Along with
doing laundry ✓
inviting people to our birthday party ✓
grocery shopping ✓
finding/ordering a birthday present for Olek ✓
going through three excel sheets of data for my thesis 1/3 ✓
Not too bad. I think I can blog and do the other excel sheets later today.
So we spent Easter with my lovely family and it we had such a good time. We took a (long distance) bus, which is a relatively new thing in Germany, because the railway used to have a monopoly. So long distances buses have only really been a thing for about a year and the organisation and infrastructure is still a bit -um- subpar at times.
We had to take a Bus from Dresden to Berlin and then from Berlin to Hamburg. The first bus was 1,5hrs late and because we didn't know when or where it would arrive we had to wait outside at the station. It wasn't very cold, but I was tired and it still sucked. We were supposed to have 2,5hrs in Berlin and wanted to meet up with a friend, but due to the delay it got shortened to about 30mins which was just enough to grab something to eat. We arrived in Hamburg almost an hour late and past midnight, but my brother and his girlfriend were nice enough to pick us up anyway.
We didn't do anything special on Friday. We went for coffee with my mum and then spent the evening playing Wii with my brother and his girlfriend.
Saturday morning we did some grocery shopping, made our own little easter basket and then together with my mum we went to a Polish "mass" (blessing of the baskets, which takes less than 30min). My mum, obviously, didn't understand a word, but she still enjoyed it. She used to have a lot of work colleagues from Poland and she always promised them to introduce them to me
but none showed up. Then we picked up her husband, my brother+gf and my grandma and went to this upside down house. Which was funny but there were way too many people and it definitely wasn't worth the 5€/person. We got some funny photos, though. Then we went for a walk and had ice cream and cake.
It was so good to see Olek talk to all my family. I guess it helps that they all speak really slowly (everyone except for me...) but his German has improved a lot. He can actually have a pretty normal conversation now.
On Sunday morning my grandparents had us over for breakfast. My grandma had bantam eggs (that were kinda difficult to eat because the spoons were too big!), Heidschnucken Ham and all other kinds of interesting/weird but really good stuff. My mum and her husband left earlier and we kids were discussing what we could do when my grandma suggested that we go play minigolf. And because we had no other ideas and the weather was kinda nice and we wanted to do something outside... and grandmas are wise and you should follow their suggestions, that's what we did.
Olek had never played minigolf before and lost (I didn't do very well either), but it was still a lot of fun. Then we went home, had dinner and played some more Wii. Olek and I were supposed to get one for our birthdays, but now that we've actually played a bit we probably won't.
Monday morning Olek and I went for a walk through my home town, got packed and then my mum and her husband brought us back to Hamburg and after another kinda chaotic bus journey (during which I read trough half of Lindsay Fayes Gods of Gotham) we got home at around 11pm.
This morning I ordered Olek's birthday present. He has been wanting a bag that he can also use as a bike bag (I have two now
) and I narrowed it down to this one in grey, the same one in green or this black one. I like the design of the last one best, but the back part is apparently this weird silvery colour, which looks a bit weird. The green one is probably a bit more interesting, but Olek's new "summer" shoes are grey and blue, so a green bag would probably be too colourful. So I went for the grey one. He *is* a man after all, so maybe he won't mind that it's not exactly the most vibrant colour out there. I also bought a chuggington (a cartoon about trains) melamine breakfast set and I'm planning on getting one for myself (not neccessarily chuggington), so we can use them for picknicks. I can't wait for it to get warm enough to spend more time outside. I really love where we live now, so I want to do lots of day trips.And this is what it looks like:
It's not super fancy, but I used three different colours. Yellow for things that are indoors (mostly museums in our city), green for small trips or things to do outdoors in our city and pink for longer (day) trips and then made origami hearts out of them. I surprised myself with how many things I could come up with - all of which I really want to do
Tomorrow is my mum's birthday which means: it's only 10 days til mine! We're going to be on a weekend trip to Lower Silesia (in Poland, but right at the border, so close to where we live) to do lots of walking and lost places sight seeing.
This was a long and boring blog and I should get back to my equally long (and not-so-boring) thesis
I hope you had a great (long) weekend!
Do those Easter baskets have any chocolate in them?