Today, we had basically a friends day. After breakfast, Mark and I walked with Imke to family friends I‘ve known since elementary school days, Wolfgang and Maya, who have been on vacation for most of June, so that we didn‘t get a chance to see them before. We had coffee on their balcony and talked about our respective trips, mostly in German, so that Mark‘s contribution to the conversation was mostly showing the photos from our trip on the iPad mini. We had a good time, and it was great to see them again and hear about their 5 grandchildren.
We then walked back home and rested a bit (I reread a children’s book that I recently re-purchased—I must have read it hundreds of times as a kid, since I remembered individual phrases and minute details, but I also know that the last couple of pages were alway missing and you had to imagine the finale! Now I have the complete novel and could finally finish it all the way!) Then we got ready for our afternoon visit—more long-time friends, this time a friend of mine from my high-school days and her husband, stopped by for the afternoon. We’ve always managed to see Ingrid and Ralph on our German trips, but typically we come to see them in Aachen. This time, it worked out that they were coming back from a weekend with her parents, who live near my hometown of Fürstenau, and took the slight detour to stop with us for almost 3 hours. We had coffee and brownies (a la mode!) in Imke’s little walled garden in the shade, and talked about travels, politics, and their awesome daughter, Kati’s childhood friend Nora, who is now studying political science and will be spending 3 months on an internship with the prestigious Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in DC this fall. Again, we had a good time but spoke limited amounts of English, so I think Mark was a little bored. But I am so glad we got to see them!
After they left, Imke made us a lovely dinner of vegetarian stuffed peppers (I made the salad), and Mark and I went on another walk, with a new destination and some new nooks and crannies of Osnabrück we hadn’t explored before—we walked to a historic apartment block in the Liebigstraße and looked at the architecture / design of various early 20th-century townhouses, and then walked along the river Hase back to the cathedral and then home. It was nice to just get some exercise, and with the weather having been just fantastic not-a-cloud-in-the-sky summer weather, it was really nice to say good bye to Osnabrück that way.