We got up after a glorious night’s sleep (I didn’t wake up at all for 8 hours) at about 8 am in the morning and were ready to take on the world. Well, at least we were ready for tea and a little shopping excursion to the nearby grocery stores. It was raining just a little bit, but stopped soon afterwards, so once we’d dropped off the groceries at my mom’s, we went for a REAL walk, since she was whirling around baking a cake and making lunch. We sat in a little cafe for a while and sampled some German apple and plum cake for a late breakfast bite, and then walked through the gorgeous botanical gardens and back home. It was lovely (and again very familiar) and we kept stopping to admire various and sundry plants, including the entire allium family with its garlic, chive, leek and onion plants. Everything is lush and green, and there are lots of wildflowers for pollinators!
Once we got back home, Imke made us a lovely lunch and we took another nap with a 45-minute timer. This jetlag combat technique seems to work fairly well to keep us rested without sleeping the day away while our bodies adjust to the new clock. Then we ventured downtown one more time to get a handful of extra groceries we still needed. We hadn’t been back for too long when my sister Judith and her husband Michael arrived around 3 pm–we were so happy to see them! Although the Fourth of July is of course NOT a holiday in Germany, it is sort of a holiday in my family, because my sister’s birthday is today (one day, she’ll spend it in the States and hopefully feel WILDLY celebrated). Right after Judith and Michael got here, we had festive coffee and cake (my mom baked AND bought cake, so that’s serious dedication). Later, we went for a little walk and a couple more errands, and then just sat and chatted for a while. We had a late dinner of bread, cold cuts, and antipasti with friends of Judith’s who go back to our high-school days, and that was a lot of fun. Katja and Udo live just a few minutes from Imke’s house, but Mark and I hadn’t seen them since 2016–we looked it up in our old blog. The theme then had been our old hometown and the people and places we all had in common, but this time, our conversation was mostly about the now–about jobs and homes and especially about the translation app that Mark was using while we were all speaking German and frequently misunderstood us all so dramatically that it derailed the conversation. We had a good time and talked until almost 11 pm, and it was nice to catch up with them and with my sister and Judith all at the same time.