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.