Late Nights, Toaster Ovens, and Dodging the Chocolate Breakdown

HeLLooooo everyone!

Wow it's definitely been longer than a week since I last updated. Shame on me! It's a good thing I write things down in my agenda, otherwise I wouldn't remember a daggam thing. And that's just because I am really busy.

Last weekend was a pretty slow weekend. The highlight was going to Cologne for the Worship Night they had there (see pics and videos on Facebook). That was just so cool. I was like a mini- Passion conference. We had the David Crowder of the German world, ya'll! Ok, maybe not that good, but still good. It is sooo neat to worship and celebrate and pray to God in another language.

Monday is grocery shopping day... so last week and this week I grocery shopped. I also grocery shopped today, because I finally figured out what to make for Thursday... the Student Government (called AStA here) is sponsoring an evening of international cuisine... we're all supposed to make something to bring along and I decided to make "western sandwiches", a recipe I discovered in my Healthy College Cookbook, and macaroni and cheese... from scratch. I tested out the sandwich today and it is amazing, so I am really excited about that. I'd like to make the sandwich and cut it into triangles and stick a toothpick through it, just for kicks. Not excited about making the mac n' cheese, but we'll see how it turns out.

Last week I stayed up laaaaaate Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday watching movies. Last Monday we went to see a movie called Lissi und der wilde Kaiser. I was very surprised to see how much I understood of the movie. I always doubt my skillz, yo. After the movie we went to a billiard hall/bar and I had hot chocolate and played a game of billiards... I lost, of course. Then we took Kito (guy visiting from Iowa/Cali) to the train station and ate at McDonalds and his train was like an hour late. We met an American randomly at the train station... he was fro Missouri and had met and married his wife while studying abroad in Hamburg 35 years ago! How crazy.

Tuesday night we all went to a "Sneak Preview" at the same theater and also went to McDonalds afterward. This time, though, I only ate ice cream. No cheeseburger and fries for me, man! Although I was proud of myself on Monday for not overdoing it, like more than a small-sized anything, that is. Honestly I don't remember a lot of what I did on Tuesday day, but I think I exercised. YES I did, I did exercise! Excellent.

Wednesday I ate lunch with friends and that evening Viktor hosted a film at his place for the Spaniards... I of course was there as well, lol. Got home late that night as well, and went to class on Thursday morning at 10. I did pretty good on my first translation. It always looks scary when you first get the text to translate, but then it gets easier as you dive into actually translating it.

I forgot to mention that I had sort of obtained a side job... I will soon be "contracted" as the official "english corrector" for some department on campus... I responded to an ad which resulting in my obtaining a 20 page document on bird flu in German newspapers to correct. It took me 6.5 hours and I earned over $70 :-) YAY! Exciting. So they'll be contacting me later to do some more work... in the mean time, I'm thinking of advertising a bit ;-)

Thursday I am pretty sure Viktor and I ate all three meals together... lol... yep we sure did, that is funny. Thursday is normally the "party night" for students here in Koblenz, and I was gonna go with some girlfriends dancing but, I felt like staying home. Sooo I went to bed, but woke up the next morning with the biggest freakin' headache EVER. I attempted to work out but I just couldn't make it to the end, so whatever. I felt better as the day went on. Met Melanie for lunch that afternoon, and Kathrin at 3pm for a little chit-chat. That was nice to see her!! I had dinner at Viktor's...... we had something quite unusual for dinner but it was really yummy... like these ravioli pasta thingers with sour cream and french fried onions... it totally surprised me how good it was, and I'll admit I doubted it would taste good in the least. We went to a birthday party and then to another party someplace else which was really fun, they had cool music and so I danced a lot. It felt good to dance!! "You can dance if you want to, you can leave your friends behind...!"
LOL

Anyway so Saturday der Schatz and I caught a train to Cochem and his dad picked us up there. We dropped off his parents at some friends' or relatives' or whoever's house and we visited some volcanic lakes. It was SO SO SO cold we couldn't stay long and I didn't take many pictures. I don't know a lot about volcanic lakes. But there were 3 of them, and we visited two. The second was pretty, there was a little church next to it that had the prettiest graves (weird I know, but hey, they looked nice!) so I took a few pics of that... we were going to walk to an observatory tower but I decided that I didn't want to because it was too stinkin' cold and we left and as soon as we got to the car it started raining... perfect timing!! We had a hot chocolate (best I've had since I got here!) and rented the movie Silent Hill to watch later since Viktor had never seen it... we even rented it during happy hour so it was 1/2 price, yo. So we went back to get his parents and ended up staying and eating, which was nice. There was cake, so I was happy ;-) j/k, it was a nice time. I felt kind of awkward being there because everyone was speaking Russian to each other for one, and for two the gathering was a sort of anniversary remembrance gathering for the host's son who had *cringe* committed suicide 6 months earlier. So yeah. Viktor and I spoke English instead of German, and he translated the Russian for me if I asked (like if everyone laughed or something, lol). Anyway we watched the movie and then went over to one of his friend's house to watch another movie (Wild Hogs) which was sooo freakin' funny. It was a really funny movie. We watched Silent Hill again but about a third of the way into it I fell asleep and woke up when it was over, lol... I amaze myself at how easily I can fall asleep sometimes and get so frustrated when I can't fall asleep....

Slept in laaaaaaaaate on Sunday, and got the train back to Koblenz at 6pm. Had to wait a while for the bus, but at least they were functioning... crazy thing was, earlier last week a live bomb was found at a construction site in the center of town, from World War II!! And so Sunday they blocked off the entire city until 2pm so they could defuse it and remove it. Wild, huh??

Sunday night I bought myself a toaster oven on Amazon and it got here this morning. The same DHL guy woke me up for the 3rd time, but it was exciting to get my toaster and my alarm was gonna go off in 5 minutes anyway. I worked out with my friend Friederike at 10am for about an hour, and we went grocery shopping at 12:30... got all my stuff for Thursday and all. She's coming over this evening to test out the oven with me; we're going to make mini pizzas, yum!!

Ok, so in regard to "Dodging the Chocolate Breakdown"... I am out of Nutella. And I refuse to buy more. BUT, I get headaches if I don't eat at least a little sugar. So, what I have resolved to do is this: out shopping today I found a box of little skinny chocolate bars... there are 11 of them and they are just a perfect size and less than 100 cals a pop. They taste really good and having them individually wrapped like that really helps with portion control. So I think if I have a craving I'll just stick with that and that way I can avoid The Breakdown by not having a giant jar of Nutella lurking in the cabinet. No, it really does lurk!! I'm serious!!

Anyway so I plan to go over to campus to the computer lab this afternoon for a bit so I can print a few things for class on Thursday and not have to worry about them tomorrow... then Rike will be here around 6pm and we'll make our mini pizzas. YUM I can't wait. Then the Spaniards are having a Spanish film evening, I MIGHT MIGHT MIGHT go watch the movie. But I want to work out tomorrow, so we'll see.

Ok so this time I covered all of the things in my title, I'm content, ha ha...


Cheers,
Caitlin