Thursday, October 1

From	To	Distance (km)	Average Speed (km/hr)	Max Speed (km/hr)	Odometer (km)	Riding Time (hr:min:sec)	Push-Ups
Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany							250

(821 words)

This morning I again ate breakfast at the Pension Becker. After breakfast and a shower, I washed some clothes in the tiny sink of the tiny bathroom attached to my tiny room. In yet another mental gaffe, I used hot water in the sink, even though one of the shirts I was washing had never before been washed. Back when Matt and I were in France, we had received white T-shirts, each with a big colorful ALSACE on the front, from Elisabeth, one of the French teachers we had met in the previous year in Rothenburg. If I had been using a washing machine, I would likely have used cold water. Somehow, my brain convinced me that because I was washing the shirt by hand in a sink, the hot water wouldn't have the same shrinking properties as hot water used in a machine. Afterwords, when I hung the wet shirt up in the window to dry, the shirt looked visibly smaller. I decided that perhaps it was just an optical illusion, that when I tried it on after it dried it would prove to fit just the same. But of course when Matt came home that night and saw my ALSACE shirt hanging in the window, he said, "Did you shrink your shirt?"

After I had finished washing and shrinking my clothes, I headed out to the grocery store and bought some lunch items and lebkuchen. Lebkuchen, a personal favorite of mine, is a cake-like cookie that you can find in Germany in the months before Christmas. I headed over to a cafe I knew from my days in Rothenburg one year earlier. I ordered a Kaffee Hag (decaffeinated coffee) and sat for a while writing on the backs of my previous day's travelogue printouts and occasionally munching on a lebkuchen.

At 11:30, I walked over to the Goethe Institut to look for a map of Alsace. I wanted a map to help me figure out where Simone had taken us on our September 19th half-day tour of southern Alsace. I found no map that would help me, so I just went down to the Treffpunkt Goethe, where I was supposed to meet Matt for lunch. After the 12:00 to 12:10 student break, when the Treffpunkt was empty except for me and Matt, we ate our lunch of yogurt and granola. We also ate one each of about two dozen hard boiled eggs that were laying out in a basket on the counter.

We were soon asked to leave the Treffpunkt, so the ladies could prepare the room for the Kennenlernenpartie (a getting to know each other party), which was to be held in the Treffpunkt that night. Matt and I went upstairs to the main Goethe Institute building, and sat down in an empty class room. I worked on my daily log until I finished Saturday the 19th of September, interrupted only by the occasional set of push-ups.

At 2:30, I walked over to the Mediotek and spent about two hours on the internet. I did a bit of e-mail, but primarily I typed in all the travelogue material I had written on paper.

At 5:00, I wandered back across the street to the Treffpunkt Goethe, where the Kennenlernen party was already in full steam. As it was a party where I knew just about no one, I felt a bit like I was at a party where I knew just about no one. Nevertheless, I made a valiant effort to mingle and managed to meet a few people.

One mexican woman told me her name, Olbeth, was a combination of Olga and Elizabeth. Another girl, Kathrin, kept eating the free munchies, retrieving baskets of munchies from other tables as she emptied the ones at hers. I couldn't help but watch her antics and laugh. She at one point saw me looking at her and told me "Ich bin hunger" as she stuffed more munchies into her mouth. This made me laugh more, because by a quirk of grammar, she had accidently told me "I am hunger" instead of "I am hungry" -- as if to say she represented the very incarnation of the concept "hunger." A few minutes later, after I had turned my attention to others at my table, she once again got my attention, this time by loudly sucking the salt off the fingers of her food grabbing hand.

Later I went to Pizzaria Roma with a few people I had met at the Kennenlernen party, including a German named Reinhard, an Albanian named Mira, and two Italians, Nicolata and Maria Grazia. I spoke mostly with Reinhard, as the girls seemed to be doing all they could to ignore Reinhard and myself. I bumped into Matt and Romana at the Roma, and chatted with them for a while before returning at 10:30 to my tiny hotel room, with its tiny ALSACE shirt in the tiny window.