So we got up at around ten o'clock and Alex and Verena had our Euro breakfast ready and waiting for us shortly thereafter. We kind of lounged around for a bit, waiting for some of Alex's friends to come by before we departed from the house. We quickly found out that the decision to upgrade the car to something a bit bigger than a Golf wagon was absolutely critical because we just barely had enough room to fit everyone's luggage in the back of the Benz. It was so tight that we couldn't even fit the sheets, the food, or the beverages that we were bringing in the back of the car.
So the caravan departed for Kahl and Alex, after reviewing what the Navigation system said about the route we should take, said he knew a better way to go that would allow us to stretch the legs on the Benz and see what we could do. I was still getting used to driving (since I don't drive on a regulat basis) and getting used to all the foreign signs, so we didn't do anything too crazy (yet).
The rest of the afternoon was spent lazing around and relaxing. There were quite a few
people that showed up, including a large group of flight attendants who were friends of Rebecca's. Daniel and Kelly finally got the chance to sit around and talk to some real Germans and Daniel told me later that day that he was very happy that he got to talk to these people. He had met some Germans that were exchange students in high school and was less than impressed, to say the least. He found them to be very stereotypical, kept to themselves, always serious, never smiling, cold, not polite, not friendly, etc. He even admitted to me that he was worried about the trip because he figured the people would be like that. But now he'd had a chance to spend the day with 15 Germans and he couldn't believe how polite, how friendly, and how open the people were. I think this is a common misconception about the Germans. Like many other cultures, if you visit the country on the personal level, you get a completely 
different experience than you would if you just came as a tourist. Maybe that is one reason why I like Germany so much, all of my trips have been on a personal level, visiting people that I knew there. I was glad to see that Daniel appreciated this as well and realized that the Germans are very welcoming people who are interested in who you are and what your culture is like!There was quite an interesting group of people who attended. There was Alex and Verena,
more or less our hosts. There was their mega-tatoo'd friends (Steffi and Sven, who had tatoos of cartoon characters all over) and their stoner friend who liked to go out on the lake in the rowboat and smoke joints (he ended up being pretty good at ping pong and beat me easily ;o). Then there was Rebecca and her boyfriend. Then there was their friends, the flight crew composed of girls from Germany (hot!) and Argentina (hot!) and boys from Venezuela and Germany. Daniel had trouble with everyone's name until he met Veronica, which is his sister's name. He said "Finally I met someone who's name I can remember!". Turns out she was from Argentina, so that figures :o).Part of the afternoon was spent bbqing some of our plethora of meat. Being a complete novice myself, I figured Jan (Becca's manly boyfriend) would be well experienced in the art of the bbq. He let me down. So I turned to our Brazilian churascarria representative Daniel, at who's house I've had several massive bbq meals. Yea, he didn't do so well either. So us three men stood around trying to get this fire going and were totally incompetent. Leave it to Becca to come over and get the fire stoking within a few minutes. Yea, our pride was mildly dented ;o)
In addition to ping-pong, there were many games being played over the course of the day,
including water polo / alee-oop on the dock and in the lake, wind-surfing on the lake, and Tip-Kick, a German soccer board game that I was completely unsuccessful at. The Germans had experience in that game and beat everyone else. There was also a few rounds of football juggling with your feet. I represented America well by keeping the ball up like a total of three times and my final kick of the afternoon hit the end of my big toe and snapped a nice chunk of my toenail back, leaving it dangling, bleeding, and hurting like a beyatch! That's what I call coordination! It didn't really bother me for the rest of the trip after I cleaned it out by swimming in the cess-pool-like lake. Speaking of the lake, there were several eye-witnesses that saw "Jaws" struggling to survive in the lake - a ginormous fish that was flopping around the surface not far from our little dock. Yes, this was the water that I chose to clean my wound with. And, yes, the thing freaked me out when I could see it splashing from the porch. I was hoping it wouldn't pick up the scent of my bloody toe when I was swimming around...Eventually, all of the guests had to depart for home. Apparently there's something called "w-o-r-k" and "s-c-h-o-o-l" that people had to attend the next day while we planned the next week out. Sven told us about a public viewing of the semi-final game on the giant monitors at
the Frankfurt Commerzbank Arena stadium that we could check out on Tuesday and that plan was immediately ratified and added to our itinerary along with a day trip to Heidelberg the following day. We decided we would shop and go to the Frankfurt Fan Zone (the public area to watch the game) on Wednesday for the second semi-final before heading to Bamberg to meet up with Alex and Verena again on Thursday. And the idea of a massive road trip to Berlin for the Final, which I had discarded as an unrealistic goal prior to the trip, was slowly culminating into a feasible idea in our heads....Sometime later in the day, the rack of Krombachers was delved into and out came a few beers
for Daniel, Stefan, and I. And a few more. And a few more. Over the course of the evening, the whole case of 24 0.5 liter bottles were consumed, though I suspect our guests had probably had a few as well. We used this liquid fuel to ignite a night of cooking (pasta with garlic, onion, and tomato sauce), a night of discussions, and a night of poker.We played poker into the wee hours of the night with Krombachers by our sides the whole time.
Justinho
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