Kerby's Great Adventure: A 6:00am Run Turns In To...

On Tuesday, Christine woke up in time to go running with me. We ran our 3 miles at a good pace, and watched the sun rise over the wine fields and the valley as we ran back to the house. It is great having a room mate that wants to come running with me, and that runs about the same pace I do. I am going to miss her a lot!

As we rounded the corner and turned up the last tiny hill before getting back home, we slowed our pace and as we approached the house, I saw our boss outside watering her flowers. This was just shortly before 7am, and usually I don't see anyone up that early. We said hello, and as I started to stretch she said, "Well, you girls are up early! Good for you! Oh hey, by the way, would you like to come with me to Heidelberg today to help move some furniture? We could use some help up there." I didn't hesitate one second, and said, "Yes! Sure! Absolutely! I would love to come and help!" My boss replied, "Really? You would? Great! I'll go call the guy who is in charge of the renovations and make sure that the furniture is coming today, and we'll leave the house about 9am!" Sweet! A chance to get out of Ingersheim for the day, to a bigger city which is very picturesque and beautiful! I jumped at the chance! I didn't care if I had to schlepp furniture, I was going to Heidelberg!

However, the first order of business was to take my boss' husband to the airport in Stuttgart. So, along for the ride we went. It took us about 45 minutes to get to the airport, and then another hour and a half at least to get to Heidelberg. We finally got to Heidelberg at about 11:30am, looked around the new European Study Center campus (in a beautiful villa owned by the family I work for) and made a plan. The furniture wasn't going to come until 3pm, and the boss had a meeting, so Christine and I were to make ourselves scarce. We were told we needed to be back shortly after 2, but no later than 2:30. That meant we had about 2.5 hours to go and explore! Yay!!

We got a sandwich from a bakery and strolled through the pedestrian zone, through downtown Heidelberg and enjoyed being in a big city. In Ingersheim there are no tourists, so this was a huge change. Everywhere you turned around there were tourists, and lots of native English speakers. It was quite a big difference from Klein Ingersheim!

After walking around and a shopping a little (didn't buy anything, though I really could have!), we made our way back to the villa. Once we got there, we unpacked some white boards for the classrooms, took some tape off chairs and waited for the semi-truck to arrive. We waited and waited, and finally we heard that the truck had gotten lost, and couldn't turn around on the narrow streets! Finally, somehow the truck ended up at the back entrance of the villa, and we unloaded tables for the classrooms. After that was done, I asked where the chairs were. Apparently the delivery company didn't know anything about chairs. It turns out (I found this out on Friday...) that the factory that made the chairs and was to deliver them burnt down on Tuesday! Looks like we won't be getting new chairs any time soon....

I vacuumed and mopped one of the classrooms, and Christine helped as well. Then the renovations manager said, "You two! Kerby, Christine, please go make some coffee. We are going to have coffee and cake! We need coffee, asap!" Good thing Christine new how to make it, because I didn't have a clue! Though now I can say that part of my internship was to make coffee. We had to go down to the basement of the villa (I don't know what it is, but German basements are the creepiest!) to make the coffee, which took a good 20 minutes to brew! Finally, we were able to deliver the coffee and cake to the meeting with the bookkeeper. Good little interns we were! (And we got to have a slice of cake, too!).

After all the washing up was done, Christine and I joined our boss, a colleague and one of the professors from the States, who had just arrived, for dinner in downtown Heidelberg. It was quite fun to get out of Klein Ingersheim for the day, and experience something new (though I had been to Heidelberg before). I got to see our new campus, and can appreciate bigger city living and also my little village equally. It was a long day, but a very good day none-the-less.

I"ll leave you with some pictures of the newly renovated campus, and the beautiful city of Heidelberg.

One of the classrooms