Today

I'm currently sitting quite contentedly...
contently...
content...
with an UBER-large cup of SUMATRA-Starbucks-blend coffee, straight from my french press. You see this weekend was another fabulous power-out-all-day-and-night-during-the-hottest-time-of-the-year weekend. The only silver lining I found was that my coffee that had been stuck to the bottom of our freezer ever since that last major power-outage weekend, was finally acquitted from its charges and set free. This morning I had no need to make myself any coffee. This morning, our directors decided to treat the entire staff to a fit-for-a-king buffet at a nearby hotel. It was glorious. I went back for seconds and thirds and I won't make you jealous by describing in full the wonderful first taste of actual maple syrup on waffles that I've had in months. I also made sure to help myself to enormous cups of coffee, sent from our neighbors, the Togolese. From there, the day progressed quite nicely, as it was Africa Union Day and students had the day off. I spent time cleaning up my classroom, writing exams, and sweating my arse off. The power hasn't been constant enough to run my air conditioning ever since I got back from Europe. Complaining was not my object of this blog post so I will continue.

The afternoon proved cloudy. Thanking God for his natural shade on Africa, my friends and I played a bit of volleyball after school and went running. We love cloudy days around here. I then began to make the dinner I have at least four times a week: boiled peas and carrots, throw in noodles, strain it all, add butter and seasoning. Easy-peasy.

HOWEVER...dun, dun, duhhhhhhhhhhhh...

I received this lovely package from my parents a few weeks ago. It was truly fantastic and included, among other amazing things, a potato bag. My mother's friend's mother makes these little cloth pouches that are like little miracle-potato cookers. I've used it once before and my potatoes that I cooked in the microwave, with this magic potato sack, came out all perfect and baked as if they had just come out of the oven! Wonderful! Apparently it was lucky that they came out alright because I found out that if you don't stick a wet paper towel in WITH the potatoes, inside the sack, the whole set-up might just set on fire. Phew! We don't own any paper towels, because paper towels are too expensive for something that does the same job as a rag or sponge, but maybe it's time to invest? Here's why...

I decided to add some SPUNK (or should I say "SPUD-nk"-hehe) to my average peas, carrots, and noodles dish by trying to "bake" potatoes in the micro again (this time-I was sure to add a wad of wet-with-clean-water toilet paper to be safe). I followed the directions, same as before, but after the 8-10 minutes, when I opened up the micro-door, black smoke came rollin' out. MMmmmm that's a CLEAR sign that I've been trying something new....THIS IS WHY I ALWAYS STICK WITH NOODLES AND FROZEN VEGGIES.

Anyway, after the girls asked what I had burned this time, I showed them.



My heavyweight potato became a lightweight, all shriveled up and dry. The wad of toilet paper became a stiff, whitish-brown mass. The potato sack, itself, became stiffer than before with added leopard-like spots. Waiting for my hot-off-the-stove noodles dish, I decided to dissect the shrunken potato. Here's what it looked like on the inside after I SAWED it in half:



And here's what it looked like after I tried some:



Just so you know, burnt and shriveled potatoes taste like tiny, crispy fries that got left in the freezer for about ten years without that nice deep-fried oil flavor.

Tired from my potato excursion, I sat down with my bowl of noodles and veggies and decided to drink my wine from the bottle. We've almost broken our way through two sets of four wine glasses and I had already had enough screw-up for one dinner.

With a few more exams to write, I decided that THIS would be the perfect time to enjoy my bold-Sumatra. It (with me under my spinning fan) is soooooooooooooo goooooooooooooood.

I apologize for any of you who may have found this story to be mundane; I pray that your evening will show more promise than mine. I also hope that you all enjoy your last two weeks of fiesta in the States, because come June 8th, I'm crashin' the party.

I can't wait to talk to you all!!!!! If I don't see you, I swear it's nothing against you, it's just that I'll be Flight-of-the-Bumble-Bee busy this summer. I'll let you know how these last two weeks progress, I know you'll all be on the edge of your seats, waiting to find out. :)

Lots of love,
Meg

P.S. Happy Birthday to my fabulous, wonderful, fantastic and beautiful friend Jamie, who turns 25 today. Love you too!

Spirit Week

Spirit Week is something I always looked forward to growing up. When I heard we were having one at our school, I was OVERLY excited. This was my chance to dress up in SUPER funky clothes and not worry about dress code semantics! The schedule worked like this:

Monday: Ghana Day-Support Your Country of Residence by sportin' the colors of its flag!



Tuesday: Twin Day-Find a friend and dress up exactly alike! It was great fun. A few kids went out and bought special t-shirts just for this day. Some went wacky and died their hair the same Kool-Aid color red and others decided that they would be twins of movie characters. It was great fun!

Wednesday: Color Day-Every piece of clothing and accessories should be the same color. I chose brown, which may be boring but unfortunately I had neither blue nor green sandals, so brown was my only choice. Good news was, I got to wear a t-shirt and a skirt. To follow up with the Kool-Aid color twins, they decided to stick with red for their Color Day outfit as well. :)

Thursday: Wacky Day-MOST DEFINITELY my favorite dress-up day. You get to pick clothes and accessories that don't match or that shouldn't be on your body ever! An example might look something like this:



Now I didn't get a group shot of my 6th graders together, so here are a few of my favorite outfits:



A pom-pom for hair and green tights above; Below a 6th grader with dress-up clothes (from his father)? Definitely wacky.



A backwards hat, shirt, and shorts, as well as switched-up shoes.



Crazy wig, teeth, tie and where did your extremely short legs come from? Wacky.



Forget about "four eyes"!



7th Grade. Please note that I AM in the group. My administrator came over looking for the 7th grade teacher and later said "Oh sorry Miss B, I thought you were a student!" As this happens to me quite frequently, I continue to remind myself that it will help me when I'm 40.



Usually, the spirit weeks that I have been involved in end in a homecoming soccer match or a big, rivals football game. Unfortunately, our school is not big enough to host sports teams, however, we can still have some fun! So, our entire Friday was called Sports Day! We all got a sweet AIS Sports Day T-Shirt with a great message on the back (which will finish up today's blog). So Friday started in the early morning with everyone out in the pavilion and a warmup stretch led by our Mr. Teachers.



After stretches, teachers went to go run 10 different carnival-type games. At each station the teacher would mark off you card. With 10 marks on a card, you get a sponge full of water and the opportunity to chuck it at the face of a teacher of your choice! Amanda and I ran the Cotton Ball Soccer game, which is pretty self-explanatory. There are two players, two goals, two straws, and one cotton ball. When the teacher says "GO", the students try to blow the cotton ball into the other player's goal. It was quite hilarious to watch happen.



Here's a left-over-wacky-haired student taking his revenge out on the music teacher.



Lucky for me, my students LOVE wacking their Social Studies teacher with a soaking wet sponge.



After a much-needed lunch break we split the school into girls vs. boys and did the ChaCha Slide. "How low can you go? Can you go down low?"



After that, every kid's dream came true as they watched their teachers pillow-fight each other. Even Mr. and Mrs. Callis got chanted into playing each other. Amy said, "I still didn't win, even though I cheated!!"



Miss Ballew kicked my butt!



The rest of the afternoon was filled with the greatest sport on earth. Yes, soccer. Each grade level took turns playing. If you have not watched a Preschool and Kindergarten soccer game, you should go watch one, and here's a little preview of what you'll see:



The funniest part of the game is when the ball would get squished up against the wall and it was just a mad frenzy of 3,4, and 5 year olds trying to get the ball off the wall. The only thing that could fix the insect-to-light mentality is a teacher's hands intervention. They pick it up and toss in to the other end of the field. The game consisted of many of these recurrences, over and over and over again. It was worth the 5 minutes of laughter though. The best part was probably the hilarious high school announcers we had:



The day turned out to be pretty intense when the 4th and 5th grade match ended in penalty kicks:



After the 4th and 5th grade played, 6th through 12th grades were split into 4 teams. Because this is the only soccer we can offer these students, the games always seem to turn into a fierce competition. Lucky for me, I was asked to ref the secondary school matches. Yippee. Everyone loves to ref, right? Hehe. After I got over the under-the-breath comments like "that shoulda been a handball" or "watch him he's fouling like crazy", it was only the African sun that I was battling with. 2 hours without sun screen in the afternoon is a death sentence for your arms. Don't do it. Anyway, I need to finish this up because I've just killed two cockroaches in my bedroom and all the Raid is giving me a headache.

At our school, our students and teachers are very diverse and come from many different countries, which was the idea behind our Sports Day t-shirts:




"We come from around the world, but soccer unites us." Obviously, this is a message you can use throughout your every day life. Soccer is King (and so is Jesus). Spread it around.

I hope everyone's lives are getting back to normal after extravagant or chilled Spring Breaks. I'm in prayer for the college students finishing up classes and taking exams (especially because my brother and sister are both recently going through this ordeal). At school we have just 4 weeks left. Students and teachers are both getting very antsy for the end of the year to come. My mind is certainly not focused on school or being a great teacher, it's excited to see my family and friends in just 4 short weeks! So, I'm asking for prayers to get rid of my senior-itis issue. I need to remember my responsibilities are to my students and their education. Thank you everyone for your continued support throughout this year; for your mail, your money, and your prayers, I am EXTREMELY grateful. Enjoy your week and thank you, thank you, thank you for reading!

With love,
Meg

Munich

What an incredible place! Munich was definitely my favorite city. Halstatt was gorgeous and wonderfully restful, but Munich had a magic and home-feel to it that couldn't be ignored. I truly enjoyed the history that was brought out at every corner, the people we were able to meet were hilarious and fun, and the sausage and beer culture drives me MAD with happiness.

We arrived in Munich, called our couch surfer and looked for an internet cafe to pass some time. We were QUITE surprised as we were greeted with a slow internet connection, but obviously this was nothing new for us. We finished up a few things and headed to Stefan's place. He wasn't going to be there for a short while, but luckily when we arrived we found a perfectly nice wall to sit on for some rest and people-watching. Apparently when we arrived in Austria, both Austria and Germany were experiencing extremely, glorious weather after a period of very, nasty cold. So as we were sitting on this wall, we were amazed by the amount of people on bicycles that passed. Girls in skirts, men in suits, cyclists out for exercise, and others with headphones, just enjoying the sunshine. After a while we walked to his place and Stefan greeted us with a personality that we were comfortable with immediately. After settling in and meeting his roommate (female-just to make those of you who don't understand the couch-surfing culture more comfortable), he invited us to a nearby beer garden.

A beer garden, we learned, is an outdoor area with a cafeteria-style food section, and picnic tables as far as the eye can see, littered with people and BIG steins of beer. So clearly, we said yes and eagerly hopped on a train with our new flat-mate Stefan, and his good friends, Sebastian, and Jen. As a person who has always turned her nose up to her father for enjoying that sour stuff that he ruins his hotdogs with, I was QUITE eager to give Sauerkraut a second chance. I heard Germany was the place for sausage and sauerkraut, so it was PERFECT when I found it was an option at the beer garden. After Stefan decided to be awesome and buy our meals for us, we sat down at our picnic table and as you might have guessed sauerkraut became one of my new favorite dishes. Looks like we can ruin our hotdogs together this summer, Dad. :)



We spent the evening laughing and getting made fun of for our "completely foolish American sayings". Apparently Germans don't use words like AWESOME and INCREDIBLE and AMAZING very often because they want to save them for something that deserves the words. I found that MANY things in Munich were VERY deserving of these words, so I am still confused today as to why "amazing" and "awesome" and "incredible" are not frequently found in the German vocabulary.

Speaking of "totally great", these painted lions were spread throughout the city. We found this one just outside the home of our first meal in Munich.



After a quick visit, to another nearby restaurant, we headed "home" to bed because we had an early morning the next day.
Our plans were to take a two hour train ride to a town called Fussen in order to catch a bus to an area that boasts two castles within a 15 minute drive of each other. The first, called Hohenschwangau, was home to a king and queen and is still privately owned by the family to this day. After a quick tour of the inside (coolest King's bedroom I've ever seen-the ceiling was painted like a sky and had holes through it so that when lanterns were lit, it looked as if there were stars flickering overhead) we took some pictures on the outside...



and headed to the second castle for the day. After the death of his parents, their son, who became King Ludwig II, took over and had a fantasy castle built. For 17 years, he watched the construction with a telescope from his bedroom window. However, it was at this time in his life when he was diagnosed with a mental illness. The next day, he was mysteriously found dead in a lake with Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, chief of the Munich Asylum and one of the four psychiatrists who declared Ludwig suffered from paranoia and was incapable of ruling. Just weeks after his death, the government opened this unfinished castle to the public as a museum. While as Ludwig this would have made me quite mad, as Meg I'm quite delighted, because on the outside and inside this castle is gorgeous. One of the coolest rooms was actually a fake cave! Oh, how I wish we would have been able to take pictures. There was a bridge from which you can see an EXCELLENT view of Neuschwanstein. If you ever travel to see these castles, I suggest you find a sign that points you to the bridge and follow it! Here's a panorama I took from the bridge. My camera is able to take three pictures and "stitch" them together. I was and still am VERY grateful for that feature.



After our two hour train ride back to Munich (on which we met a group of Calvin College kids and a very drunk man who gave Amanda flowers and consequently peed all over himself), we got in contact with my good friend Jane from Hanover, Germany. I hope you all remember my good friend Kristy who was another Young Adult Volunteer last year, living up in Ho, with a few Germans. Well, Jane was one of those Germans! We were able to get to know each other very well and I was just tickled at the idea that we might meet up in Munich! GREAT NEWS! Not only was Jane able to come, but she brought Roman her long-time boyfriend that I had heard SO much about, as well! We decided to meet up for dinner at the famous Hofbrauhaus! This place was FANTASTIC.



There was constant singing, walking on tables, ladies selling pretzels and incredibly, yummy food! Sauerkraut, duh.



It was hard to leave, but again we had plans in the morning that could not be delayed as it was our LAST DAY IN MUNICH/EUROPE! :'(

So Stefan told us about these "free-tour" things that happen in big cities all over Europe. In Munich, apparently every day (save for Mondays) at 10:30am they meet in Marienplatz directly in front of the famous Glockenspiel.



Then the group is divided into a few more groups after you've seen the giant cuckoo clock do its thing. It WAS pretty awesome, but once was enough. Our tour guide, Heidi, took us through the streets of Munich and explained the history behind so many incredible sites. She was quite the comedian and I truly enjoyed listening to her JAI-NORMUS bank of knowledge. At break time during the tour she told us that we had 15 minutes to grab some refreshments and we were welcome to go inside the American Embassy to use the bathroom. We all burst out laughing when we realized she was pointing to the Starbucks. I would happily call that my embassy!



At the close of the tour we sat inside this stage-ish area. I suspect if you know more about Germany's history than I did (luckily I know more now thanks to Heidi), you may recognize this building from photos or videos of the Beer Hall Putsch when Hitler and his buddies unsuccessfully tried to gain power.



It was an incredibly amusing and interesting morning. Who knew learning was fun? She led us to a place for an unending bowl of homemade stew and a free beer! With TERRIBLY full bellies, we walked towards the English gardens, which we had heard were beautiful. Whoever we heard that from was right, because they were! Our first stop wasn't something you would call beautiful though, it was more like "radical dude!!!". There's a river that runs through the length of the gardens and it just so happens that there is a constant wave that runs adjacent to a bridge at the entrance. What do people usually do with waves??? Surf on 'em dude!!!! We watched for at least 15 minutes as surfers got up and fell off of the single wave. We touched the water later, this helped us to understand why they were wearing wetsuits, it was FREEZING!



At the end of the gardens, we found the Chinese Beer Garden.



This is the place that is known for its convergence of people from all walks of life: rich, poor, good-looking, and weird. We met Jane and Roman for a quick snack and a radler (beer mixed with lemonade). We made plans to split up and get a few things done (we had some last-day-in-Europe-H & M shopping to do) and meet again for dinner at a place they had picked out. Last minute shopping was a success, duh. During this time we called Stefan to also meet us for dinner. As we all arrived, it turns out Elyse fell sick. Because it was our last night, I stayed to hang out with Jane, Roman, and Stefan and Amanda went back with Elyse as she was not feeling too well herself. I have permission to tell you all that on the way home, I unfortunately missed the most comical event of the trip.

Elyse apparently spent the whole way home keeping an eye out for garbage cans in case of you know what. As luck would have it, at the time she needed to expel the contents of her stomach, there were no trash receptacles. Therefore, Amanda pulled out her CLEAR ZIPLOC bag and Elyse tossed her cookies into it...in the middle of the sidewalk...in front of a McDonalds. You might think it's lucky that she was in front of McDonalds because then it's easy to dispose of a bag you desperately do not wish to carry. However, it turns out that this lovely McDonalds prides itself on taking care of your rubbish for you. You are directed to leave your trash on your tray at various stations throughout the restaurant. This was unfortunate for Elyse on this day. Amanda being the good friend that she is, hopped inside to ask for a "to-go" bag. However, there still was the question of where to dispose of such a treasure. Thankfully there was a ladies room and a tiny little garbage can whose top, for a reason God only knows, could not be pulled off. After many tries, the girls finally pried the top off, left the bag in the can, and decided it wasn't even worth it to try to get the top smashed back on. A word of advice to European McDonalds restaurants, put garbage cans in front of your store on the OUTSIDE to avoid awkward garbage-emptying epidemics. Eesh...

The rest of the night spent with Jane, Roman, and Stefan was great! Because this is getting incredibly long (not unlike plenty of blogs in the past), I will give you the rest in a nutshell: dinner was VERY tasty, I practiced a lot of German words, played a karaoke video game, took a SWEET bike ride with rented bikes through Night-Munich,



and promised to come back to Germany where I will spend much more than 3 days in the country. We left the next morning after waking at 5:00 or something terrible, trained to the airport (I love public trans.), checked in, watched a big security dog sniff the ins and outs of every passenger getting off of a plane coming from Amsterdam, and slowly and solemnly got on the plane that took us back to our real lives.

All I have left to say is that this trip was an AMAZING, FANTASTIC, AWESOME, INCREDIBLE, FABULOUS way to spend Easter break! Thank you Jesus for great friends and huge blessings.

(Sorry it took so long to get the last one up)

Love to you all!