Immer ein partie in Deutschland

Germany has the coolest parks. One of our favorites is called the Abenteurspielplatz (I think I spelled that right...it means "Adventure Playground") where you can check out a toolbox of saw, hammer, and nails then pull out some boards from the wood pile and build yourself a club house. There are tire swings and ropes courses and the concession stand boasts 10 cent slices of watermelon and 15 cent ice pops. There's a crudely built stage for imaginative performances and a wooden boat that's been painted by kid patrons. You can check out unicycles and badminton sets. It's a 10 year old boys dream, but Julia and Eli are big fans, too. Anyway, apparently the charitable organization which runs this park also puts on the Main Fest every year, which is a big party for kids that moves along different places on the Main River. We hit it yesterday when it was stopped at the Opera House. As you can see, the girls had a blast.

The fun did not stop there, though. Our manager found a microwave for us, so to celebrate I ran down to the store to grab some microwave popcorn. Lo and behold, Bornheim Mitte, the area of Frankfurt in which we live, turned 100 years old and there was a parade to celebrate, complete with bowls of hot soup from the Deutches Rotes Kreuz and candy from every which organization. (Some radio station was handing out cups of beer which we weren't sad to miss, some other team was handing out long-stemmed roses which Eli would have been sad to miss had we told her about it.) And as if that wasn't enough, we topped off the day by watching The Hunchback of Notre Dame with German subtitles, lovingly lent to us for the purpose of learning German by our friends in the ward, the Robinsons. I know all sorts of useful words like hellfire (hollfeuer), sin (Sunde), vice (Laster), monster (Monstrum), etc. etc. now. But the BEST part of the day was when Jini walked in from a week of grown-up EFY at 23 Uhr as we were about to go to bed. But off she goes again tomorrow to dig up the records of our German ancestors in a little city in Bayern. Wish her luck!