Craziness and new things

Wow!  So much has happened since I last posted.

First, I apologize for the large time since my last post.  I had difficulties first with getting pictures put together for posts...THEN my computer completely crashed and I lost almost everything.  I then waited nearly 6 weeks to get a recovery disk for my computer.

Once I got my computer up and running, several new things happened.  I finally got volunteering and a mentor set up for me.  These will help me with medical school immensely.  The volunteering I've done thus far have been absolutely awesome and only further my desire to go into medicine.  My mentor is great for me in that her background is very similar to what mine is right now.  Things keep looking better.

Now for the travel...

After Halloween, we visited our friends in Ulm again.  While learning more German with the little ones than I had in a while, we visited LegoLand...which was AWESOME!  The rides were not bad, and the lego sets built there, miniature european cities and both miniature and full size models of star wars sets and characters, were quite impressive.  I caved and bought myself a quite sizeable Technic set which I spent three days over Christmas building.  I forgot how much I LOVE Legos.  Yes, I saw the movie.  More on that later.

We took more day trips during December and January.  One of them was to Speyer where they have a pretty cool Cathedral and crypt.  The elaborate stone work and size of it was spectacular, especially considering it was almost a complete rebuild from after the last war.

The next place we went to was Ludwigsberg, not terribly far away from Heidelberg.  There were a very large gardens, a sizeable building (422+ rooms in size including a theater and two chapels), and even a very large aviary which completely took me by surprize.  It's completely worth visiting if you want a bird's eye view into how things worked for the upper class during the Baroque period.

Just a few weeks ago, we visited London and saw all the major sights: the London Tower, the National Gallery, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, London Bridge, Tower Bridge, the outside of Westminster Abbey, and the Natural History Museum.  It was good we spent most of the weekend there indoors as it rained for about half of the time from the hurricane-level storm on the opposite side of the island at the time.  We used the tube for the majority of our travels which was always super bustling!  It was like being in the Matrix with literally stories upon stories of train tunnels...it was like a whole other city underground.

In short, London was incredible and we both would completely visit it again.  The quality of the museums was fantastic and mostly free!  Everyone...EVERYONE...was very polite and very helpful...such a switch from many other cities we've visited.  The only downside to the visit was that it was definitely on the expensive side of things...three and a half days on the cheap ran us far more than we hoped it would.  It was also a nice change of pace to visit a place where there was not a language barrier.

A little special trip we took while visiting London was to see the Lego Movie.  I LOVED IT!!  It was so much like what I imagined when I was little playing with the tons of Legos I had at home...minus the super city that took up an entire room.  It was also nice in that we got to experience a different part of London away from the "City."  It was surprisingly like the States...more so than any other European city we've visited thus far.

Finally, I'm still practicing and playing soccer with the local team I am a part of.  I played in my first indoor soccer tournament in Europe.  There were roughly 12 teams in our competitive bracket, and we played about 5 or 6 10min. games.  The skill levels of the teams were all over the map: some very young, quick, and aggressive, and others older, slower, and more tactical.  My team was smack in the middle.  One game we saw resulted in bench clearing as one of the goalies had a beef with an opposing team member.  That tournament made me proud to be part of my team.  We did average with a surprise upset on our last game.  We never lost our cool, we always had fun, we were always supportive, and we were probably the most strategic team.  I'm very much looking forward to our game in early March.

This should bring you all up to date on things.  I will absolutely try to get more pictures as soon as I can.  I know a picture speaks volumes more than a simple story sometimes.

Special shout-out to K!  I'll be better about making more posts.  :)