My first venture out solo

I flew into the Bonn/Cologne airport last Thursday night. A guy connected with Liz´s team, I don´t know how, picked me up. He had a little white sign that said my name and everything. Falk was his name. I´m thinking of naming my first child that now, boy or girl. He carted me over to the gym and I walked in to see Liz smiling up at me on a water break. It was wonderful to see such a friendly familiar face in a foreign land. We hugged, sweat and all, and I watched the last hour of her practice.

Leeza gave us a ride home afterwards and we got home around 10:30. We chatted for a long time. Liz was telling me how there are days when she doesn´t even speak to anyone. But, she´ll be starting German classes soon and hopefully getting a computer. So, as you can imagine, she told me everything that has been swimming around in her brain for the last week and a half. Really, it was great, because I missed her and it was so fun to catch up. As I told you in the last blog, she had a cake made and we did a little celebration that consisted of the cake and then a trip downtown by bus for McDonalds at midnight.

I think McDonalds tastes better in Germany than in America. Plus, their workers have to be fairly educated, as it´s in high demand to know english since it´s an American establishment. Anyhow, we walked around downtown at night and looked at the cute little old town with all the typical looking European buildings. We planned our shopping for the next day, which included H&M. I visited 3 H&Ms in Germany. Yes, I´m obsessed. But, they all have some different stuff, so I had to.

Before I get too far into my description, here are the pics I took of Liz´s living sitch...
To the left is Liz hanging off the stop sign at the end of her adorable little street in Bonn.
To the right is Liz eating some of the cake she made me in her cute little kitchen. We finished half of it before going to McD´s. Liz lives on her own in a basement apartment. You walk into one main room and there´s a tiny hallway with a shower on one side and a toilet/sink on the other. Walk up a few stairs in front of you and enter this cutie kitchen. The whole set up reminded me of that Geico commercial with the people in a tiny house... but just right for a Liz.
To the left is Liz unlocking the door to her apartment. As you can see, she has not given up on the open mouth smile, nor do I think she ever will. She is even getting her German team to join in. It´s an international sensation. But, as Dave will tell you, I will never give up on the Darby face, which inevitably messes up any nice picture my mom likes to take. To the right is the front of Liz´s house, where the owner of her team lives with her daughters.

Now, on to the festivities of the visit. We got a couple beers before we went home on Thursday night because you have to drink beer in Germany, it´s like water. I forget which kind we had, but Liz said each region has it´s own type and I think we got the special type for Bonn. And, you can´t really get a "normal" sized beer there, they all sort of look like 40s. So, Liz and I sat at a bus stop and drank 40s in Germany at 1 o´clock in the morning. How great is that? I´m sure we poured some out for our American homies too. We are so classy. Even more classy, we tried to take them on the bus, but that didn´t fly. Oh well.

Since Dave got me the Gilmore Girls season 6, we had to marathon watch that until 5 in the morning once we got home. Liz watched the entire thing throughout the course of the weekend and I watched all but 5. It´s 22 episodes long, about 45 minutes a piece. I think that´s quite a feat.

Friday morning, we awoke at the crack of 1 p.m. Liz is still adjusting from the jet lag. We went out to the town, I guess it´s a town, of Bad Godesberg. Maybe it was just the name of the castle we went to, I dunno. Anyhow, we bussed it in and walked around yet another adorable oldtown area. Here´s a picture of one of the streets, to the right.

There is a castle there that Liz had been wanting to hike to the top of for a while, so we did. I think it was just called Bad Godesberg. I haven´t done any research on why it´s there yet, but it was pretty and had a nice view. Here are a few pics...
The castle from a distance to the left.
To the right is the view from the top. That long white row of buildings and the steeple are sort of the central old town in the Bad Godesberg area I think. Liz will probably read this later and say, Darby is so wrong, she is talking out of her "culo" as we say here is Spain.
To the left is Liz on the top edge of the top tower of the castle of Bad Godesberg. There was a large red sign on the side that said "verbotten" something or other, but we are just dumb Americans, we don´t know any German and also feel a sense of entitlement to whatever we want, so, Liz jumped up and I snapped the shot. She got me to go up and took a picture too. It was a bad one and there was no way I was getting back up there. Really though, it´s Liz´s town, so she´s the only one who should be on top of it.

From there we checked out the H&M and took a bus down town for huge bratwurst and fries. They were the yummiest. The fries, pommes, were a little yellow, but so good. Maybe they used yellow potatoes, but I prefer them to many from home. Maybe they used butter to cook them, oh yum. I´m trying not to be a fatty by the time I come home, but I´m not doing so well so far. I haven´t gained weight, but we´ll see.

Friday night we went to a team party at Liz´s teammate Hannah´s. We were all set to dance around and get crazy, but it was a more mature crowd. Mostly we ate and chatted with eachother as everyone else talked in German. We talked with Liz´s coach Lucas (pronounced Lew-kass) and her teammate Vera, who is very sweet, for a bit. As it got later and we got bored, we decided to surf the net. We had asked Liz´s teammates if they like David Hasselhoff because we heard he was huge in Germany. They laughed and said no. But, this made me remember "Jump in My Car", so I had to show it to her. We found it, but couldn´t hear it, so turned it up. As we did so, the song became quite loud in the other room. Suddenly, we realized the music that was playing at the party was hooked up to the computer. So, Liz thought fast and unplugged the speakers really fast before anyone realized the song was playing. This caused a huge screetch to occur for a few seconds, which was much more disruptive than the song. We laughed our asses off as everyone stared. Oh well.

Saturday was another late wake up. We found a Bagel Brothers, so yummy, in downtown Bonn around 2 and took a train into Cologne for the afternoon. Cologne is home to the most visited site in all of Germany, the Cologne Cathedral. We walked out of the train station and there it was, right in front of us...

I couldn´t even get the whole thing in one picture, it´s humongous! We got a little further away and asked a guy to take a picture of us. Below is what we got, which caused another fit of laughter.
Liz had heard that we MUST hike to the top steeple and look at the view. The hike was interesting. Very skinny spiral staircase of over 500 steps. Oh, and there were people going up and going down the same staircase. Nuts. There should have been a body circumfrence limit for sure and a pre-climb deoderant check. But, the top yielded the largest working chruch bell in the world, which I´d post a picture of, but it´s just a bell and this blog is getting long. The viewing deck was kind of lame, all caged in, but we got some good pics I think...


The first one on the right is between some of the gothic-ness of the top steeple. A lovely view of the Rhine River and the waterfront. The one on the left was just a cool view so I snapped it.
Pretty huh? Well, it was a very fun time. For the rest of the afternoon we went to, guess where... H&M. I went on another birthday spree and bought an awesome striped hoodie, yellow and olive green, and some cool brown striped pants that look like slacks, but have a sweatband tie waist for super comfort. And, no, they were not in the maternity section.

Here ends the first edition of my blog on Germany. The rest is all basketball all the time, so I thought it would be good to put it together. I´ll try to write that one tonight after the kids are in bed.

So, a mini-update on me has more to do with my sis than me. For those of you who don´t know, a team in Norway flew Whit to England to play in a tourney this weekend and she has 10 days to prove she´s good or they´re shipping her home. It´s so exciting! I can´t wait to go visit her, providing she doesn´t get the axe, love you Whit. I´m planning my week off in December to go to Norway and then Ireland. Pretty freakin cool.

For the immediate future, I´m staying in town again this weekend because we have bball practice Friday and I feel bad missing because I missed all last week. Sunday, the fam comes home early from France for Alexis´catechism, pre-speech on Sunday. I´ll probably go to that and then travel with the team to Vitoria where they have a game. I´m pumped about that because then I can maybe get to know the girls better. Coach Inaki, not the weird old guy, made me a spanish CD of music to listen to, per my request. It´s mp3´s so there are like 150 songs on it! Awesome. I can only listen to it on the computer, but I´m going to try to figure out how to get it onto my IPod, my skills from O-Live must be helpful in some way, right?

Thanks for reading, and until next time, here are some goodbye pictures from Liz and I to you...