Finally a minute to update.....

So it's been a while since I have updated this blog. Somehow between school, hanging out with friends, and skiing I haven't had the time or energy to write anything. It's on my rather long list of things to catch up with today.

The first weekend of February was pretty quiet. Friday night I went into the city for dinner with some friends. Cara and I then went back to her place. We watched a really neat movie, An Inside Job. It was a documentary about the financial meltdown, and an eye opener. On Saturday I went skating at the Eissporthalle in Frankfurt. Apparently most of Frankfurt also wanted to go skating! We had to wait in long lines first to buy tickets, and then to rent skates. There was an indoor rink, but we went outside. They had frozen the track so it was like doing laps of a track on skates. The evening was then capped off by meeting up with a bunch of friends to celebrate a birthday.

The week that followed was busy. The weather was cold, about -10 outside. On Tuesday it snowed and a bunch of parents were late picking up their children. One parent didn't manage to get to school until 6.45 - 45 minutes late! Wednesday was also a late day - parents evening for my class. It started at 7 and didn't end until 9. Nothing too interesting to report here. Most of the evening was in German and I just had to sit and try not to fall asleep! One parent complained because we made her son eat lunch. She wanted to know why if he didn't like the lunch he couldn't eat dessert instead. That got some comments from other parents. One thing of note is that the parents don't clap after a teacher is done. Instead, they knock on the desks.

Last weekend was superb. 5 of us drove the 3 hours south to the Black Forest to go skiing. We drove up early Saturday morning and went straight to the hills. Lindsay went snowshoeing while the rest of us skied. The hill was great. We had a number of runs to choose from, and we could stick to blue runs without getting bored.

Andy, Cara and I skiing (I am wearing my super awesome new ski suit!)

Here is us checking out a sign - trying to decide if run 13 was blue or black. Right after we got off the chair lift the sign was blue, but here it was black. Luckily we noticed so Cara and I could switch to the red run. That was hard enough for us! I had a great day skiing and didn't fall once (if you don't count my trouble on the t-bars....). Overall it was a great day :)

Sunday we had a lazy drive back, with a stop for lunch. The weather had warmed up and the sun was out. It was so beautiful Will and I decided to go for a walk along the river after dropping the car off. Unfortunately by that time the sun was behind some clouds, and almost gone for the day. You can see that the river had partially frozen too:

The last of the sunshine

And finally this week.... It was busy and I'm happy that this weekend is a long weekend. Monday is Rosenmontag, a holiday for Fasching (carnival). Some highlights of the week:

Our first order for the library came in. We got 5 boxes of German books. Cara and I were pretty excited, and got to work right away putting them all into the system.

On Thursday my class and the Monkey class went on a field trip to the Palmengarten. We spent most of the day walking around and visiting the different houses. We went through tropical houses, cactus houses, and of course stopped at the playground. 

We were pretty tired by the time we got back to school, and then we had to go to our first German lesson. The arrangement is kind of crazy. One of the German teachers drives two of us into the city, and then teaches us and two city teachers German for an hour and a half. Our first lesson was nothing exciting since half was taken up waiting for the city teachers to finish a staff meeting. I am really excited to get started for real, though I wish learning the language would be more instantaneous.