The Longest Day

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This post should be subtitled "The Struggle To Stay Awake". You see there are two ways I can deal with not getting jet lag. The first (which was my plan) was to get on the plane, change all of my devices to read CEST, sleep as much as possible on the plane, and then it would be whatever time it was when we got off the plane. That has worked for me in the past. But, for some reason, I couldn't sleep on this plane, so instead I just had a very long day, where I was awake from 7:30 AM (PDT) June 30th until just after midnight (CEST) July 2nd. I'm writing this at 8:30 AM (CEST) July 2nd, and I feel rested, refreshed, it really does seem like morning, so I would say the for all practical purposes, I have managed to dodge jet lag again.

Other than the actual act of moving from point A to point B, which I generally do not enjoy, this giant day was a pretty nice day in which we were reunited with some dear friends most of us hadn't seen since 2009. There's something gemütlich about sitting in Ulf and Andrea's living room, drinking tea, catching up and speaking ungrammatical German at them. Ulf, Laura, Anne, and I went on a short trek to what Anne called the mallchen (because, while it is a mall, it's very small) to get distilled water for my CPAP and a pre-paid SIM for Joe's phone and some chocolate for whatever one needs chocolate for. The city they live in, Schenefeld, has a small town feel to it, and the foot path we used to get to the mall actually took us away from the town and into what I would call "countryside", which greatly reminded me of the land around the tiny town I grew up in.

After the mall, all of the travelers had a short nap and when we awoke, we were presented with a delicious cauliflower and leek soup and more conversation and then we headed off to one of the local Kneipe to watch the USA - Belgium world cup match, and we pretty much closed the place down. When regulation time ended, the score was still nil all, and we decided that we'd better leave because it looked like they had been wanting to close up for a while. Ironically, all the interesting parts of the game happened after that, and though USA lost 2-1, they played hard and we were very proud.

And then, everybody collapsed and passed out. And it was the evening and the morning, the first day.

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