May Highs and Lows 2016

April ended with my mom's visit and she flew back to Wisconsin the first week of May. A week later I flew to the East Coast of the US to visit my daughter, and I was pretty lazy after returning. Then a few days ago I was asked to come back to the Hermann-Hesse-Kolleg language school to start with a new group, and that begins today. I stopped in yesterday to meet the students, and at the moment there are just three people - one from the Ukraine, one from Tanzania, and one from Saudi Arabia. They seem very nice, and hopefully they are as eager to learn as my previous students!

The year is moving along quickly, and I'm glad the weather is getting nicer and warmer and the garden is perking up.

HIGHS

• a pre-Mother's Day lunch in Esslingen with my three mums: my Schwiegermutter, my real mom, and my Gastmutter (from when I was an exchange student in Esslingen in 1986)! This was the first time we four were all together, and it was just the four of us. It was so lovely!

my three mums

• spending time with my daughter


• this red Azalea bush outside the house my daughter lives in

• our visit to Sunnybank, the former home of one of my favorite writers and his collie, Lad


• two days on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, the setting of another favorite childhood book, Misty of Chincoteague. Ponies, ponies, ponies!

some of the postcards I bought

• dining out and eating delicous food at a Thai restaurant (a first for me) and an Italian restaurant, in Narberth and Bryn Mawr, PA, respectively.


• having a toasted bagel with plain cream cheese at Panera for breakfast one morning. Yum!!


• sharing a Philly Cheese steak sandwich with my daughter in...Philly, of course!

• being able to chat with my son a few times on the phone because we were only one time zone apart


• coming home to M after my 10-day absence in the States


• another successful kitchen experiment: homemade buns and pulled pork (it cooked for 2 days!)

LOWS

• flying internationally


• having to quit watching a movie during the flight because the woman in front of me put her seat back and the screen was too close to my face for me to focus. Even my reading glasses didn't help.

It's always nice to report so few lows from the month. Life is indeed good!

And as an addendum in these final minutes of May, another high from today... During my lunch break I walked around a bit in Horb and bumped into Omran, Mohammed, Subhi, Mosab, Hadi, and several other of my Syrian acquaintances whose names I shamefully don't remember (I am so terrible with names!). Yesterday I drove past  Talal, waiting at a bus stop with his daughter. This evening I sat with Asaad, one of my former students, for three hours while we went over the story I'd written about his journey to Germany from Syria and made corrections and additions. Just seeing my Syrian and Eritrean friends brings a smile to my face, and I'm always happy to have time and opportunity for a chat.

I've lived in Horb for 3.5 years, and I have never before bumped into people in town whom I knew. I guess I only knew seven people until I started getting involved in the Freundeskreis-Asyl and the refugees. It's a nice feeling to have friends in town!