Dropped the kids off at school!

Finally, the successful culmination of a year of preparation! I was able to take the kids to a school they enjoy learning at and pick them up with a German drivers license and our own car.

Dragon Boat Racing

The organization where I work put together a dragon boat racing team for an event in nearby Bad Malente. We had one day to practice with the boats the day before the race, and we had a very international team, with Germany, India, France, China and of course the US represented. We even had a Chinese drummer to beat out the rhythm in the front of the boat (who had been in a dragon race boat in China before). The first day we practiced in cold rain. The trick was coordinating so we didn't bump into each other with the paddles because we were sitting so close together, with one row paddling on the right and one row on the left. The directions were barked out in German, which I made a couple of mistakes with and messed up the paddeling on my side. At one point I felt like I knew what it was like to be paddling for a viking ship. On the day of the race the weather cleared up a bit and to add to the strageness of being in a Chinese sport in Germany a Punk-Scottish band was playing modern Celtic music at the festival. There were a couple of professional teams that came in, but we didn't do bad and placed in with most of the other teams present. The first time we completed the distance in 1:09 and the second time in 1:02 (I think the distance was 200 meters, but I'm not completely sure).

V's birthday

Night Festival

Wildschwein

There is a park someone mentioned to us in nearby Bad Malente that has wild pigs. T and I drove over there early one morning and had a look. There was a fenced in area with a gate you have to go through to get in. One boar came running right over to us. They were very tame and we could get up close to see them rooting around. There were also elk in a large enclosure (not exactly wapiti, but elk-like. I not sure exactly what species.)

Eleventy-First Birthday!

It's a Tolkein reference. We had a cake for my birthday this year, which is 111 years old (started in 1898, the birthday not the cake), a curious number and a very respectable age. No, I'm not insane. I guess there are only four or five people out there that know the trick to explain this.

Pirates in our Backyard

Piracy, it's not just for Somalia anymore. Apparently a ship was hijacked in our own backyard according to this news article (Russia's navy deployed, ship hijacked in Baltic).

The Great Ladybug Invasion

V alerted me to this news article. Earlier I posted (here and here) about the unusual numbers of ladybugs near the coast. Now millions have made it to coastal England (link).

Long Barrow

T wanted to do something special so early in the morning on Saturday we hopped in the car and drove to where there was a bronze age long barrow (Langbett auf Deutsch, literally "long bed").





Then, after we got back, we all took the train to Hamburg to see a large outdoor store "Globetrotters." Among the highlights, they had an indoor leaf cutter ant nest, a plexiglas climbing wall (overlooking the street four stories below), and a "thermal room" complete with ice-block furniture where you can try on winter coats and see how well they keep heat from escaping with an infrared camera!




We were all wore out by the end of the day.

Photos from 7/31

Here are some camera phone (V's) photos from our road trip.