Playing in a cemetery?

I have always had this strange fascination with cemeteries. Not in the creepy way, but I always wonder what that persons life story was. What they did. Who they loved. What they wanted in life. What made them who they are.
On my trip into Frankfurt this weekend, I passed by the Hauptfruedhof, which is a big cemetery here. I had tried to go into it once before, but I got there at twilight, and well honestly... I had read Dracula for a bit right before... Not a good mix. Yes I know it is a fictional story, but my imagination has way too much fun with these kinds of things. I got there on Saturday and there was plenty of light, and it was actually quite calming there. The big stone walls surrounding the cemetery blocked out almost all of the city noise, which was shocking. There were birds chirping in the trees and there were very few people in it. It was really peaceful. I enjoyed my stroll, wondering about the stories of the peoples who's graves surrounded me.
I was confused every once in a while because there were green stickers slapped onto some of the head stones and I had no idea why. When I asked someone later I was informed that when you are buried, you get the lot for 30 years and then have to pay. If you don't pay, they move your bones.... The conversation got distracted at that point, so I am not sure where the bones go then. It was just odd to me. You are dead. Yet you have to pay later... Strange system.
For the record, Hauptfruedhof is a HUGE cemetery. I ended up walking clear towards one side, and in all honesty I was rather tired. I had been longboarding the city for about 5 hours and then walking in the cemetery. I got to one end, only to realize that I was going to have to walk all the way back out, then along the side of the cemetery past where I currently was. Way too much backtracking for me to be ok with... so.. I hopped the fence. I got a few funny looks, but there was not a chance I was walking all that again. My country upbringing worked well that day.
When I started making this blog, I just wanted to put up some pictures. That is my main thing today. I had fun playing with photoshop on them, and I love to share all the random things I see. So welcome to Frankfurt :)

This is a Ludwig Mausoleum. I wanted to go inside of it, but when I opened the door it kinda freaked me out... Was reading Dracula again... Love the book too much!

This is the door on the mausoleum. See, creepy!

A bridge :) Just making sure you got that!

This would be the Bird Lady... She made me laugh.

I found a random swap meet, there were some... odd things there. I got there right as they were closing down, but I would love to go back and explore sometime!

Can I please get my shoes at a swap meet?! (insert sarcasm here)

I have no idea what so ever about what this is. It was there, I laughed, so I took a picture. That is the story of this guy :) Hope you enjoyed the lovely tour and I will be back next week with pictures of Paris :D

Sledding on a castle hill....

Yup... That is when you know you are in Europe. Last weekend I went on a lovely trip with my host family to Kassel, Germany. It is about 2 1/2 hours North of me, but let me tell you, that last half hour felt like forever! That would be because I was in the back in between two overly large car seats in an already small car. The trick to getting in was wedging your hips in and leaning forward at the same time... It was interesting but fun.
We got there Friday night and we stayed with Mattius's sister. Mattius thinks it is the most amazing thing that I don't drink so pretty much any chance he gets he tells people I don't drink, usually in an excited kind of way. Not like I am a freak at the circus, merely a side show :) It is all in good fun and it makes me laugh because I don't have to understand German to understand when he is telling people. Their shocked faces says it all.
It was especially entertaining this time. On hearing I don't drink, there was the shock, followed by a "but this is only juice" explanation. "It only has 2 % alcohol." And that my friends, is German juice :)
Dinner was divine can I just say!!! We used a raclette grill

it was delish! You put things on top to grill, and below you mix things like pineapple, ham, bell peppers, and onions, then top it off with a slice of cheese and put it under the grill to warm up and melt the cheese. I want one of these and someday I will have one!!
Nikki also started doing something at dinner. She had me memorize how to say 5 things at the table. So now I have ananas(pineapple), paprika(bell peppers), Zwiebeln(onions), Karofeln(potatoes), and Käse(cheese) ingrained into my brain. You may be thinking, how are those words going to help you? Funny enough they helped the next day.
We went to a birthday party where I ate... Ok I don't know the name of a single thing I ate. All I know was that it was so yummy!!! I... I love the food here (granted there are still a few things I can't quite bring myself to eat yet...)! The only problem at this party... I was the only English speaking person there. Oh well. I just listened a lot to the conversations. There was one conversation where I only caught three words. Mom, Dad, and... wait for it... Potatoes. Yup. Potatoes. No idea why, all I know was that I knew that word and I felt rather happy about that fact.
After the party we went sledding. Everyone else seemed to find it totally normal, but me, I was in awe. We were sledding at a castle!!! Things like that just don't happen back in the states, for obvious reasons, but still!
It was the castle of Napoleon Bonaparte's brother. That guy was crazy! He spent more money partying and building thing for his entertainment than Napoleon did with the fighting and such. He bathed in red wine (which is why people in Kassel wont drink wine, because apparently they re-bottled the wine... yum.), and he also built castle ruins around the castle. There are places that look like old castles that are falling apart and have some medieval story about them, when in fact he just built them cause he thought it was cool. It was a very interesting place and I would LOVE to go back when it is green and not so cold!
Since we were still in Kassel on Sunday, I found a branch there are joined them. Relief Society had a total of... 5 women when it started. Me included. They even had me say the opening prayer, they told me it would be ok to do it in English since I can't pray in German (this is a total German ward, not like my happy little English in Frankfurt). It was a nice lesson, I think. I enjoyed it. They also gave me the manual in German. I may start taking that with me to church so I can connect things. Could work right?
Then in Sunday School there were about 7 of us total there. It was really funny because the opening prayer was in German, and when the teacher has us all read a lot of scriptures in order, she had us read them in whatever language we could. So it went like this- German, German, English, German, English, Romanian, German. It was fantastic! The teacher knew I only spoke English so every once in a while she would translate what she just said for me. She was a sweetheart and I really appreciated it a lot. The class closed with a prayer in Romanian, and since I had to leave so we could head home, I left after that. I really wished I could have stayed. I have picked up a liking to singing in German. No, I don't sing any better that I do in English, I just get to laugh even more at myself for it all. I am going to work on it more, so then I can come home and sing in German. Just to mess with people.
That about sums everything up, oh except that I went longboarding here today and it was fantastic! The looks I got from people were amazing. There aren't people who skate here all that often. When you do see someone with a board, I have yet to see one for the record, apparently they just hold them and walk around. Sort of as a coolness status. That is what I hear at least. People on the roads kinda freak out and don't know what to do. I don't get it. I take up the same amount of space, if not less, than a bike. They understand that, what is the big deal? No I am not going to dart out in front of you, I like life thank you very much. Maybe by the end of my year here they will finally be use to it. It is a pretty small town so that is plenty of time to get over the fear of a little longboarder.
The thing that cracked me up the most during my ride was this guy.


It is a cop on a horse, I tried to get a picture of him chillin at the stop light, but I wasn't fast enough. People didn't freak out about a horse walking down the street. They politely didn't run him over. Is it me, or is a horse stopped at the light more odd than a longboarder? Keep in mind this is not a little farm town. Horses aren't normal like in Lehi and Cedar Fort. I don't get it, but I can handle my own. I understand they don't know how to deal with me, so I am easing them into seeing me around. I can't wait to take my board with me to other countries too! Paris here we come :D

Losing yourself

There is just something so liberating about being lost in a foreign place.On the majority of my vacations and trips to places, one of my favorite things is to just walk around and lose myself in the city. It is my current pass time in Frankfurt really. I hop on the train, get to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, and then hop on a random train. Then I decide when I want to get off, then start to explore the city from wherever I am and see when I can figure out where I am. I am getting pretty decent with it. I'm not exactly sure why it is, but it is so freeing. Knowing that you have no idea where you are and that it doesn't matter is great! Nothing else matters but where you are right then. It is like you have left behind yourself and it doesn't matter what is going on in life, you are free from everything that moment. I love it!

Yesterday I went to institute and had a lot of fun. Of course it was all in German so I really didn't catch much of it... at all really... But I enjoyed trying. Every once in a while Emily would lean over to me and kinda tell me a little of what was going on so I would be able to connect the few words I know into what they could possibly be saying.

I was enjoying listening to everything going on, when the teacher put us in groups and said we had to do something in five minutes. I looked to my group members to see what was going on, and was informed that we had to come up with examples from the Book of Mormon about times where there was delegation (Delegation was what the lesson was on). We talked it over a bit, then Emily looks at me and says that I am going to be the one telling about it. Say what?! I told her no, but the great thing about Emily, she doesn't listen to me sometimes (actually works out pretty well). Then she says something to the other guy in the group in German and he agrees. I know enough to know that she just told him not to say anything and this was all me. Luckily most the people in the class know English so I just said it in English. No biggie there.

The Sister that was teaching the class then passed out quotes for us to read. The first time Emily snagged mine and read it. The second time, she decided I was ready to read German. This was the quote I got, "Einige werden nicht zu großen Führern, weil sie nicht gelernt haben, Weisungen zu befolge. nämlich die Lehren Jesu Christi. Damit wir also führen können, wie Jesus es getan hat, müssen wir zunächst lernen." (really good quote once you translate it. I had no idea what I said till I came home). I stumbled a bit, blushed a lot, but I got through it. Yet another example where Emily didn't listen to me when I was trying to be a little more shy. Thanks :)

Afterwards it was really nice because one of the girls in the class came up to me and said, "You read that really well. Really. I am not being nice." It made me happy. I know I slaughtered a lot of the words, but you know what? I did it. They at least understood me to a degree and I appreciated it. Mark my words, I will be speaking German when I come home. It will be magical.

A photo tour of my life as I know it

So this blog is mainly dedicated to picture. I do have a little input, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words so it wont be a lot. And before I forget to mention something, I now know how I have made foreign people feel. While at the grocery store I was checking out, the lady said something to me I didn't understand for obvious reasons. It was German. I informed her IN German that I didn't speak German, so what does she do? She speaks slower. Still in German. I just looked at her with an expression that knows no boundaries of language. My face screamed "Lady! I just told you I don't speak German. WHY would you explain it again?!". It was interesting to see the flip side of this.




This is an awful cropping of pictures... deal with it till I have the time to fix it. This is Frankfurt, taken across the Main (pronounced mine) River. This is when it was a lovely 13 degrees outside and I was on my 8 km (5mile) bike ride.

This is the man selling Bratwurts on the Zeil. I am still entertained by this.
This is one of my favorite cathedrals, the Dom Cathedral. It is one of the few to survive WW2 bombings. It is beautiful on the inside but it always creeped me out when I would turn the corner after seeing beautiful sculptures of angels, to see a grotesque one of Christ. It makes me sad how they try and scare you into being religious.



This is just funny to me. You are walking down the street, there are shops and modern buildings, there is even a Hilton down the street.... Then there is this. No idea what it is, but it has been made into some business and is still being used.
I shouldn't be this entertained by the random pay phones... But I am. They are pink! Give me a break!


This is another Church I think is beautiful. It is St. Peterskirche (St. Peters Church). This is where some random creepy guy tried to get me to go to a New Years Disco at his restaurant, kept shaking my hand, and did the cheek kiss thing enough times that he could smell my perfume. He may have 'accidentally' been hit with my umbrella a few times....
This is in the grave yard surrounding St. Peterskirche. I had no idea what it was for, there are just a bunch of large nails in the wall and roses on them. When I got home I translated this. Verletzte Liebe means 'Hurt love' and I found out that every nail in the wall is for someone in Frankfurt who died of AIDS. Very interesting.
This is also in St. Peterskirche grave yard. I was able to read it when I took this picture... But I can't remember what exactly it says. I believe that it says "Here lies Goethe's Father" which I found kinda entertaining. Goethe is a HUGE thing here, and his dad is buried with that stone across him.


This is what Goethe's Fathers whole grave looks like. No idea what the rest of the head stone says... There are perks to having a famous son. You get a nice little gate around your grave and your headstone is kept nice and shiny. There were a lot of the headstones that were falling apart and were so covered in... Slime? Crusty stuff? Moss? That you couldn't read them, which was sad.


This is my Christmas tower I was talking about :) I love this thing!

I didn't take this picture, I found it online. Now I know this looks awesome, but imagine this over the ENTIRE city! It was amazing! I got to play with big fireworks like these. Granted I almost blew us up because I was sticking one in the ground and was told to put it about 1 millimeter in the ground... I had no idea what he meant exactly by that, so I put it in a millimeter by my scales. Well... It was too far in so it just blew up right in front of us. Good times :) There was at one point in time where there was so much smoke from the fireworks around us at the park that I couldn't see more than 20 feet in front of me. Yeah... That is a lot of fireworks!

Well that is all I have right now. I will find more things to take pictures of now that I have a functional camera and a blog that is not being stupid.
Tschüss!!!