Boats, Ropes, Nazis, and Football

James here! Who were you expecting?

I spent last week doing more of my August task of completing the TESOL course, and I actually am making awesome progress. I've completed 17 / 20 of the Units and will finish this Wednesday.

This weekend was pretty crazy. On Saturday afternoon, I got a call (my cell-phone is up and running now) from Claire asking if I wanted to go on a boat ride.

Our friend Alan has a friend who owns a Stocherkahn - what? You don't know what a Stocherkahn is? They're very important here in Tübingen. A Stockerkahn is a long wooden boat, similar to a gondola, which is steered and propelled by a person standing in the back pushing the boat from the bottom of the river with a long wooden pole. These boats are the pride and joy of Tübingen, which is home to 120 of them - exactly 120, no more can be built. That's some sort of weird city rule.

Every year, Tübingen has a Stocherkahn race - in which all 120 of these boats are filled with enthusiastic team members and raced against each other in a lap around the Neckar island. I just missed the 2009 race, but maybe by 2010 I'll be on a team.

Anyway, so we filled one of these with ten people and set sail - or stick - on a three hour voyage of drinking beer and eating cake. Nobody has to do any work on a Stocherkahn except the poor soul who has to stick that thing around, so we just kind of kicked it. It was pretty great.

That night, I went with my flatmate and her friends to see Inglourious Basterds - an ironic film to watch in German. I understood most of the plot and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was actually cool to have seen the film with a lot of Germans, as the cast includes many famous German actors who are unbeknownst to Americans, as well as several Americans who were recognizable to me but not to them. It led to fun post-movie conversations. "What? You've never heard of The Office? It's like the best American TV show!"

This morning I got up bright and early and was picked up at 9:00 AM by Christian and Claire - we were bound for Schloss Lichtenstein, a nearby castle, but more imporantly, we were headed for ADVENTURE LAND!

Adventure Land is a rope climbing course built into a forest - it feature 9 levels of difficulty for all ages, and consists of climbing, swinging (where you roll on a wheeled thing across a long wire), and even some random challenges like jumping from a swinging rope into a net and grabbing hold. It was surprisingly rigorous, and at certain points I'd be walking on a thin wire forty or so

feet in the air and suddenly wasn't as confident in my abilities as I was entering.

This picture doesn't do justice to the madness that was Adventure Land - but that's the idea. Lots of rope, lots of wire, lots of people climbing. Good times.

We had lunch at a nearby noodle factory (chocolate noodles for dessert, anyone?) and then

returned home.

Promptly after returning from this voyage I was called and invited to go play some football (that's actually soccer, remember) by friends of my roommate and we played for a couple hours. Afterward, we went for a run - what the hell? Who goes for a run after playing soccer? Soccer is nothing but running already.

Actually, this run was quite nice because the path took us through a few fields of corn and farmland, which looked a lot like Kansas. "My whole state is like this," I said to my friends.

Needless to say, it was a ridiculously physically taxing day for me, but it felt nice after spending so much of my week in front of computers working on English grammar.

All this stuff may seem like trivial socializing, but it's so important for me right now - the Germans are tremendously friendly and inviting, and meeting people and making friends is one of the most crucial tasks I have at this juncture.

Oh, and here are some pictures of Schloss Lichtenstein. Castles are so picturesque.

It's midnight right now, who the hell is playing drums on the street?