Marni's last day, plus some fun outings

It's so crazy . . . I can't believe how fast everything has gone.  But Marni left for Munich this morning, and yesterday was her last full day in Hamburg.

Me and Kenneth at Jim Block!!! YUM

We planned one final cooking night for last night. Yeserday she spent her time helping Petra get packed up for Ireland and seeing her off at the airport, and also meeting up with Lauren, one of Petra's friends, and Lauren's mom who had come to visit.  During the morning our apartment was rather in a state of chaos.  Petra was packing up her room, Indra and Marni were hanging out in my room while I tried to organize stuff to mail home, Corina and her friend were cooking lunch in the kitchen with the pop station blasting "Beat It," all the doors to everyone's rooms were open, and my iTunes was playing the soundtrack for Der König der Löwen.  Fun, except for the knowledge that all the packing up was related to us leaving each other soon.

Rose garden at Planten un Blomen

Kenneth in the greenhouse

At 12:30 I shoved my laundry into the wash and then ran to catch the train to Jungfernstieg.  Kenneth finally had time to get together because the semester is done, so we decided to do our long-awaited excursion to Jim Block, "Das Original Hamburger."  There are a couple of locations in the city, and they are basically a fast-food burger place, but a lot more fresh and nice than the typical American fast-food burger chains.  We ended up going to the one at Stephansplatz, just next to the opera house, because the one at Jungfernstieg is right in the busiest part of the city center and was really crowded.  Kenneth had a chicken salad with garlic bread and I ordered the "mini" cheeseburger with a small salad.  I was glad they had the mini-burger option, because the regular ones are huge, like 6 inches in diameter!  Mine still wasn't really mini, it was more the size of an In-N-Out burger, and for being a "small," the salad was a pretty good size (which made me happy because I like lots of salad).  Everything was really good.  They make a delicious "American" dressing which is similar to thousand island.  Kenneth was really nice and paid for me--he said it was a late birthday present.  I told him that in that case, I'm taking him to In-N-Out when he comes to California for fall semester and I'm buying.  (It was actually his birthday the day I got to Hamburg, and he never told me!  I found out on FB later.  So I owe him.)  Anyway, we had a really nice time catching up on what we've been doing and making plans for fall semester at CSULB.  Kenneth took six classes this semester, which is why he had no time to hang out until now!  He said that was way too much work to handle, and he thinks from now on he'll stick to four courses per semester.  I've got to give him credit for even attempting a class load that heavy--I would die of exhaustion if I took more than four studio classes in a semester!  We walked to Planten un Blomen after we ate and wandered all around in it.  I didn't like Planten un Blomen when I first went to it in March and April--I thought it was ugly and way too urban--but that was only because it hadn't bloomed and turned green yet.  Today I absolutely loved it!  The northern section, which we walked through today, is a botanical garden primarily, and they have a big greenhouse with different kinds of tropical, mediterranean, and dry-climate plants.  Some of them were plants we have at home in California.  We also went to the rose garden, played with the interactive hose-and-ball water fountains, and stopped at the park stage to listen to the Polizeiorchester (police orchestra) play a few songs.  They started off with a Strauss waltz and later they played a music medley with a xylophone solo.   It was mostly old people listening (with their walkers parked next to their chairs) and they seemed to thoroughly be enjoying it.

On the way back to the U3 station at Monckebergstraße, we stopped at an outdoor gear outlet so Kenneth could buy a key chain and a carabiner for his backpack when he comes to California.  He wanted to buy a duffel also, but they were of course quite expensive because the brands were really good ones like The North Face and Fjällräven, so he ended up only getting the small things.  We had fun looking through the key chains, because they were really nice ones in all sorts of colors with cute and fun shapes like dinosaurs, bears, moose, and fish.  Kenneth picked a green rabbit key chain.

Just a quick side note: For all you peeps back home who don't know about Fjällräven (like me before I came here), they are a Swedish company that makes high-quality outdoor gear.  Their jackets are really nice, but the product I've seen the most here is their famous Kånken backpack.  All over Europe, you see people carrying them--they're almost a cult thing here.  Marni has one, and she has praised it very highly.  She said you can fit an unbelievable amount of stuff into them.  Hers is the medium size, about 18 inches high, 12 inches wide, and 7 or 8 inches thick.  It was the only piece of luggage she took with her on her trips to Prague, Kraków, Copenhagen, and Israel.  (Granted, she wasn't able to fit a change of clothes into it, but basically it held all her necessities and even a few art supplies.)  The Kånken isn't cheap by any means--the smallest one costs almost €100--but it's super high-quality and is designed to sit in the right spot on your back so you don't end up sore or stiff from carrying something heavy.  And they look really classy, like a satchel, not dorky like a lot of "comfort" backpacks.  Plus their logo is a really cute fox!  You can read the story of the founding of Fjällräven here and check out all the fun colors of the Kånken line here.  If you happen to be seeking a good backpack that also looks nice, you might want to consider this one. . . it's definitely a worthwhile investment, from what I've heard!  (I would buy one.  Just saying.)

Anyway, Kenneth and I took U3 to Mundsburg and he got off to go back to school for something.  I stayed on the train and went further to Saarlandstraße.  When I got home, I scrambled around my room for a bit trying to organize my stuff to mail home, and Marni showed up around 6:30.  We walked to Aldi to get our ingredients for mango curry chicken (our recipe of choice) and I also bought a bigger box at Staples (yes, Staples has followed McDonald's and Starbucks over here) to mail my stuff in.

The fearsome threesome: our last night

It was sort of a surreal night because none of us could really grasp that it was our last cooking night together.  But we had fun, of course, like always.  I put on Mumford & Sons (at Marni's request) and we chopped up carrots, kohlrabi (that German cabbage-turnip-thing), onion, and bell pepper to go in with the mango and chicken.  Marni did a great job with the seasoning.  And for dessert we had a special treat that Indra had made.  It's called Himbeer Traume (Raspberry Dream) and has layers of quark (like fluffy plain yogurt), frozen raspberries, meringue, and crushed-up things that look like a Ding Dong but have a thinner chocolate outside and cream instead of marshmallow filling.  Indra made a big recipe and it was more than we could finish, but we polished off quite a bit of it (let's just say we would probably be diabetic, or at least chubby, if we ate that much of it on a regular basis).  After that, even though it was late, we put on The Curse of the Black Pearl and watched it in German (the German title is Die Fluch der Karibik, or The Curse of the Caribbean).  It was good to watch it in German, because I picked up some new words!  Disney's foreign-language dubbing is pretty good--they really make an effort to make the voice-overs match the characters' mouths onscreen.  Indra said that some voice-over actors always do the same voices for a certain actor--for example, the actor who voiced over Geoffrey Rush in this movie always does the German recordings for Geoffrey Rush and also for George Clooney.

The Himbeer Traume disappeared fast . . .

Marni left to go to bed about halfway through the movie because it was late.  I stayed up really late (later than I care to mention) to finish making a farewell card for her.  (Which is why this post went up today instead of last night.)  Marni was so sneaky though!  She planted love notes and big bars of chocolate in our kitchen cupboards on her way out, and we found them later.  I've given up trying to out-nice Marni and Indra--they always have me beat!  (I say that with absolutely no hard feelings, of course . . . I wish I were as giving as they are!)

This morning, even though I had only had like four hours of sleep, I was up by 7:30.  Marni was coming by at 8 to say goodbye to us, and I was determined to go with her to the bus station to see her off.  Indra was still in her pajamas and she had to go to a tutoring appointment with a student during the morning, so she said goodbye when Marni showed up at our door.  (It dawned on me that this was the last time she would come by to "bother us" and ring our buzzer.)  I gave Marni her card and told her I was going with her to the bus.  She took her ginormous backpacking pack and I carried her duffel (which was heavy because her Kånken and lots of other stuff was strategically crammed into it).  The morning was absolutely beautiful.  We got to the bus station downtown in about 20 minutes, and I helped her get her bags loaded into the luggage compartment.  Then she walked with me back to the entrance to the train and we hugged goodbye.  We purposely kept it short because neither of us wanted to prolong the agony.  I went down the stairs back into the train.  The ride home felt twice as long as the ride there.  It was a weird thing to know that was the last time we would talk in person for who knows how long.  All I have to say is: Praise God for email, Facebook, and Skype!  They make it so much easier to stand the saying-goodbye thing, because you know you can still stay in touch and even see each other's faces and hear each other's voices.

I took a nap when I got home and then set about packing up my box to mail off.  It was extremely heavy when I finally got it filled up, and I had to rest at least five or six times on the two-block walk to the post office.  When the clerk weighed it, it was just over 10 kilos, so I took out a couple pieces of clothing (I had put them in there because I knew I wouldn't wear them between now and when I leave) and got it down to just under 10.  That meant I paid about €48 to send journals, printmaking plates, other artwork, and a bunch of souvenirs, which wasn't bad considering that an extra piece of luggage on the plane home would be at least $100.  (Poor Marni had to pay something like €60 to send her art stuff home, because Australia is so far away from everything!)

I also went to the bank to exchange coins for bills.  Marni left a bunch of 1, 2, and 5-euro-cent coins for Indra to use for the wash and stuff, but Indra couldn't change the coins for bigger ones at Haspa because she has an account at a different bank. So since I have a Haspa account, I went and changed them for her.  Me trying to put the coins in rolls was like a comedy of errors.  The German rolls are not already in roll form--they are flat and you have to roll them around the coin stack.  And I can't even put U.S. coins into the American rolls.  So it took me like 45 minutes and my rolls ended up looking pretty sad when I finally finished.  I wasn't upset though . . . I actually was cracking up most of the time because I was making such a mess of the job.  When I finally took the rolls to the teller and apologized for their sloppiness, he just smiled and said, "Oh no, this is fine.  I've seen much worse," and gave me the change.  I think there is a secret to rolling those things that I wasn't able to figure out . . .

Anyway, I finally got home, having had a successful mission, and changed into my swimsuit to meet Indra at the Stadtparksee.  She wanted to go there after her tutoring session.  We went to the Naturschwimbad (natural swimming pool) today, which is separated from the other part of the lake by a wall and has a €3 admission fee, but that's cheaper than most pools in Hamburg and this pool is really nice, so it was worth it.  They have grass areas to lay out on, a shallow area and sand for kids to play, a really big open swimming area that is about 8 feet deep, a float in the middle with a slide on it, and lifeguards.  We laid in the sun for a bit, then swam for a while (I went down the slide a few times too), and then got out and laid in the sun for a while longer.  I think we spent about three hours total.  It was soooo nice.  I've dreamed of doing this all semester long--going to the Stadtparksee on a hot summer day, going swimming, and then laying out on the grass.  We want to try to go again tomorrow because today was so good.  On the way home we went to the ice cream place at the end of our street and actually sat down for fancy ice cream, instead of getting a scoop to go.  Indra had a tropical-fruit mix over gelantino (that's the amazing apple-lime-passion fruit flavor) and lemon ice cream.  I, having developed a thing for cherry sundaes after that amazing one I had at Alex, ordered Kirsche-Dream, which had cherries in syrup (real cherries, not maraschino) with ice cream and real cream on top (yum!).  That was kind of my dinner . . . right now it's about 8 pm and I think I'll go make a salad, but I definitely don't need a full meal after that!

No pictures of the lovely day at the Stadtparksee, but if we go again tomorrow I'll be sure to bring my camera!!