Doria because our towns are in opposite directions. It was a great day!

Yesterday was Pfingstmontag or Pentecost Monday, which is a national holiday in Germany so everything was closed again. I went over to one of my teacher's house in Vieselbach. Her house was huge and had a really cool enclosed porch upstairs along with a huge garden. We ate lunch and went to a French horn concert at the local church.