The Butterfly Paper

I have 164 pictures from this weekend. Well, Sunday morning, actually. The morning Mary read her e-mail and my mom e-mailed her and said she had to take pictures, and we hadn't taken any.

Photobucket takes one minute per picture. Picasa is a lot faster, but only works for publishing straight to Blogger. Maximum of 4 pictures per post.

So I started a new blog. A blog just for pictures. One that will be updated far less frequently. It is called Butterfly Paper and it is for your enjoyment.

FRIDAY, ACCORDING TO MY NOTES
Piff got out of school early because it was the last day before Ferien. My school is not nearly this nice. I was jealous. We had lots and lots of cake left over from the Schulefasching thing, and that meant Delicious. We were going to have movie day in Bio, and then our teacher tried to tell us the tv would work without electricity, and then it still didn't work and he complained about the school falling apart and being worse than Russia, and we ultimately had to do work and not watch a video. Math was, well, Math. "So who's absent today?" "Our brains." "Gellie, what is that in your hand?" "A magic stick." "It does her homework for her!" And in German, we listened to some random, boring 1930s German comedian. I took a nap.

I went to see Mary this weekend! I got up all early Saturday and rode the train forever. In Koblenz, the stop before Bonn, the train decided it couldn't go to Bonn anymore, and I had to get off somewhere else and take the S-Bahn to meet Mary and be 40 minutes late. But she had a chocolate crossaint for me! Mary loves me, I think. We went to Pizza Hut and were loud and silly Americans (myself, Mary, and Casey), and we had a delicious pizza and couldn't decide what language to speak. Once our hunger was slaked, we had to go to the post office, and Mary bought stamps and stood at the mailbox FOREVER finishing her letters (who doesn't finish their letters before going to the post office?) and Casey and I eventually left her to go to Karstadt to buy silly Karneval costumes. We looked forever and I bought a flapper dress and a boa and a feather for my head and we bought spray-in hair dye and face crayons and it was great. Mary put the glitter in her hair in the bathroom because she is very impatient. I got to wear my boa immediately. I love boas. We went to McDonald's because Casey needed a balloon, and I waited outside while Mary and Casey tried to get one, and succeeded. Then we decided it was time to go to Mary's house, so we got our stuff from the train station lockers and got on a bus and Casey and I had an iPod war and it is a long way from the bus stop to Mary's house, no matter what she says. We got there and dropped our stuff and had some tea and I wanted to watch the Olympics, but Casey was mean (and controlling the remote) and made us watch Germany's Next Top Model, which isn't nearly as cool. We had dinner sometime, and it was delicious, as was everything Mary's host mom made, and then we went down to Mary's room in the basement and her host brother got us hooked up with the DVD player and tv and we watched the Notebook, which I determined was a silly movie, and Casey and Mary hate me for thinking it was silly. I should mention I was dressed like a flapper at that point. Then Mary's host brother Christian came back down and we watched Gangs of New York, which was so much better, although Mary and Casey slept through most of it. It was late, and we went to bed. The next morning, Mary got us up for church, and church is closer to Mary's house than the bus stop, I think. In any case, it is really close. And it was an American church, in English, with Methodist hymnals! Casey's a Methodist, too, and we got all excited and told Mary she was going to a Methodist church, because it was just like our church at home. Mary disagreed. After church, we hurried home for lunch and then got ready to go to the Karneval parade in some village with Christian and his friend. We had lots of fun standing there and screaming for candy at every float that came by, and mostly it seemed like they would throw it beside us, directly across from us, and then on the other side of us, so we didn't get much. Casey got a horse calendar, though, and a juice box, and she's pretty proud of that. We headed home after the parade for Board Games, and we started with PayDay because they wouldn't let me play the Texas oil drilling game (it looked like fun) and then we moved on to Deutschlandreise, which turned out to be the coolest game ever. It was a big map of Germany with a bunch of cities on it, and cards for all the cities, and you got 8 cards and had to go to all those cities and then get to a special goal city first. It was way more fun than it had any right to be, although Casey won constantly due to being able to find super-short routes between cities and being very very lucky. We drank a lot of tea and ate a lot of cake, too, until it was dinner time. After dinner, we started watching American Wedding, and then realized that it was the most boring movie ever created, so we played more Deutschlandreise and left it in for background noise. Our next choice of background noise was Robin Hood Men in Tights, but of course we ended up watching it instead of playing, and Casey, who has never seen this amazing movie (I don't know why not) got bored with it (she must have problems) and went to take a long bath while Mary and I enjoyed our movie. We went to bed thereafter and Mary woke us up too early the next morning for the next parade. As we were eating breakfast, it started to snow, and we were lazy, and we finally decided to be wimps and make more tea and stay in. Of course we ended up playing a lot more Deutschlandreise. We packed and we dyed our hair (of course) and we took millions of silly pictures, which are on the other blog. We eventually went out into the snow and to the train station to go home, but we were a bit early and grabbed another cup of tea in the bar, and then I faced my 5 hour ride home, which was uneventful.

I spent today uploading pictures. Good thing it's Ferien.