Leeds to Mannheim

Guten Nachmittag!

As I didn’t have time to post last Wednesday, I have a week and a half’s worth of activities to write about today! To be honest though, when Jordan wasn’t here, pretty much all I have done is work, cook and exercise.

On Sunday, as it was St. Patrick’s Day and Annie, from last semester, had come to visit from Spain, we started the day by going out for brunch. We went to Le Coffee again which is a lovely café and does delicious brunch food, but it is very slow service. I had American pancakes with peanut butter and banana but there was a lot of choice including scrambled egg, open sandwiches, waffles and cakes. Later, we met at Fermacs, an Irish bar, to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. We were all given Guinness hats and just sat and chatted for a few hours. The others were drinking Guinness but I just ordered some chips.

On Monday, after a day of uni, we all went around to Reubens house for a pizza night to say bye to Annie before she flew back to Spain. When we arrived, we watched some Takeshi’s castle whilst Annie ordered the pizzas. After she had gone through the eleven-pizza order in German the lady on the phone said she couldn’t accept the order as It wasn’t from a German number, so she had to call and do it all again on another phone! For the amount of pizzas ordered it was ready really quickly though. Rachel, Reuben and I went and collected them, and we ate them whilst watching more Takeshi’s castle! Once everyone was finished with the pizza, we played some games which involved being connected to Reuben’s projector through our phones. The first was like an online Cards against Humanity but you wrote out an answer. Basically, you were given the start of a sentence and had to finish it with the funniest answer you could think of, then two answers were shown on the screen and everyone voted for their favourite. After that we played one where you had to draw t-shirts and write captions before matching other people’s drawings to the caption you found funniest. Again, the T-shirts were put to vote, and the winner was the funniest. You could even buy the T-shirt designs afterwards!

After a long day of uni on Tuesday, I set off to the airport to meet Jordan. I got to arrivals at Frankfurt just as his plane was landing but he didn’t get through until half an hour later. For that 30 minutes I sat staring at the arrival’s door, waiting and when he finally did come through, I missed him as I was watching someone pick up a war veteran! After noticing Jordan, we started our extended (but considerably cheaper) train journey back to Mannheim. We arrived back around 8:30 and I took Jordan to a Donner shop for tea so he could try German kebab. However, he is the pickiest eater ever, so he effectively just had plain grilled chicken in pitta bread.

On Wednesday, I managed to force Jordan out of bed around 12, we had lunch and then headed to Schwetzingen which is 11 minutes away on the train. Like Mannheim, Schwetzingen has its own palace but unlike Mannheim the rest of the city is also quite beautiful. However, there is nothing to do. On Tripadvisor for Schwetzingen you have the palace, the palace gardens and a statue of a pig! We saw all of those in one go and were basically done for the day. The weather was beautiful though, so we walked around the whole city, visited a few shops and sat and ate ice creams by a fountain.

On Thursday, I had to tutor all afternoon so I forced Jordan to get up earlier than he wanted so we could go for a walk and have an early lunch. For lunch we went to Azteca, a Mexican restaurant. Jordan had enchiladas, I had chicken fajitas and the salad and vegetables that Jordan didn’t want! After I tutored, we went to Eeva’s for a game night. Everyone arrived with snacks and we played the German game Zug um Zug, explained to us all by Kathrin. The game is quite complicated and just a bit weird, you have to build trains to get points and you get extra points for building them between cities on cards that you pick up along the way. You get a different amount of points for each train line you build and there are different rules for tunnels and channel crossings. Most of us soon got the hang of it though and I was glad I had Jordan on my team as he’s quite good at strategy! Kathrin’s team won with me and Jordan coming second. The game took around 3 hours so by the time it finished everyone was ready to go home.

On Friday, I had a morning lecture, so I left Jordan to sleep while I attended it. Afterwards we made fresh pizzas for lunch (by we, I mean Jordan sat and watched while I made the dough and then he added the topics he wanted). Once we had eaten, we walked across the river to Ludwigshafen and spent some time exploring the shops in the Rhein Galerie. Again, it was a beautiful day, so we sat in the sun and had an ice cream. Jordan saw a fox/ racoon cookie cutter in one of the shops and for some reason really wanted it, so we decided to buy that and go home to make cookies. Making the cookies took about 20 minutes but decorating them took about 2 hours! Jordan was convinced they were raccoons, so we tried to decorate them as such, but I only had icing sugar, cocoa powder and cocktail sticks. In the end they weren’t that bad though and they must have tasted okay as they didn’t last very long.

As Saturday was Jordan’s last day, we spent most of it just relaxing together. In the evening we met everyone for a meal as this weekend Emma from last semester had come back to visit. We headed to Fermac’s but it was full, so we ended up getting Indian from House of India. It wasn’t the best Indian I’ve had, and they made a few order mistakes, but it was fun to be around everyone and my friends really liked Jordan!

Jordan insisted that he would get lost forever if I didn’t take him back to the airport, so we set off on a Flixbus on Sunday morning and, after sitting in Frankfurt airport McDonald’s for a bit, we said goodbye and I went back to catch another bus. Whilst waiting for the bus I met a girl who was also waiting to go back to Mannheim and I practiced my German with her, I then spent the whole journey trying to learn grammar rules for my exam the following day. Sunday afternoon and evening were also spent revising this and trying to learn my presentation that I’m giving in a fortnight.

I was incredible relieved on Monday when the grammar exam was over as I now only have two more things to focus on before Easter. The exam didn’t go too badly either I don’t think although it wasn’t easy. In the evening, after a bit of revision, I went to the Zumba class again. She changed some of the songs this week which made it more interesting but also meant I was really rubbish as I had no idea what I was doing. By the end I was effectively just doing a different dance to the rest of the class!

This morning, I met Kathrin for brunch at Cafe Fraulein Schiller. I thought we were going to be speaking German, but she had been out last night and was so tired that I don’t even think she noticed the times I spoke to her in German! It was nice to chat to her and know everything she was talking about though. The breakfast was not that great, I had homemade muesli with yoghurt and fruit salad, but you didn’t get a lot for the price. Kathrin had a bigger traditional German breakfast which was much more expensive but still seemed quite small. Afterwards, I participated in a marketing experiment to get an extra 5% added on to my grade. It was an interesting experiment and quite funny as it had a practical origami part to it as well, needless to say I failed miserably with that.

This next week will mainly just be a lot of revision now so I’m prepared for my accounting exam, but I also am definitely helping at the food bank tomorrow and doing a city clean up on Friday.