This day I knew my nose and throat were about to pull another London on me. My head hurt like crazy when I woke up, I felt the snot running down my throat, and my nose ran continuously despite the medication I took. After blowing my nose several million times before we left the snot finally stopped dripping. Let me tell you, I hate colds. They always seem to find me. Maybe I should just paint my nose red and then they'd leave me alone thinking I was already taken by some sort of virus. Na that wouldn't work, they'd just think that I was already hurt, why not take advantage of the situation. Nasty, conniving little twerps. That'd be the cold.
To help fight off the cold I got mostly fluids for breakfast, making sure at the same time that I had something hot and got plenty of vitamins and ooooh what's the fancy health word.... Ah well. I gave my body nutrition to fight off the nasties. That's my summed up version of what I did.
After we checked out we jumped into the car where Ahmee and Poppy had a fun time navigating their way back onto the highway. Let me tell you, those highways are like gigantic spaghetti-junctions. An absolute nightmare if you don't know what town you're headed towards and if your eyes aren't quite fast enough. Luckily our combined eyes and knowledge of which direction we needed enabled us to pick the right forks. We didn't have to turn around once. Well, other than the roundabouts, but those don't count!
After we got on the highway and were headed in the right direction I pulled out the computer and started typing my blogs. Basically, I was a bad girl in France. For a bit there I didn't write. I caught up quite a bit at Giverny and had only a few more days to write, but I still needed to make sure they got written. I saved Giverny for last because I knew I was going to want to spend a ton of time writing it. That one blog was going to HAVE to take up several pages, otherwise it would not be even close to being good enough.
The entire time we were on the road I was writing. Unlike the past few days I was able to type without feeling completely nauseated. I caught up with all of my blogs except for today and for Giverny. I decided I would save that one for later to add tons and tons of details. Just like I wanted to.
It wasn't long before we passed from the Netherlands to Germany. When I looked out the window I saw one thing that was similar between the two countries and that was that many of the farmers had apple orchards. Another common crop was corn. Quite often Ahmee and Poppy would say, "What type of plant do you think that was? It had awfully curly leaves... Perhaps it was____?" I never knew exactly what the crop in question was. I've never seen it grown in large fields and we don't like vegetable gardens so I wouldn't recognize it even from up close.
Something that was different was the architecture. The German homes that I saw at first had very wide houses whose roofs reached far down so that the house seemed to mostly consist of tiling. Many of these houses were farm houses.
After entered Germany it didn't take long to reach Cloppenburg where we decided we'd stay the night. My dad had sent me information in an email a short time after we'd started this trip. The information he sent me gave me information about the Tobe family and where in Germany we were from. I went from knowing we were "somewhere in the Black Forest" to knowing that the Tobe's were located in one of two little towns close to Cloppenburg. However, I did not know this immediately. I had read the email, but I had forgotten the information. I had copied and pasted the information to a word document that I had saved as GERMAN INFO so that even if we didn't have internet access I could still access that particular email.
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When we pulled into the Cloppenburg information center I knew we were going to be looking for a hotel, what I didn't know was that Ahmee was going to ask where we could find information on the Tobe family. The people at the tourist information center spoke English to us and then would break out in German between themselves for ages trying to figure out what would work best for us. In the end we got the locations of three different internet cafe's, a website that would bring up your family history, the name of a local museum that showed the way that German people lived, the area the post office was in, and several hotel suggestions (none of which we took because they were too expensive). We got all of this in about 20 minutes time. The only reason it took so long in there was the two people were searching for a proper church where I might be able to look up information on the Tobe's. They did give me a name, but we ended up not needing it.
After we left the information center we went to the town post office. We got postage stamps and sent postcards to family members and friends. Ahmee and I both sent something to Iain's Momma Pat. Shortly after we walked out of the post office we found the hotel we were going to stay in, the name of the hotel was Hotel Schlomer. We parked around the back of the building and then headed upstairs to drop off our things. After that we hurried out into the streets of Cloppenburg. Most of the streets we were on were walkers only (except for special cases). While we enjoyed looking in the shop windows and looking at all the buildings and people, we weren't out for just a joy-walk. We had a mission and that was to find and use one of the three internet cafe's that was in the area. The first one we stopped in was filled with smoke. We asked if they had wifi (I suspected that none of the cafes would), when the answer was no we walked out and kept moving, glad to get out of the haze of smoke.
The next cafe we stopped in didn't have wifi either and we had issues with the guy in charge because he didn't understand us and we didn't understand him (when this happens it's good to us simple words, talk slowly, and use hand gestures and/or drawings). When we asked if they had wifi he said no. This time we didn't walk out though because I asked Ahmee and Poppy if they just wanted to check their emails really quick, since Poppy had said he'd needed to talk to his brother Tommy. We paid to use their computer for 30 minutes. I don't remember exactly how much it was, but I do remember that it was dirt cheap compared to other prices (and this one had more on the computer!).
Ahmee said she was going to go outside and look around while Poppy and I typed. Ahmee has never been very into the computer, or typing for that matter. She told me that when she was in college Poppy typed her papers out for her. She hand-wrote her papers and then let Poppy do the typing.
I let Poppy check his email and reply to his brother first. While he was on he noticed that the keyboard was slightly different than the ones we're used to. The y and the z keys were switched. When I got on and started replying to people I discovered that this one switch was a pain in the ass. I'm used to being able to type without looking at the keyboard, in fact it's become pretty much muscle memory for me. When I went to type to people I realized just how often I use the letters z and y, because I kept having to hit the backspace key and retype.
Unlike Poppy who wrote to only one person and made his email incredibly short, I wrote to four people and wrote between one to two paragraphs for each person. Normally my emails are much longer. If the news the person has sent to me is huge, which I have gotten huge news while over here (ex: Momma's going to be going back to school full time, Iain shut down his company and is going back to school, etc.), then it takes me a bit longer to write the email and can take 15 minutes to type. These took me about 5 minutes each.
I first checked on Momma. She'd sent me two emails and I opened the most recent one which simply contained a huge sparkly sign that said I LOVE YOU!!!!.
Poppy, who was standing right behind me said, "Is that from Iain!?" This made me laugh because inside I was thinking about a conversation I'd had with Iain and Sara, in it Iain had said that he doesn't believe in love (said there was no such thing). I didn't tell Poppy this, instead I informed him that that email was from Momma.
I wrote to Momma, to Emma, to Sara, and (last but not least) Iain. The entire time Poppy was standing behind me. At first I didn't have a problem with it, but as I got to Sara's and Iain's emails I began to wish he would leave me alone to type. I know that I looked back at him several times to check and see if he was still there, I don't remember if I ever suggested he go somewhere else though. Afterwards, I wished I had because I didn't get to type what I really wanted to type to Iain and Sara with him standing over my shoulder. I wasn't even sure he was reading the emails I got or the replies I sent, but his commenting on one of the messages I'd gotten made me nervous and slightly irritated. What I say to my friends and family is no one else's business. What I write in each email is meant for those people alone (they can do what they like-and I know the people I send private information to will share that information with only select people). I don't even write in this blog everything that occurs in those emails.
One example would be how I emailed my dad, I responded to my dad, and yet I've been waiting for weeks to hear back from him. Letting loose here: I'm more than slightly ticked. He gets all angry about me not calling him, that I don't respect him and don't give a shit for the importance of the father, and here he is taking FOREVER to respond to me. I've thought recently, "Well maybe he just doesn't have internet since he's living in a different area.... Well maybe he just doesn't realize that when I respond to him it's meant as a conversation and that it signals you respond back....." Normally a different voice in my head explodes and starts shouting things like, "I'M IN FUCKING EUROPE ON THE ROAD! I'M STILL ABLE TO FIND INTERNET EVERY WEEK! I DON'T WANT TO HEAR SHIT ABOUT NOT HAVING INTERNET! YOU CAN FIND IT! AS FOR THE IDEA OF HIM NOT KNOWING YOU'RE MEANT TO RESPOND TO AN EMAIL THAT'S SENT: BULLSHIT! I'VE SEEN HIM GET ON HIS COMPUTER, CHECK HIS EMAIL, AND EMAIL BACK OTHER FAMILY MEMBERS!"
Even though this blog contains a lot of information about what I think about Europe and a few things that I've thought while in Europe, it doesn't have many many other thoughts. Within one second a person can be thinking thousands of different things at once. I'm no different. There are also many other things that have happened to me recently, things that emerge in my thoughts because of the pain that was inflicted, and then there are also thoughts that are definitely not PG. The emails I send to people portray these thoughts that I refuse to share with anyone and everyone (sorry, but I no longer know who is reading this), and having someone standing over my shoulder while I'm typing them isn't something that I welcome.
I quickly got off the computer, kept my annoyance in check since this was only the first time this has happened with Poppy, and then we headed out of the internet cafe. We all walked back to the hotel where we found out what time dinner started. I had half an hour to kill up in the room typing. Since I had plenty to type I was more than glad. To sum things up for people: I had to type for Giverny which absolutely HAD to be long and detailed, I had to add a bit of Spanish in, I had to double-check specifics on blogs, and I had to finish a study guide for US Government (and read a couple chapters for AP US History). Since there was more to be done on the blog (and this blog is what two of my grades are based on so I was literally killing two birds with one stone while having one thing open on this computer) I wrote about Giverny. I didn't even make it halfway through the day before we heading downstairs to eat dinner.
The restaurant was connected to the hotel and was run by the same people. The woman who had checked us in was the same woman who took our order. She had black hair, chubby cheeks, and a nice smile. The main things about the dinner I have to say are: the food was delicious, the wine Ahmee and Poppy had was killer (the goblets they got to drink it in were amazingly huge and helped aerate the wine), and Ahmee and Poppy had more than one helping to the wine.
Afterwards I stayed up typing about Giverny. I finished that blog and then realized it was 11 o ‘clock. Before I dashed to bed I jumped in the shower to heat myself up. Then I went to bed where I slept as fitfully as before. The past couple nights I've been waking up multiple times and getting incredibly cold.
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