My class is still going well, if a bit slowly. I'm still amazed by how international the group is - it's like a miniature world in the classroom. Since I posted last week, four more people have joined the class - one from Bangladesh, one from Sri Lanka, one from Paraguay, and one from Vietnam. It's so fun to be in the middle of so many different cultures! And I am getting to know a few of them, too. As I mentioned last week, two of the women are from France, and I'm surprisingly able to remember enough of the French I learned at St. Thomas to communicate with them. Not perfectly, of course, but good enough. One of the women invited a few of us over to her house tomorrow after class for homemade quiche! I'm pretty excited about that. Also, last week a few of us had tea at the woman from South Korea's apartment. We've all exchanged phone numbers and email addresses, so I'm sure we'll continue to be in touch, and hopefully after the course ends, too.
The weather here has been really strange lately. It was really nice last Friday - maybe in the 50s, - but then it got cold again and has been snowing off and on yesterday and today. Aengus and I timed our walk well yesterday, but got stuck in a super windy snowfall today. I guess in a typical winter, Muenster gets about 10 minutes of snow, and this year I would say there have already been at least 7 or 8 snowfalls. It's kind of nice for a native Minnesotan like me.
I haven't mentioned before what brilliant recyclers the Germans are. They separate waste into four categories - bottles, bio, which is for anything organic, true trash, and another one that holds most of what I would think of as true trash. It's called the "yellow bag", and it's for any kind of packaging, wrapping, plastic stuff, cans, etc. And, to give you an idea of how much they actually do recycle, the yellow bag gets picked up every week, and the true trash only every other week. It's pretty cool, really.
Oh, and the North Sea! Martin had been asking me for weeks - months, probably - if I wanted to check it out. I've heard from several Germans how nice it is, particularly the Dutch coast, so I conceded and agreed to bring Aengus and go. We went to Egmond aan Zee, and although it was super windy and quite cold, it was really beautiful. We took a 10K walk up to the next town, and Aengus loved running on the beach and through the sand dunes. Here are a few pics:
The sand dunes:
On the way back, we took a driving tour through Amsterdam. It was awesome to see the sights there again. Upon arriving in the city, though, one of the first sights we saw was this - a Dodge pickup with confederate flag stickers:
I'm pretty sure I was in Amsterdam and not Mississippi, though.Here are a few more photos, but they're really not that great since we didn't get out of the car. Next time I'll go without Aengus.
I don't see too many of these in Muenster, but versions of it appear all over the Netherlands:
Pretty sweet way to get yourself and your child around town!I guess that's about it for now, but I hope to have more soon. Take good care, and be well!
Until next time...
1 comment:
The lady with the kid on the bike better watch out for shouting Englishwomen!
"Oh shut up!"
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