No idea why the last post was black on black...I am just going to go with my new excuse for everything "ich spreche keine Deutsch" :) That seems to work well for me here...
Adventure of the day (day 2-ish): We walked down this lovely pedestrian walk along shops and restaurants looking for a little cafe to have lunch in today. We found a bakerei (bakery) and each selected a sandwich or the like on freshly baked bread, etc. I got a nice spinach quiche, C orders an egg sandwich to which Josh and I both ask him "are you sure that is what you want??? It's hard boiled eggs on bread." He responds casually "yeah, sure, that's good". We are under a little pressure with a few German patrons waiting for us to decide and order and a nice German lady quickly grabbing what we choose and looking impatiently on for us to choose the next item. We sit to eat with three apple schorlies (apple spritzers), a tea, my quiche, H's salami sandwich, Josh's cheese and veggie sandwich on a soft pretzel roll and C's sandwich which is a HARD roll with mayo, lettuce and sliced hard boiled egg-yes, that's all. C takes a bite and get's this look on his face like "What??!!!" We look at him and say something uber sympathetic like "you said that was what you wanted. We asked you 5 times to be sure." He is cracking up saying he thought it had salami and egg...Josh says " well that's good. I thought it had eggs and olive spread! That would be even more disgusting." Here is the irony, though...at dinner, Josh thought he ordered beef tips. His plate comes out with three white eyeball looking-thing and a mangled hot dog (but a "good" one like Nathan's all beef) on top of a pile of shredded red things. I am sticking with red wine and steak. I may gain 50 pounds but at least I know what I am eating! Photos tomorrow...cord in the car :)
Day 3 (Tues 10/18-our all but forgotten wedding anniversary). The day started with all of us oversleeping and getting off to a crazy start. We woke at about 10:40 which left about 20 minutes of breakfast left. This is the largest meal of the day here for the most part and our hotel had a great one. We all jumped out of bed, threw on clothes, took the dog for a speed walk (or quick relief) and hurried to breakfast. We ate quickly only to have to rush up to the room to pack up, shower all of us, and vacate the room. We were scheduled with the "Schulamt" in Dusseldorf at 2 but were told to leave Cologne by 12:30 in order to meet with our translator at 1:30 for introductions and a 10 minute walk to the meeting. The "Schulamt" is the office that will make the decision about where the boys will go to school. We feel like this is the most important of all of our meetings so being rushed and crazy (did I add that it was raining and going to be a really bad hair day anyway???) was not ideal. It dawned on us as we were leaving with a hotel cart full of bags that not only would not all of the bags fit in the car with us, but that we would also have to drop the dog off at our temporary rental home before heading off to the meeting. We wound up leaving two bags with the bellman and took off for the rental home-decorated in what we would sum up as 70's garage sale. We dropped the dog in his quickly assembled crate and left for Dusseldorf, the next major city north. Our GPS vectored us through an industrial town full of traffic lights rather than on the highway, so once we got to the autobaun (highway) we were relieved. That lasted all of about 3 minutes. We wound up being about 8 car lengths back from a nasty wreck that had the autobaun at a standstill. I called our translator in a panic, only to find out that the school office had changed the meeting (3rd time) to Friday so we were ok to arrive whenever. Just as we started to relax in our completely stopped car, Josh noticed that the very nice coach bus (like a rock star tour bus) behind us had four mean looking guards up front and a cage behind them for the prisoners!!! Yes, we had a prison transportation bus directly behind us. We are still looking for the candid cameras...evidently they came to Germany with us! Tschuss.
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