It has been alternately boring and interesting here, at least to read about. On Thursday, the highlight of my day was that I found the post office in Dettingen. Reason #1 I could not find it before: it is located in a basement. I'm not even trying to be funny. There's small store that's attached to someone's house, but the store is one of those ones where it's in the basement but you can enter from the street. The post office is in there, and the entrance is at the back on the house. I saw that I had the right address, and I was kind of thinking, hmmm, I think I'm in the wrong place, I'll go in this nice little parking lot and turn around. While I was turning around I saw the Deutsche Post logo. It's not even really a post office; it's more like, the lady who runs the store also sells stamps.


Friday was also slightly exciting. We collected all of the apples from the apple tree in the front yard. It was kind of fun--Stefan got up in the tree and would shake the branches in a certain part and then wait while we all ran around and collected them. It was pretty much only me and Stephanie collecting apples, while the kids "helped". There were a ton though; there is a store that takes the apples to make apple juice and gives out credits towards future purchases of juice, and Stefan said that when they took the apples there, the store said they weighed 150 kg.


Saturday=day of excitement. I went to my German class in the morning, which was fine. We did more stuff with conjunctive, which is getting a little old, but at least now I remember how to say that stuff. Last week all the stuff we did was like, "I would like to make more money." This week we progressed to, "If I made more money, I would buy a lot of gummi bears," and other such complex sentence structures.


After class on Saturday I went to Ulm, which was really nice! I'd only been there on a train stopover so I didn't see much, but it's a really beautiful city. I definitely plan on going back. I of course went shopping and bought two skirts at H&M (only 5 euros each!), then walked through the Fischerviertel (Fisher's Quarter) which was so nice! It was all cobblestone streets and cute German houses and little canals. Then I walked along the old city wall, which runs right along the Donau River (the Danube, in English--why do we always change the names of perfectly pronounceable things?). The Donau is the border between Baden-Wuerttemberg and Bayern (Bavaria--again with the name-change!), so of course I had to walk over the bridge just to say I walked to Bayern. After that I walked around a little bit more, then went into the Muenster, which has the highest church tower in the world. Unfortunately I didn't walk up because I had all my German books with me (those suckers are surprisingly heavy), but next time I'm there I'm totally doing that. The church is amazing though. Like every church in Europe, it's elaborate and ornate and all that typical stuff, but mostly it's just HUGE inside. I took a few pictures, but there's no way to get a sense of how big it is without seeing it in person. It doesn't even look that big from the outside--it mostly just looks tall.

I eventually took the train back from Ulm, got picked up by my fam, and we went home, where I had to eat dinner super fast so that I could shower before going to the youth group. I'm really glad that I decided to go again because this time ended up being a lot better. I rode with two girls who live in a nearby town, and they were really nice. At the youth group it was better too, I think partly because we watched a movie instead of talking about junk I didn't understand. Afterwards, I felt a lot more comfortable hanging out with the people there. There were more people there, which helped, and they also weren't so shy/awkward. I think my German must be getting better too, because I felt more able to participate in the conversations. Last time was tough because not only was there a language barrier, I also didn't know the people. This time I knew them a little better plus I can speak a little better.