Okayyyy, sorry it's taken this long to put up another post! It was a hectic two weeks, with Faschings, and then Mid-stay, and this last week I was just trying to get back into the normal routine of things, with missing a week of school and all.
So I started this post over a week ago, and somehow got distracted and forgot about it. Sorry again.
So the last time I wrote was like the tenth of February. We had less snow then we do now. Anywho, we had Faschings vacation. FASCHINGS WAR EINFACH TOLL. :D Fasching is sorta of like a mix between Halloween and Mardi Gras and germanized. It's pretty awesome. I went to lots of parties and a parade (with party). I was a Mexican Pirate (which made up for me missing halloween) and a German Soccer Fan (though not both at the same time. Then after Faschings, still in vacation, we went three days skiing. The slopes were soooo short and there were only a couple. But it was still fun. And I ended up going off a jump with a bad landing, flying through the air, and landing on my face and hand, which ended up spraining my wrist. Though It's much better by now.
Then I had a relaxing weekend, a day of school, and then it was off to my Mid-stay camp in Bad Honnef (sort of near Bonn). It was pretty funny. Though my train ride took like 5 1/2 hours to get there. It's been awhile, so I don't remember a whole ton of what exactly happened. But one day we went to Bonn and the Haus der Geschichte, but we were there a little to long for my taste (history's not my favorite thing, you guys know that), and had not enough free time. We did lot of workshops which a lot of times did invovle funny skits. We were in Köln another day, and went to a Mosque and the Kölner Dom (the third tallest church in the world (though I have been to the top of the tallest, the Ulmer Munster)). And we saw a comedy show there too, about turkish immigration there and such (oh I'm noticing how funny everything looks without the nouns all capitalized), which was pretty funny (but not always). It was nice to be with americans again. Now things got exciting on the way home.
So, I got on the train in Koblenz with another exchange student, Dan, who lives somewhere in the near from me. So at first I had a reserved seat that my mom booked for me, so I sat there (the train was really full, and Dan went ahead to find another seat (we were pretty sure we wouldn't be able to find seats together anyways). So then there came an annoucement, which I didn't heard because I had my iPod in, so I asked the lady sitting next to me. She said that a tree was on the tracks or fell on something ahead of us? So we would have to wait a little until the tracks were cleared, like maybe an hour. Then they changed their mind and said that we would go back to Koblenz, change direction and then go to where we were supposed to go through different tracks. Then Dan came and found me and borrowed my phone to call his parents, 'cause his battery was dead. Mine didn't have much battery left either. Then I called my mom talked to her, and decided to stay in this train. I moved my seat to sit next to Dan 'cause he did find a place with two empty seats. We waited. They changed their mind and we actually did go forward, after like a little more than an hour of waiting. So Dan and I slept some more (with some chatting inbetween). Then our train stopped in Mainz the next stop as planned. Then we continued, and at some point in time before the next stop, the train kinda just stopped in the middle of the woods. The train dude came on saying a tree had hit our train and we would recieve further information as soon as possible. So Dan started calling his parents with my phone, but it kinda died at the beginning of his call. So then we were without phones stuck in a train not going anywhere. There ended up being lots of information going on and off, and I ended up asking an old lady if I could borrow her cell phone to call our parents, she ended up asking me if I was going to call America (No, I wouldn't spend so much money on someone else's phone), but let us use it, and Dan called his host mom (I couldn't 'cause I don't know they numbers, they were just in my phone which was dead, and Dan had his written on a piece of paper), and his mom said she would call my mom (which she did). Then we kinda just slept and talked and waited and maybe worried a bit too. We decided it would have been entirely awful if we were alone, and we really glad we weren't.
So then they finally said the tree was away, and that we would go back to the last train station. So we made our way back painstakingly slowly, so a tiny little train station (our train was a fast train and only stopped at the big train stations) in the middle of nowhere. (Okay, so not really the middle of nowhere but a tiny little station wayyy on the outskirts of Mainz.) Then they said we would most likely not be going further, and if we had options of somewhere near hear to go then we should do it. Some people left. The train kept getting emptier and emptier for the next hour-ish. Dan and I just weren't quite sure what to do. We contemplated leaving, finding a pay phone, and a bus into the city among other things. Just as we were about to leave and try our luck they annouced that there would be an S-Bahn coming that would take us to the Mainz Hauptbahnhof (Main train station) and that everyone should take it as this train would most likely not be going anywhere. So as we were leaving, the doors refused to open. How cool. But lucky some lady got them open just in enough time for us to get our butts over to the other track while the S-Bahn came. We took it too Mainz.
So the plan was to find a pay phone. We have good enough luck that we found one right away. But then the problem that we couldn't figure out how it worked. Then we went to find an ATM or something to check if Dan could get some money. (He didn't have any money with him (I had about 40 euros), and had to pay back 25% of his ticket on the first train 'cause he forgot the card that made it cheaper, so he didn't have any on his account either. But it was actually really cool 'cause when the lady came to check our tickets Hillary (one of our councelors, not actually called Hillary but we called her that anyways) talked in an american accent too, so that maybe the lady would be nice to exchange students. But sadly it didn't work.) He couldn't. Then we went back and observed some people using it, and figured out how to actually use it. He called his host parents, and they said they were going to try and call AFS and then for us to call them back in a half hour. So we went to get something to eat, I had a Döner (yummmm) and a Bier, and Dan ate McDonalds (bleh). So then we went back and called his parents, who couldn't reach AFS, and told us to go talk to the people at the train station information/help/service center. So we wandered around looking for it for a bit (first we found the sketchy bathrooms in the basement and such), and finally took the escalators wayy upstairs where we immiediately saw a HUGE line of people at this stand.
So we started making our way to the very back when we heard a familiar voice scream our names. It was Mariah, Amanda, and Johannes! Apparently they were stuck here too! Their train was the first train ours had passed that had a tree fall on it too. And Mariah had seen me through the window as our train had slowly passed theirs, she recognized my awesome rainbow hat. She said she was like "Whatttt, they get to keep going and we're stuck here?!" But we ended back up at the same place as them, just a long time later. So we waited in line, and then talked to the train guy (and Johannes did most of the talking, which was cool), found out their were definitely no more trains going home for any of us that day, got our tickets good for tomorrow, and asked if they would pay for our hotel. (We had also called AFS but apparently everyone in the Mainz area was too busy to help a couple of all alone stranded americans.) Then Johannes and I figured out we could put my Sim card in his phone, because he accidentily locked his phone, but mine worked, my actual phone just didn't have any battery. And Mariah had the sheet with everyone's home number on it, so I was able to call my mom, (And this was actually during this whole last thing, so I called her every now and then as we went through stuff.) So then we bought some sweets (chocolate and gummi bears), and decided the only thing to do was to go find a hotel. We left.
So once we got out of the train station we looked around trying to find a hotel. We found one, but it seemed really expensive, and we asked if we could just get one room and some of us could sleep on the floor. They said no, but the guy was nice, and suggested a cheaper one a little bit around the corner from the train station. So we went and found it and talked to the guy there. Johannes did most of the talking again, and I think the guy felt sorry for us, so in total we ended up getting it 20 euros cheaper (but not per person). I won't write the name of the hotel though, because the man there asked us not to tell anyone about that. And it was a rather sketchy hotel too (but not too too sketchy). We were on the fifth floor (a WHOLE bunch of stairs), and the guys and a two person room, and we had a three person room. Johannes and I went back to the ATM to get money for the rest of the hotel, because only us two had access to money, so he paid for half the hotel, and I paid for the other half. Then we went back to the hotel. Amanda bought some internet time (for about 2 euros or something, we got it cheaper again), and so everybody had a short go on Facebook, and Dan skyped his dad and asked him to put some money in the bank.
So then after a little bit of chilling Dan, Johannes, and I went out to find a bar. After wandering around for a bit, we ended up going to this nice little spanish restraraunt across from the train station that had a bar. It was later by then, and pretty empty, except for two middle aged guys who started talking to us when we went in. Apparently the recognized me from my rainbow hat from the train too, and then I remember I sat near them in the train before I moved to sit by Dan. So then we talked with them for a bit, and they bought us beer. We talked about American government (and got a little bit showed up) and German government and such. We were there until about 1 am talking, and we had to be back at the hotel by one anyways, because then the guy there locked up. At the end they ended up saying they hadn't talked to young people such as us before, with so much interest in politics and such, and who knew about it, and our opinions, and that we could even use "du" with them (because in germany there is "du" unformal, and "Sie" formal, for you, and we had been using "Sie" the whole time). It was the first time anyone that we had to use Sie with told us that before. We left and went to our respective hotels, and will probably never see them again.
I went right to sleep when we got back, and we got up at about 10 am. (Normally we were supposed to be out by 10 am, but they guy was nice again, and said that we could leave at 10:30.) We packed all our stuff up again, and headed out. The day before we had thought that maybe we would take a later train home, so we could see Mainz that day, but we all just wanted to get home by this time, and headed to the train station to check train times and eat breakfast. The first train for any of us was Dan and mine at 11:15, with a 15 Verspätung, so we all went to get breakfast. (I ate pizza, it was yummy.) We headed down to the tracks and said our goodbyes, promising to back our facebook statuses that we got back safely as soon as we got home. Dan and I got on and found to unreserved empty seats together (which was a bit of a challenge), and can you guess what we did? Sleep. Then there were a couple of changes, that our train wasn't going to stop somewhere (but a different stop as ours), and we ended up having to get off in Stuttgart and catch another train to Ulm there, but it was okay. In the train on the way to Ulm, we sat near a bunch of business people speaking englisch (and I talked to them shortly, but they weren't really the talking to teenagers sort of type). So then as we got to Ulm, I ended up getting off really quickly to catch the next train to Hermaringen. (A train leaves Ulm every hour, but I just wanted to be home by then, and didn't want to wait for another hour, even though it wouldn't have been much of a problem, I know Ulm pretty well.)
I caught the train home, and after a painstaking half hour, 45 minutes, got to Hermaringen, and walked home. It was about 23 hours after I should have been home.
I'll post a post soon about the month of march, sorry this one just took sooo long to write!
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