Germany

This weekend I managed to get off to Germany for a couple of days to catch up with a few friends. And it was great to relax a little. The destination was Essen (a name meaning ‘Food’), but I almost didn’t get there at all. Whose stupid idea was it to have two flights to Düsseldorf leaving from the same airport at the same time?!

(“What? I’m supposed to leave from Gate 54 five minutes ago? But this is Gate 12, and there’s no way of getting back on the stupid ‘transit’ [?!] to get to Gate 54!” – fortunately a man in a bus came to my rescue. Not for the first time.)

But get there I did. And it was a lot of fun. I won’t go into too much detail about what we did, because I don’t know how interesting that would be (also because we spent a lot of time in Starbucks and SubWay), but I’ll show you a few pictures:

Four of us went to play pool, changing teams each time we played. Now, I may have been on the losing team each time (I swear I’m not that bad!), but at least I looked the part...

Other than Essen, I also got to experience the delights of Gelsenkirchen, another city about fifteen minutes away. I went to the Salvation Army corps there and took what I thought was a lovely photo of me and my friend Lucia, before realising that she hadn’t done her best smile...

In Gelsenkirchen, Daniel thought I should take a photo of this... art work?! ... from below, thinking that it would look like a road into the sky... Well, I guess it kinda does.

Daniel setting off down his road to the sky (who knows?!).

I had been to Essen once before, back in 2005, when I came to see the German Staff Band play at the Old Synagogue (I know that’s a slightly unusual place for a Salvation Army band to play, but it’s now used as a cultural centre and concert hall – although it’s currently being refurbished). That was the first time I met a lot of the young people from the Salvation Army in Germany, and from there I ended up going to music school and got a lot of great friends. So it was kinda cool to come back and think about how much had changed since I first came (those of you who read this blog regularly will know I’m a little bit thinky like that).

In Starbucks I was told I wasn’t allowed to take a photo, but I did, just because I could.

The Post I Never Wrote (Part One)

I’ve been blogging now for two and a half years. And that’s quite a long time.

When you’re a keen blogger, like I am, it means you’re constantly thinking ‘would that make a good blog post?’ or ‘I’ll have to put that on my blog’ or something along those lines. But quite often, I’ll never actually get around to writing those posts I’ve been intending to write.

For example, I never wrote about how the party poppers at Katie and Stacey’s joint birthday party nearly killed me:
Or about how Stacey and Anna acted out a puppet drama using aforementioned party poppers:
Or about being in this phone box with my friend, Kersten, and a photo of two other friends:
Or about this lamp:
And that’s just some of the stuff I’ve never written about.

Why Not?

A lot of people I know have been writing these lists of 25 facts about themselves, and I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon. I don't usually like this kind of thing, but it's actually been pretty cool learning new things about people you've known for years. Regular readers of this blog will have seen a couple of these before...

1. I am mega-proud to be a Christian and a Salvationist.

2. I own ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ in 19 languages.

3. When I was 20, I had a bike accident in Sweden and woke up in hospital with no idea why and no recollection of the previous two weeks.

4. I, bizarrely, have frequent dreams where I’m friends with Amy Winehouse.

5. I once presented the ‘God-spot’ on Faroese national television. In Faroese.

6. My favourite number is 51.

7. I often pretend to be Australian when shopping (occasionally Scottish or Welsh), and even convinced an Australian shop worker.

8. I have taken a photo every day since 30th November 2007, and have posted them all at here. Some are boring, but then so are some days.

9. I don’t like even numbers.

10. I go crazy when British people use the word ‘gotten’. It’s ‘got’. It’s always ‘got’. It’s not like ‘who’ and ‘whom’, you know, sometimes ‘who’, sometimes ‘whom’. It’s always ‘got’. Every time you write the word ‘gotten’, stop, press delete three times, and carry on. Just a little tip to help make the world a better place.

11. I reckon I spend a good 50% of my time in my imagination. Seriously. I’m there now.

12. Because of my studies, I have lived for a time in Germany, Sweden and the Faroe Islands. The best and the toughest times of my life.

13. My brother and I have exactly the same sense of humour. It can get quite freaky when we say exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Once we both, completely spontaneously, burst into ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas’ in exactly the same key, with no indication from either of us that we were going to start singing. Bizarre. We just stopped and stared at each other.

14. I recently started a gospel choir and am loving it. I am at my very happiest when singing fantastic songs with great friends. It doesn’t matter what kind of day I’ve had, or what worries are usually at the back of my mind – when I’m singing, I’m in a whole other world.

15. I love Elmo, Mars Bars and Christmas Cake.

16. I actually wrote a letter of complaint (well, more a ‘letter of concern’) when they took Yoghurty Special K off the shelves. But who’s had the last laugh now?

17. People blowing raspberries makes me feel sick – me telling you that involves a considerable amount of trust.

18. Whenever I’m writing a list of things to do, I always put some things I’ve done already so I can tick them off.

19. I was once stopped on Tottenham Court Road and photographed for a modelling agency. True!

20. At school I once got three detentions in one day, including one for fighting. I’m not proud of it. But I obviously am, or I wouldn’t have put it on here.

21. I’m a bit of a fan of lists (clearly) – I even have a list of every Salvation Army corps (church) I’ve ever seen (and have occasionally been on fairly lengthy walks to find them... Apologies to anyone I’ve ever dragged on one of those).

22. I seem to be quite changeable in appearance – what that means is that I always get a slight surprise whenever I look in the mirror, because I don’t look quite how I was expecting. It also means that people who knew me when I was younger never recognise me in the street. That has its plus sides.

23. I started to lose my hair about 2 years ago, I reckon. I got so worked up about it, but now I really couldn’t care less. I have a nice face ;)

24. I don’t lend out books to my friends, because I can’t stand it when they get creases down their spines. So don’t even ask, and we’ll save ourselves embarrassment.

25. John doesn’t share food.