Oktober Wochenende

This last weekend I had a Rotary meeting with former exchange students called Rotex. We were suppose to meet in a town outside of Koln called Solingen. I have never been to good at trains or buses so luckly I had my friend Clint who seems to know everything, and has all the times down. I just followed him for the most part and nodded my head if he asked me a question if i think we are on the right train, even though i really didnt know if we were. My host mom likes to make sure that i am fully prepared for everything so when Rotary gave us a list of things we should take, she made sure i took all of them. So I had a backpack, and a large gym bag full of clothes, a sleeping bag, a pillow, and a sleeping mat. I told my mom i only needed two pairs of clothes and a sleeping bag, but she insisted that I take it all, so going through the busy train stations, and bus stations were a task. We made it to where we were suppose to be, and were assigned a host family for the night. I was in the same host family as my friend Heide whose from brazil and a girl from mexico named marianna. We had alot of fun together, and they taught me how to do some traditional dances, and laughed when they talked about how americans dance. We woke up in the morning and went to a gym where we unloaded all our stuff, and were sperated into two groups. My group traveled first to a castle, I never quite got the point of why back in the day they made it so complicated to get around the castle, we had to go through different rooms that lead to different doors, that lead to staircases and finally made it through the rooms. The castle was beautiful though, and people in germay do a great job of maintaining the castles to keep them in good shape, after that I went to a scissor factory, where i got to see how they are made, and even got to polish one of my own, although they are not polished very well. It is alot harder than it looks to make them shiny because all i had was a file and some sand paper. I also got to see the largest knife and the worlds smallest scissors, which needed a magnify glass to see them. After i visted all of that i came back to the gym where we played soccer, it was the americans and brazilians, vs. the mexicans... we lost but it was still a very fun game, after that we had some pizza and split into another group so we could write a letter to ourselves in german so that at teh end of our exchange we can see how much we have improved, I did not know that was the point of it so i actuallly had Clint write some of mine, well a sentence and than i resorted to small english sayings just to make me laugh such as " Learn to ride a bike better", or and these are my words " stop sucking at germany" that is a saying margy and I say because we are hopeless when it comes to german buses, or trains, or trasportation, we guess most of the time, and usually just end up back where we started. I wrote things like that, and clint wrote something in german. Finally we were all done and than we had a Dance, well more of a fiesta because the number of mexicans out weighed the number of everyone else. It was alot of fun and they helped me to learn some more dances, but after a good 3 or 4 hours of dancing i was tired, but that did not stop them from finishing their fiesta. So as i was trying to sleep the only ones left were the mexicans and their loud music, i am still not sure how much sleep i actually got, and than in the morning i woke up to soem more spanish music. Its great to see how proud they are of where they come from, and i wish that we as americans could do the same. It was a great weekend filled with alot of fun, and well funny moments. Im glad that i got to go, and even though on the way back clint and i got in a train jam, and ended up in a train for abour 4 hours, it was still worth it... Rotex threw a great Oktober Wochenende