Tuesday was the Lehrerwandertag (teacher hiking day - gotta love those German compound words). Almost all of the teachers went and the kids got a half-day off of school. We all got on a chartered bus at the school, where the second foreign language department (who were in charge of organizing the hiking this year) gave us all some sort of fried meat pie, a bottle of water, and offered us all a mini bottle of champagne, which I declined since that did not seem like the best pre-hiking idea. As we got on the bus, I felt rather dumb because I didn't recognize a lot of the people there. Had I really been so unobservant? Then one of the other teachers mentioned that she had been talking to a retired colleague that she hadn't seen in a while, and everything made sense. German retired teachers come out of the woodwork to participate in hiking day.
After we drove for a bit, we arrived in a village near Weimar. We then hiked under 2 miles along a path to the German Bee Museum which also had a cafe where we all had coffee and cake. (Eating was the real theme of the day. I should've expected this by this point...Germans love to eat.) I was with the last few stragglers of the group, and we were trying to figure out where the entrance to the cafe area was. An older man outside the museum pointed us in the right direction, but said that a huge hiking group had just gone in, so we might not find a seat. He didn't realize that we were with the hiking group! As soon as we walked inside, all four of us started cracking up.
I ended up sitting at a picnic table near the Ilm (a river) with one of the English teachers, three teachers I only knew by sight, one of the interns, and a man that none of us knew. German etiquette says that if someone is sitting by themselves, it's okay to sit with them as long as you ask if the seats are still free, so we did that. Anyhow, the intern for some reason started talking about how he only ate 5 days out of the week because it's healthier and on the other two days he only ate 500 g of food. The man we didn't know said "Oh, so you could eat two of these, eh?" and pulled this weird green capsule out of his pocket, which turned out to be a poppy pod sort of thing that I think you use to make drugs. It was just a very odd experience. At least the coffee was good, but I don't drink it very often so I was very wired for the rest of the afternoon.
After that was over we walked from Weimar through the park where Goethe's Gartenhaus is, where it started to rain. In typical German fashion, everyone else had a rain coat and an umbrella, while I was wearing a sweatshirt and thought I had put my umbrella in my bag but was mistaken, so a few different teachers took turns letting me walk under their umbrella so that I wouldn't catch cold and die. It stopped raining pretty shortly, though, and we walked the rest of the way to the restaurant where we had a buffet dinner. I had grilled chicken, bread, salad, and corn. The dessert was all fruit, which I, as a rule, disapprove of. Dessert should be a reward and I generally consider eating fruit to be a chore. (If I have to choose between fruit and vegetables, I choose vegetables always.) After that everyone went out on the patio and talked - the English teachers gave me a gift card to the bookstore and a nice card thanking me for working there this year. It was very nice, but I was exhausted when I got home.
On Thursday I watched the World Cup match-up of death, Germany vs. America, with my Bible study group at an Italian restaurant right in front of the courthouse. The setting was beautiful, and we had some really good pizza! At the start of the game, I embarrassed most of the group by singing along with the American national anthem, but luckily one of the other girls in the group did a year in the US and sang with me. The other patrons of the restaurant stared at me. Then I was fully prepared to sing along with the German anthem as well, except that the other Germans didn't sing! How strange! After that it just got pretty embarrassing for me, especially since Jermaine Jones ran into a referee and another American in the course of the game. After the game was over, we went to someone's apartment and played Dixit, which I really liked although I suspect that everyone was saying really easy clues so that I could understand them as well.
I also finished my cross-stitch project!
And I saw a dead bird in between the grocery store and my apartment yesterday. Exciting, right?
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