Monday

We had Chemistry and Math like normal on Monday, then Nunt and I had our two hour break while the others had French. I left the school and was planning on sending a couple postcards and reading/passing out in the bookstore, but then Nunt ran up to me and asked where I was going and if she could come with, so I was like, sure. So, since Nunt probably didn't want to sleep for two hours in the bookstore, I thought of where we should go. The week before Nunt had gone to Söflingen (five minutes with the street train=Strassenbahn) and walked around the whole time, so I was like, we could go to Söflingen again, and she was like, ok. But then, when we were walking across the bridge over the train tracks, I was like, hmmmm, should we take a train to Blaubeuren and look around there? (15-20 minutes by train, very beautiful little village) So, we found the next train to Blaubeuren, which was just about to leave when we got to the train station, we booked it onto the platform just when it started moving. So, I kicked it, and found the next plan: Laupheim. A little farther away (25 minutes by train), but neither of us had been there before. So, when we got to Laupheim, we looked around a little bit, decided it was a pretty plain little town, mostly agriculturally-based, found a church steeple, and went church hunting. It's surrounded by a beautiful graveyard, and the church itself (picture) is quite pretty. After about a half hour, we walked back to the train station, found that we had looked on the wrong schedule for our return train, and would have to take a train that would make us ten minutes late for English. We also had to wait a long time for it, but we amused ourselves with the ticket machine. We ran back to school from the train station in Ulm, got into English a little less than ten minutes late, looking very disheveled. It had occured to me that I could explain ourselves in English, so advantage Brent. The teacher was like, you look somewhat disheveled, haha. So, I began explaining, fearing the worst (my host mom had said that the last (first) excuse she wrote me was the last she would write). I said that we had wanted to see Laupheim during our break (class roars with laughter), and that the train made us late. The teacher was like, 'hmm, Laupheim is somewhat far away...the train station is hard to find. Did you find it, then?' I was like, yup, we saw a church, I have pictures. And he was like, ok, that's fine then, sit down. End of story. Good old English teacher. I then discovered that he now thinks my name is Bert. He had me explain all the southern food that was listed in this story about southern USA, and he was like, 'well, you can explain for us, Bert.' Everyone snorted, and fought to control their laughter, the girls in the back were about to correct him, but I thought it would make the period more amusing if we just carried on (which it certainly did). So, I kept struggling to give explanations for things like fried perch fingerlings, iced tea, hush puppies, fried shrimp, etc. And by struggling, I mean to stay in my chair. Once, I didn't give an answer quick enough cause I couldn't stop laughing, and the teacher was like, 'oh, come on, Bert' in an admonishing tone, always with a somewhat British/German accent, which didn't help anything, of course. Once, the girls in the back were joking about it, I only heard 'mumblemumblemumble...Bert! laughlaughlaugh.' So now everyone calls me Bert, especially when I get called on in class. I think they're stopping now, though.

This afternoon I went "shopping" (messing around with things until we nearly break something) with Morgan in the Blaubeurer Strasse, where lots of big stores like IKEA and the shopping mall and Media Markt are. We went into Media Markt first cause Morgan wanted to buy an mp3 player, and I looked at memory cards for my digital camera for the Europatour. A 1 GB memory card for my camera costs 70€, which is what I would need if I only bought one, but then I spotted (well, Morgan spotted them) portable hard drive thingies, whatever you call them. One has 40 GB for 80€. So, as long as I take my camera USB cord with me and my camera batteries are charged, I can take unlimited pictures on the Europatour. Well, I haven't bought it yet, but I got the clear from my dad to buy it, hehe. I wonder if someone should take a power strip on the bus, I heard that there's only ever one plug on the bus, and there will be about 56 people on the bus....anyway, excited about that. And I can load music on it too, of course. I'm going to take my camera and camera cord with me to the store when I buy it to make sure that everything will work.

So, I have to call Morgan now to check if we can go skating tomorrow. She was going to call Nunt to ask if she was going to come along too. No school tomorrow! Yippee!