Almost over....

Has it really only been a month since my last update? It feels much longer.

As I am writing this, Willow and Rendy are on a plane back home. Simon comes home tomorrow, and it's slowly been sinking in that his return is the LAST thing I have to look forward to before going home. After he left, I was able to comfort myself by remembering that I was going to Switzerland and Italy. Once I was in Italy, I was able to comfort myself by the fact that I'd be going back to Diethardt to see the family again (and meet the new kitty!). Upon returning to Diethardt, I was still able to be excited about the fact that I'd be seeing Simon again, but after tomorrow, I think it's going to really sink in that my year here is OVER. Of course I still have things to look forward to back home: seeing my 22-month old goddaughter again (I haven't seen her since she was a BABY: I talked to her once on the phone, but it was obvious she had no idea and didn't care who I was; nevertheless her mother had taught her to repeat the words "I love you, Amy!" which nearly brought me to tears!), seeing my family again (and my doggy!), going back to school, starting my training with Wycliffe, teaching Sunday School again! Nevertheless, I'm going to miss my GERMAN life terribly.

Way too much happened in the past month for me to possibly write everything, but I'll at least try to reconstruct a rough timeline (more for my own benefit than for anyone else's, since I never got around to keeping a journal).

July 12th, Saturday. The family left to go on vacation. Jack Johnson. AMAZING.

July 13th, Sunday. Ferdi drove Rendy and me to the train station where he boarded an ICE train to Basel to visit a girl that he'd met traveling, and I went to Tübingen for the end-of-the-year barbecue for Willow's program.

July 14th, Monday. I camped on the Swiss shore of the Bodensee with just a sleeping bag and a tarp, and after it rained the entire day, I began to reevaluate whether it was really a good idea for Rendy and I to plan our trip in to the alps without a tent.

July 15th, Tuesday. Rendy met me first thing in the morning and we rented bicycles ("Velos") from the Swiss train station in Rorschach. We left our luggage in the lockers there, and took off coasting along the shores of the lake. The weather was GORGEOUS, and after eating breakfast in Switzerland, we had lunch in Austria (at McDonald's, of all places), and dinner with Frank in Friedrichshafen. After dinner, Frank showed us around his University (the first private Uni I've ever seen in Germany, with a gorgeous campus right on the shore of the lake), and then we crashed on his couch. His apartment was tiny, but after having seen Jorden's brother's in Holland, I've learned to appreciate space!

July 16th, Wednesday. Our butts were SORE from the previous day, so we took it a little bit easier. We rode from Friedrichshafen to Meersburg, but then we took a break from bicycling and rented a paddle boat to go out on the lake a little bit. We had no bathing suits with us, but the weather was so nice we jumped in in our clothes, and Rendy nearly lost his shorts! We ended the day by taking the ferry from Meersburg to Konstanz, where Willow's friend Evan had agreed to let us crash in his apartment. Problem was...Evan had only given us his street address and forgotten to include his apartment number! This was a bit disconcerting when we discovered that he lived in a 7-story student housing complex.... Luckily, all the students' names were listed on the mailboxes, and only because I had just seen his name on a telephone list in Tübingen did I know that his real name is Gilbert Lopez. We searched the mailboxes up and down, but although we found S. Lopez, A. Lopez, and H. Lopez, there was no G. Lopez or E. Lopez. Finally, however, I spotted the name of someone else from Willow's exchange program: K. Smith, whose last name I only happened to know because we are friends on Facebook. Lucky for me, K. Smith is very good friends with Gilbert Evan Lopez and was able to point me to his apartment right away (whose real name, it turns out once again, is not even Gilbert, but the Mexican spelling "Hilberto". H. Lopez. I should have thought of that). Anyway, Evan's apartment was considerably larger than Franks, but he doesn't even have a couch, so Rendy and I got practice for our zukunftige Wanderung in die Alpen.

July 17th, Thursday. Only two more days until my 24th birthday! (the keyboard just bugged out and that almost came out reading "2th" birthday...) It was pouring down rain when we woke up, so we were forced to abandon our ambitions of getting an early start on the last day of our bicycling tour. In fact, we postponed the start of our trip as long as we possibly could without wearing out our welcome at Evan's apartment (he had apologized in advance for the fact that he was just finishing up a very stressful semester and wouldn't have much time to be a good host). We first made our way to Woolworths where Karin and Evan had informed us we could get a cheap tent, cause our little blue tarp would not have been big enough for both Rendy and me with our stuff if it rained like that in the Alps. It cost 20€ and weighed only 2 kilos, so we decided it was definitely worth it. We then had breakfast at McD's (I know what you are thinking...again?? and it was still not to be the last time we would eat McD's on the trip...) while we tried to dry off and warm up (it was only about a kilometer from Evan's apartment to the train station, but trotzdem waren wir klatschnass, that's how hard it was raining!). We even hung out at the mall a bit to kill time, and I found two pairs of Tom Tailor shorts for Rendy for under 15€ each (Frank asked us: "Are you sure they are Tom Tailor and not Tim Toolar?"). Finally, we had to admit that the rain was NOT going to stop, so we bought train tickets back to Rorschach to make sure we got the "Velos" back by the agreed time. The lady at the Swiss train station in Konstanz sold us tickets at the reduced rate because of our German Bahncards, but the tickets we had to buy for the bicycles cost us more than both of our own tickets combined. It was truly disappointing. Back at the trainstation when Rendy was unable to locate the key for the locker where he had left his stuff, we attempted to reconstruct the scene where we had stowed the backpacks in the locker, and slowly came to the realization that he must have left the key hanging in the locker, and to our very great dismay we discovered his locker to be empty. We went immediately to the service counter where I explained to the man in my best Hochdeutsch what had happened, and asked whether any of Rendy's stuff had been left in Lost-and-Found. Without even asking what the bag looked like, however, he responded simply "no" with a bluntness that we later discovered to be quite as normal in Switzerland as it is in Germany. I, however, was unsatisfied with his response. "I'm sorry," I began, trying to stay as calm as possible, "Maybe I asked the wrong question. IF (hypothetically speaking) Rendy's bags HAD been turned in, where would they have been brought?" The man responded brusquely that they would have been brought to him, but repeated that they had not. "Can you at least check???" I asked, irritated that he hadn't even asked to know what sort of bags I was inquiring about. He responded in a tone that would have been considered quite rude by American standards that I was welcome to check for myself, and he unlocked the room into a back storage area, where it was plain to see that no backpacks were stored. That was the point where I changed my strategy. "Look," I said, in a tone that was obviously fishing for sympathy, "There was absolutely nothing of value in that bag. There is no reason someone would have wanted to steal it. It MUST still be SOMEWHERE around here! Where is the police station? Maybe someone turned it in there. How about the dumpsters? Maybe someone rummaged through it, and threw it away when they realized there was nothing of value." The man assured me that the dumpsters were locked, so no one would have been able to throw away a backpack of any size, but he seemed to take me a little more seriously when I mentioned going to the police. "Why is it so important to you to have it back, if there's nothing of value in the bag?" He spoke this sentence, however, in such a way that I detected he was starting to have a little bit of sympathy with us. I explained our situation in what was probably a little more detail than he wanted, but nevertheless it seemed to have the desired effect. I told him that we were Americans who however lived in Germany, and we were supposed to be on vacation until mid-August, but since we didn't have that much money, we were planning to go backpacking, and even though it was only clothes and toiletries in the backpack, it was all we had to last us for an entire month, unless we were to cut our trip short. By the end of the story, the man motioned to me to follow him to the back of the train station. He showed me the locked dumpsters, and dutifully unlocked one by one to show me that there were no backpacks inside, but his attitude was no longer one of "I told you so", but rather of wanting to show us that he really did understand the difficult situation we were in, and would have liked to help if there was anything he could have done. As we reached the last dumpster, I still hadn't run out of hope, but I was definitely running out of ideas, but at that very moment, a janitor walked by, and the gentleman asked him whether he'd found any lost luggage around the locker area. "Actually...." said the janitor in a thick accent, and I almost couldn't believe my ears when he said that in a shopping cart behind the train station they had found a large, heavy, blue backpack. The man didn't even have to ask me whether that fit the description of the bag I was looking for, because I was nearly jumping up and down as the janitor showed us the way back to the room where he had stored the bag. Of course it was Rendy's (it would have been too much if it had been a different big, heavy, blue backpack), and except for a couple of the snacks we had packed for our backpacking trip, EVERYTHING was still inside. Just like I had thought, it had probably been a homeless guy who found it, discovered that there was food inside, and left the rest behind. Needless to say, we didn't let our bags out of our sight again after that, and we camped that night in a town called Buchs on the banks of the Rhine river.

July 18th, Friday. It had rained off and on that night and into the next morning, so we didn't start our backpacking trip that day, but rather decided to stay a second night in Buchs and spend a day exploring the tiny country of Liechtenstein. It was, as Rendy had anticipated, NOT a very interesting country (as opposed to Luxembourg, which had DEFINITELY been worth the day I spent exploring there), and we couldn't even afford to have lunch there so we walked back across the border (about 8 km from our campsite, it took us about an hour), treated ourselves to lunch at a Swiss Pizzeria, and bought groceries for the following day.

July 19th, Saturday. My 24th birthday! We had bought cake for breakfast (a German tradition), and packed up our tent, then boarded a train to Chur, where we were planning to begin our journey. Chur proudly holds the title of oldest city in Switzerland, but except for a quaint Altstadt, didn't have that much to offer us as tourists. Nevertheless, we found a bookstore where for 8 Franks (almost exactly $8), I bought a Swiss-German phrasebook. I had already been picking up a couple of words: "Grüezi" is the Swiss equivalent of the Bayrisch phrase "Grüss Gott", "Velo" means Fahrrad, "Poulet" means Hähnchen, and even in the German-speaking part of Switzerland they say "Merci" instead of Danke (and when they do say "Danke", it's followed by "Vielmal": "Danke vielmal" instead of "Vielen Dank" or "Danke Schön". I even heard a couple of times "Merci Vielmal"!). Our reason for wanting to start in Chur was that there was a chairlift that would allow us to get a nearly thousand meter headstart in our ascent into the alps. The plan was to head pretty much straight south from Chur over several peaks whose names I can't look up right now because Rendy still has our Topo map and they are not named on Google Maps, but long story short, we were in much worse shape than we expected, and had to go much slower than anticipated. To be precise, RENDY was in much worse shape than he we expected. Don't get me wrong: he's still in better shape than I am, but I always knew that I was in poor shape. For some reason, he and I had both expected him to be much faster than he actually was, especially when ascending.

July 20th, Sunday. My cousin's birthday! Taking a break from writing. I'll try to finish when I can...