Weekend in Germany

Last week Wednesday I flew back to Germany for a longer weekend for the baptism of my little niece! So Wednesday that week to this week Monday i spent in Cologne with my sister and brother in law and their two daughters and eventually my entire family and some friends! It was great seeing everyone after being away from home for 5 months and not seeing part of my family for even half a year! When I saw Nele, my older niece, she smiled such a big smile at me as if she had remembered me from half a year ago :) And Anna, my little baby niece, is just about to start smiling and they are both just very very sweeet! I really enjoyed my time in Cologne and it was quite hard to say good bye again for another 6 months after seeing them for only a few days.

Me and Nele

Me and Anna

Nele

It's good to be back in England anyway. This week has been exciting as it snowed quite a lot on Monday and Tuesday so that Tuesday was actually a snow day which meant a day off from work just because it was too dangerous to get on the streets and try to get to work and also most of the schools had a snow day and were closed as well. Yes, England goes crazy once it snowed more than 10 cm.... ;)

In the snow on the way home from work.

just snow

Chaos on the road due to an unusual lot of snowfall! We were trying (with success in the end) to maneuver our little team car through the narrow street...

By the way. When I was in Germany, wise as I am I went to a doctor (although I was feeling really well that day but just to get ckecked by a proper doctor) and she found some rest redness and swelling and gave me something against that and also something for if it started hurting again. So it did of course start to hurt again, I took that stuff and then everything was fine. Imagine what happens? I come back to England and it starts hurting again. I'm allergic against England I think. Also at the moment our office is freezing cold, just because the room we call our office is very big and the radiators we have obviously can't heat up that much of a room. But fortunately I have my best friend the german hot waterbottle which does an amazing job at keeping me warm wherever I am! :)

Now I'm looking forward to tomorrow cause I'm going to spend the day in Manchester with some german friends! And Anne and I decided on each buying a pair of these ultra hipp wellies everyone wears nowadays! :) We'll see what comes out of that!

Hello again!

I'm sorry you haven't heard anything from me in quite a while. The last post was at half term... now the first term is over and the second term has already started after Christmas.
I've had an "interesting" time the past few weeks cause I've been ill for a long time. What started with a cough turned into a cold, then a chest infection, then everything was ok for three days and then I got Tonsillitis, so since Monday I'm on antibiotics for the 3rd time within 9 weeks and I'm improving slowly. I'm actually feeling quite good now, though I still feel my throat when I swallow and I'm still coughing but all in all I feel like I'll be able to go to work again on Monday evantually!

Exciting things happened too (hardly imaginable when you sit at home for weeks...). I became and auntie for the second time!! :) My sister had her second baby girl just after Christmas and she is called Anna Noelle and is very sweet of course and my older niece, Nele Fiona, is a happy and proud big sister now! And unless my health goes rapidly down again the next few days I will fly to Cologne on Wednesday and stay there for the rest of the week to see my family and nieces and celebrate Anna's baptism! It will be the first flight on my own....

Then of course Christmas itself was very interesting since I stayed in England and experienced it in a different way than I'm used to. It was indeed different and not always easy not to be at home during that time, but i'm sure it wasn't wrong to see it celebrated in just another way.

The time after Christmas was a bit tough due to stupid illness but there were nice times and my hostfamily cared for me very lovely, last Monday my team came round to my house after work to visit me and cheer me up a bit and they brought a bag full of gorgeous sweets and happy makers like super bubbles and a children word search book.... :) Lovely team I have!

Anyways, I'm looking forward to starting work again on Monday which might sound weird to some people but if you imagine being at home for three weeks you might feel the same!

Okay, here come some pictures of nice happenings :)

(to see the pictures in big, click at them)

A beautiful morning in Marple

A really good day in Manchester with my german girls Anne and Ina and our American guy Jarrett, drinking Gluehwein on the German Christmas Market in Manchester!! :)

This was on a walk over the hills of Charlesworth, a next door village, on Boxing Day. The weather was cold but beautiful and we had an excellent view even unto Liverpool.

This is my new born niece Anna Noelle...

...and this my proudbigsister niece Nele Fiona :)

the advent candle in our office

a bit of modern art in Sheffield... the long building in the background is in fact very old, very ugly, and no one lives in there anymore and there are holes in it and it can't be knocked down because it's landmarked. ha ha.

Robert, Daniel, me and Uli in front of some random water fountains in Sheffield.

Me and 4 yearold Elijah (my "host cousin") on a cold January day on a playground. He suddenly saw an ice cream car stopping nearby and desperately wanted some of course!

...is a good man.

God bless you!

Half Term

Hi guys!!


Great feature of my superdupercooli camera... colour change thingy or however that's called in English... I love it!

I've just had a wonderful half term! Monday and Tuesday were off. I went for a long walk with my host family and my host mum's cousin's family. It was dead cold and rainy at the beginning but though it stayed cold the whole time the sun came out later in the day and I really enjoyed the walk. In England they have the most interesting "Public Footpaths" I've ever seen in my life! They either lead you trough the toughest muddy deep puddle forest thingy or over sheep and cow meadows. And even through people's gardens. Sometimes it's also a normal path, like something you can actually walk on.

Me on a "public footpath"!! Next to some family's chickens. And in the small shed on the left there was a goat, I could have just taken them all with me.

After this really freezing walk we went for a curry which just means we went to an Indian Restaurant. I think my food didn't have any curry in it, don't know why they call it a curry then... And that food was massive! The starter almost could have been enough for me! And then the real meal. Huge. It was really tasty but just so incredibly much! I really felt like just falling asleep right where I was sitting, I was so full! But indeed good food!

Wednesday Thursday Friday was Fresh Conference. That means all the Pais teams set all over GB met in Manchester for some more seminars, some refreshings of seminars we heard at Foundational Training, sharing experiences, showing ministry, stealing other team's ideas, going shopping in Manchester and having a really good time together!
Natalie, Sarah, Alex, Anne, Laura, Ina, me

It was so nice to see them all again, seemed like ages although it was just 5 weeks! And the next time we meet with the whole group is in 4 months!! That's an awful lot of time in between...

Most of the weekend I spent with Steph, the only girl from church in my age, and her parents. We went for a nice lunch somewhere and afterwards I got to know the "Trafford Center" which is a massive shopping center near Manchester! It's got shops on two floors and each floor is one mile long! And it's got everything! Really huge! And I had a horrible encounter with a spider, it was in the car, at first we couldn't say surely that it was a spider but Steph and I were looking at it - frightened - and then it moved and we both screamed at the same time so we had to stop on the next car park where we both jumped out of the car and her dad had to save us and remove that terrible animal thing. Scary. Probably not at all as scary as what Syllie has to face and live with in Cameroon... but still. Uuaaah!! Anyway.
On the way back home that night I heard the song "Top of the world" in the car and when I came into the house I just sang the chorus of that song about 15 times thinking no one was at home and if so supposing they would just tell me to shut up after three chorusses. I knew definitely my host parents were away and I was pretty sure my two host brothers were as well. So I just sang that song in an incredibly loud volume (it was 11pm) and had my fun with it. And today I found out that Jake, one of my host brothers, actually was at home. That was indeed funny, I couldn't believe it!

Tomorrow I will start a thing that is completely new to me. Susanne, last year's Pais worker in the church I'm in now, started a kids club called "The Incredibles" where in each session they talked about one Incredible from the Bible (like e.g. David, Solomon, Jesus) and played games and made crafts on the topic. I'm going to restart it now and I've really no idea how it's going to be as I've never lead any kids club before! And I won't describe myself as a creative person which would actually be quite a good skill but anyway. I'm really excited about it and I'm glad I won't do the sessions alone, some nice ladies will always be with me to help and support me keeping all the six to ten year old girls in peace... And by the way, Jesus will be with me as well, I'm quite sure about that. (Cool, I've got the most incredible person in the world with me, I just realized that.)
So if you'd like to support me in some way you could definitely pray for me leading the Incredibles each Monday evening and also the upcoming Saturday where we're going to have "The Incredibles' Party". I really hope the kids will like it!

That's news from me. Hope you are all doing well wherever you are! Please let me know how you are doing, I'm interested in how everyone is!!

God bless!

Things that make me smile

• the way English speaking people pronounce my name
• the Sunday-phenomenon: in the morning it's grayish and rainy and during the last song in church the sun comes out and keeps shining the whole day
• my team
• German bread from aldi which is said to be ideal for a healthier lifestyle
  
• the chickens in our garden
• my host father when he tries to speak German
• the lovely people in my church
• my huge bed
• seeing people being happy
  
• dancing on Thursday evenings
• waking up on a Saturday morning, getting into the kitchen and finding a letter for me on the table
• my gorgeous niece with her 5 teeth
  
• God's wonderful creation

This day was filled with lovely beautiful sunshine! What a joy!!

Sunrise in Marple

Sunset in Marple

Arriving 'home'

3 weeks Foundational Training are over now! I had a really good time, brilliant! And now I'm so glad to be in my new home! My host family is so lovely, my bedroom is wonderful, I've got a very big bed and my own bathroom, and we have a piano and guitar and the landscape in and around Glossop is amazing!

I arrived on Saturday and on the way from Richmond to Glossop I couldn't stop wowing! The area is very hilly and there are many fields and meadows around. And on our journey the sun was shining which made it even more beautiful!
Yesterday I went for a walk with my other host parents (I'm going to change the families during my stay here) and I really loved it!

Today I had a day off, so I enjoyed sleeping in in my big bed :) and during the day Mandy and Tim (my host parents) showed me some parts of the area. And now I'm ready and very excited to start tomorrow with my team in our office. We probably won't be in schools this week because this is Vision Week, we're just going to set up plans, getting to know the area, our team and other organizational stuff. I'm really looking forward to that all!

A little bit about my host families. The family I'm staying with at the beginning is Tim and Mandy who are probably a little bit younger than my (real) parents and they have two sons called Ben and Jake, Ben just went left home for University and Jake is on his last year at school. The couple I'm going to stay with later on is Keith and Susan, two lovely people (a little bit older than my parents) who have a son called Gary who is married to Regan and they have a sweet eight-year-old daughter called Hemarnie, a very lively girl! I got to know them yesterday in Church and afterwards when we had lunch together at Keith and Susan's house. And Keith and Susan have a daughter, which I don't know yet cause she's married and lives somewhere else. But I’m sure I’m going to get to know them as well.

I wish you all a nice week.
God bless you!

ps> I'm happy about every mail I get! :)
xx

Some pictures

Ja, in England scheint auch die Sonne!

Der Wabbeltest!