Today I decided to finally give my first bread recipe a try. It came out.. okay. It’s a bit bland but then again.. I didn’t put any kind of flavor into it. I used spelt flour to avoid wheat and used a vinegar/ baking soda mixture to avoid yeast. I am going to try a sour dough after my trip to see Thilo, because it takes a few days to make it.

It felt really great to be in a kitchen.. even if it was a hassle to figure out what a tablespoon really was and what a cup meant. What I have learned is to convert everything to grams or milliliters. I use the kitchen scale and measuring spoons that simply are for milliliters. Remind me to have Thilo grab my measuring cups and measuring spoons when he goes to Maine!

I am looking into the different methods of transportation I can find here. The Bahn, or train, is the easiest method. It just happens to be a bit expensive. I’ve considered getting a Bahn card.. they have three different cards… 25, 50 and 100. The 100 is essentially unlimited travel on all trains in Germany. But, with a price of nearly 4,000 Euros, it’s impossible for me. Although doesn’t that sound amazing? The 50 is 50% off tickets and 25 is 25% off tickets. With the 50 coming in at about $300, it’s expensive, but if I plan to make at least 5 trips to Thilo, Johannes or Berlin or Munich, then it has already paid for itself.

Another option I’ve started to look into is shared cars. People post when they are leaving and where they are going, and you can pay to grab a seat in their car. It is much cheaper than the train, but there is obviously a lot fewer opportunities to get the time you want. We’ll see though, I’ve contacted one person who is going to Hannover so very close to Thilo.. who said he’d pick me up no problem.

Stefanie seems to have made a big leap with me. She’s very clingy to her mom and cries when nearly everyone else takes her. But today she came over to me a lot more and asked me to pick her up. I hope soon she’ll have no qualms about me taking care of her. She really is adorable.

Tomorrow I am taking the kids to school, then have my morning free. I haven’t decided what to do yet..

I’m more determined to get my German on the fast track. I’m going to start working on vocabulary I don’t know using this learning box method that Julia uses when teaching English. You have small cards you put the words on and 5 compartments in a box. New words go into the first compartment. As you test yourself on the new words, if you know it, it goes into the second compartment. When you test the second compartment, if you know it, it goes into the third. If you don’t, back into the first. So, once words are in the fifth compartment, you really know them. Let’s hope it works!