David, Katherine, and I went to Idar-Oberstein this evening. It's a good place to go people-watching. When I went on Monday, I saw a man wearing leder-hosen for the first time since I've been in Germany. This evening we saw four German soldiers walking down the street side by side eating ice cream cones. That would have been a great picture, but I'm too shy to snap pictures of random people. When Katherine gets hungry, we have to eat right away, so we ended up eating dinner at a fast food place rather than a restaurant. Even so, it was very [View Full Entry]

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Today we went by bus to a big supermarket called Globus. Germans love meat. They had a huge meat counter comlplete with happy-face bologna. All I bought were sweets. The chocolate is very good. [View Full Entry]

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Today we visited the Baumholder Museum. (Baumholder is a small town/village in Rheinland Pfalz.) The exhibits were all in German, but the lady who showed us around was very nice and spoke pretty good English. I’m not sure that I understood everything correctly and there are gaps in my knowledge, but still, the history is interesting. This area was first inhabited 2,000 years ago. The Romans had a road that went from Trier to Mainz, and this was a good trading point. The south sides of the hills get warm sunshine and there were wells where people could get water, so [View Full Entry]

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Today I went to Idar-Oberstein again. The weather was very nice. We spent most of our time shopping. I bought Katherine some finger-farbe (finger paint). [View Full Entry]

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After you live without your things for nine months, you get them back, and you realize that you have too much stuff! [View Full Entry]

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Katherine went back to the doctor today, and she's doing much better. She will go back again on Friday just to make sure she's fully recovered. [View Full Entry]

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David, Katherine, and I left for the Netherlands on Saturday morning. Katherine had a cough, but we thought it was just a cold and that she was getting over it. Before we left Baumholder we stopped by the local post office to pick up some packages. The main post office is right by where we live, but the packages weren’t there. David said they were in this little shop that sold backpacks and bags. The place had a little German post office emblem on it, but it also had a sign for “LOTTO.” I thought it was just a little store [View Full Entry]

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On our way to the Netherlands we stopped to eat at a restaurant that is actually built above the interstate. People driving to Germany enter the restaurant on their side of the interstate, and people driving to the Netherlands enter on the other side. You go up some stairs and then meet in the middle. There were actually 3 eating areas: a pizza place, a cafeteria, and a fancier dinner place. The building also had a souvenir shop, where we ran into friends from Katherine's playgroup. They were on their way back to Germany. The food was good and Katherine enjoyed [View Full Entry]

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Papa was away in Bavaria during Easter. We missed him, but we managed to have fun without him. [View Full Entry]

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Aren't toddlers special blessings? I never would have thought of decorating my cupboards with tomato sauce and blue contact paper, but Katherine found a way to make it work! [View Full Entry]

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