Do as the Germans Do

This weekend was pretty normal for Abby and I. Our weekends are Fridays and Saturdays and on Friday we came to the church building and did a lot of work to get prepared for the following week. So, nothing exciting to report.

On Saturday we went with Kai, Annette, and Anna Marie (our home family) to Moritzburg which is a castle about 40 min away from Dresden. I would have been the perfect afternoon except for the fact that it rained the entire time. The palace itself is really cool, its an orange building that is literally built in the middle of a lake. So on a sunny pretty day it should be gorgeous--with the palace reflecting off the water. On a wet gross day it was simply neat. After we visited the palace we went to a wild animal park to show Anne Marie all of the animals. it was cool to see what all of the animals were called in German. Some were simple to figure out and some were not so simple. One of the more unique animals were the beaver rats (which for the longest time Annette and I kept talking about how they are beavers but they sure did look like rats...then Kai was like "oh! these are beaver rats" and it settled the question). We also got to see wild boars which from a child my father had always told me about (from when he used to go out into the field in Southern Germany). He has always told me that they are very big and not something you want to mess with but I always had a feeling that he was exaggerating a bit (one time he told me won ton soup was monkey brains and I believed it for a couple of months...I was 4 leave me alone). But after seeing the boars I too would not want to cross them in the middle of the night, or in the morning, or in the daytime--they are quite large, scary, and the stink.

After Moritzburg and the animal park we went back to Dresden and had a typical Kaffee and Kuchen (coffee and cake) time with our family. Abby and I got hot chocolate with whipped cream (oh my gosh, can you say heaven) and apple strudel with ice cream (basically the reason I'm one day moving to Germany permanently). We were all tired but Annette, Abby, and I went grocery shopping for the week and then we all had dinner together. It was quite a marvelous day.

On Sunday we started our reading sessions again and life returned to normal--but not so normal because Monday was yet another holiday (c'mon!). So everything was closed, most of our readers were out of town, and Abby and I were just a little bored. We took a walk along the Elbe and enjoyed the day German style.

This weekend coming up is a very exciting weekend for Dresden because Barack Obama is coming! That's right folks, our US president will be coming to Dresden to tour the city and give some speeches. What will Abby and I be doing? We will be going to Berlin. No one told us he was coming till after we booked our trip. Oh well, another time Mr President.

Well thats all for this week, keep reading the blog and praying for us and our readers. As Bri, one of our missionaries says, things in Germany take a long time to develop and so sometimes it will seem like we are just hitting a wall--but it does make a difference.

Miss everyone!

Emily and Abby