This one was pretty damn easy. We happen to live in a city that has a pretty famous market, which I go to every time I go into the center. The highlight of this trip was watching a man sell a mop like he was on some sort of game show. He had an example floor and everything.
Firstly I just want to apologise for not posting this on my usual posting day. But I bring pictures of cake – does that make up for it a bit?
OnThursday, Hannah and I thought we’d bake something for the Macmillan coffee morning we hold at school annually. We were originally going to make multi-coloured layered cupcakes. However, the Tesco Express up the road didn’t have food colouring so we only had the green and yellow Hannah brought.
I also bought some M&Ms whilst I was there. So they went in. They looked good, but after watching someone struggling through one from a distance at school the next day, we realised that didn’t translate into actually tasting good too. We didn’t tell anyone that we’d make them after that.
H – Last weekend Katie and I went into the city center, mainly to see the new library. Don’t think we’re sad. Though we partly are. People have been going on about how amazing it is so we had to see for ourselves … and visit Primark. And we can report that the ‘people’ are right, it’s pretty damn awesome. And the library’s alright too. P.S. there’s not really a lot of pictures of the library here, we were too busy ‘ahh’ing at it.
H – There it is, the amazing new library that is leaving window cleaners very confused about how they’re going to clean it. We also had to queue to get in it. Yes, that’s right, we queued to get into a library. 
K – Not only did we queue to get into the library, we queued to get in the lift in the library. Honestly, it’s a pretty crazy place. The fact that these photos are taken from the top of it. This is no ordinary small village place – its serious stuff.
K – I didn’t quite realise just how many pictures there were of me and how little there were of the library. I have also realised that this post became mostly about the library. Well to add some variety I ate ice cream that tasted like bubblegum and we visited a Costa inside a clothes shop. Not your regular kind of day. But definitely a good one.
I’ll be honest here, I’m procrastinating. Like a lot. It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m desperately trying not to work. Problem is, I’m home alone so I don’t even need to pretend to work. The other problem is that I actually really do need to do some work. Katie and I went into the city center yesterday so nothing got done then, and somehow, the list of things I need to do has lengthened over the weekend. And yet, here I am, writing a blog post instead of doing something productive. IT’S JUST SO DULL!
It makes me sad that I’m so lazy.
My friends can back me up on that. They’ve been blackmailed many a time when I want them to get me something that I don’t want to get up for myself. I’m the sort of person who will text someone in the next room because they don’t want to shout and just lie on the floor for hours. And you know what? It kind of annoys me, and yet, I’m still to lazy to do anything about it. It just goes round in circles. But I’m going to try to break that silly little circle.
Ooh dramatic I know. It’ll be just like a film.
…
Who bets I’ll just spend the next three hours on Pinterest?
From one capital city to another. If you’ve read my first post about my summer holiday then you’ll know that I went to Germany for 10 days this August.
I believe we’d only got to Day 3, so this will be a (really rather long) rundown of Day 4-10.
Day 4
Nikolaiviertel, Berlin. Statue of George slaying the dragon.
In Germany, they have this incredible shop full of hundreds of different chocolate combinations. Hence why there is a picture of me next, what I can only assume, are giant chocolate bar replicas.
Remainders of the Berlin Wall.
Day 5
At the station, before getting on a train to Munich.
After our final day of sightseeing, the next morning we headed to main station in Berlin, to catch our train to Munich. Over the course of the 6 hour train journey (which we were very nearly late for because the timetable said it left 20 minutes later than it did) I finished An Abundance of Katherines and managed to get some of my summer work from college done. After arriving in Munich, we headed straight to the hotel and out for dinner.
Day 6
On our first day in Munich we visited the famous Hofbräuhaus which is one of Munich’s oldest bear halls, founded in 1589. My mum and I obviously didn’t have one of their massive 1 litre house beers, but did get to enjoy our soft drinks in beer steins. We also got to meet some of the locals – well some of the slightly tipsy locals shall we say. A German man came to sit next to us on one of the long tables in the beer hall and introduced himself as Pete (very disappointingly un-German). He then continued to talk to us for the next half an hour, playing the game “Guess the English celebrity I’m thinking of” with my parents whilst I got intensely stuck into reading the guide-book – did you know they repainted the roof in 1972?
On to another trip to Starbucks, no name on my cup at all this time.
Day 7
We woke up to pouring rain so it was time for Science Museum number 2! No windmills this time, but there was a planetarium. So almost the same… After that we went to the German version of Pizza Hut where they put little Pizza Hut shaped chocolates on our desserts which I found amazing.
Day 8
You may have heard of Bayern Munich. Well the clue is in the name – their stadium is in Munich, so we went to visit. Not so much a fan of the football, my mum and I decided instead to take pictures of ourselves. We have no idea about this photo either.
We then headed back into the centre and visited Olympiaturm which is at the Olympic park built for the 1972 Olympics. As you can see we climbed to the top at 955 ft.
I was taking a photo of the Olympic Stadium and my dad thought it would be hilarious to step into the photo just as I was about to take it. This is the result of that…
We spent the majority of the day walking around the park and enjoying the beautiful weather. Also, when we had gone back into the centre for dinner I noticed these incredibly creepy mannequins. Seriously…bleughh.
Day 9
Day 9 took us on another train, to another country. After getting to the station at 9:30 we booked ourselves on a guided tour around Salzburg in Austria. There were 7 people on our tour including us – the other 4 were Americans from Chicago (I just wanted them to keep saying my name because I loved the way they called me ‘Kadie’ instead of Katie). So we had a tour guide who directed us to our train which took roughly 2 hours to reach the centre of Salzburg.
Like many other places now, this is a bridge across the river has loads of padlocks locked onto it with people’s names engraved on. Its a tradition that people will write their names on the padlock, lock it onto the bridge and throw the key away into the river below.
After our tour, the guide gave us some free time to visit anywhere we wanted before catching the train back to Munich. She had told us about a shop that sells handpainted chicken eggs. Intrigued, we went to have a look. They have literally thousands of individually, and beautifully I might add, painted eggs so we bought one as a Christmas decoration.
Day 10
Our final day of holiday was spent mopping up all the last things we wanted to see in Munich before flying back to Heathrow. I ingeniously named it ‘Moperation’ (a combination of operation and mopping up). First stop was St. Peter’s Church tower where you can get a brilliant view of the whole city.
Admittedly, I did take this with a zoom lens but this the Münchner Kindl who is the symbol of Munich.
Lunch was much needed after our trek up to the top of the tower and around the city so we went to one of the parks that has a massive outdoor beer garden selling food as well as their famous beers. We opted for a stereo typically German meal as it was our last day.
In the gardens they also have an artificial wave maker in the river that surfing experts are allowed to use. The river has a very strong current making it perfect.
Then it was onto our last Starbucks of the holiday with a better version of my name than they’d managed to do in England on my cup.
Now to solve the mystery of the Rubber Ducks part of the title…
Last weekend, my brother and I headed to London to visit some family friends of ours in Greenwich. After an annoyingly long train journey in the ‘quiet’ carriage (it was NOT quiet. Two strangers sitting behind us had an extremely loud two-hour conversation, where everyone in the carriage learned the girl’s entire life history. Did you know she spent a year in Ethiopia and her dad’s directed a Bollywood movie? More worryingly, she swapped Facebook details with this guy. She was 17. He was 38. Don’t do that. Sorry that was a long bracket. Maybe go and re-read the start of the sentence so the next bit makes sense.), a tube journey with two very excited Americans, a swerving bus and a short walk/run in the rain, we arrived at our friend’s house and sat gossiping over tea. They’ve just bought a new house so we were forced to run out in the rain and complete darkness to see the ‘potential’ of the house – the garden. It was dark. We saw nothing.
On the Saturday afternoon, Luke and I headed out into central London for what turned out to essentially be a really long walk. We started off with a trip to Chipotle, a Mexican fast food place that has only two shops in the UK, both of which are in London. We headed to the one on Baker Street and although Luke says that they’re not as good as the are in America, they were still pretty damn awesome.
This guy was hilarious. We were watching the inspection of the guards and as they paraded out the last three accidentally walked straight through a massive pile of freshly laid horse poo. This poor solider had to run up and clean it off their boots. Ew. 
Bonus points if you can spot the snail below. 
It wasn’t until I got home and showed my mum this picture that I realised that this originally said ‘be yourself’ and someone’s just rubbed out letters so it says ‘be our elf’. I thought they were advertising for a Christmas job … (also, by ‘I realised’ I mean ‘my mum pointed out to me’.)
Ugh, Monday. Despite the horribleness (yes that is a word) here’s a few positive things about today:
Eww, Mondays. At least there’s only four more days until the weekend.
Summer holiday photo album time. Hopefully this won’t depress you as its now all cold and rainy…
Whilst in Germany this summer, I took 864 photos so I won’t be showing you all of them in one go, but over the next few weeks I’ll give you little snippets of my German adventures.
Now if you’re wondering about the title I shall explain a little. In Berlin, where we went for 3 days at the beginning of the holiday, they have loads of bear statues everywhere painted in loads of different designs by different people. So whilst we were there I made my dad take a picture of me in front of each one we saw, here are just a few:
The rubber duck part you will have to wait until next time to hear about though…ooo the suspense.
Day 1
So pre-getting-on-the-plane-and-actually-going-on-holiday, we took a little trip to Starbucks at the motorway services. Now you would think, in an English-speaking country, when you tell them your name is Katie they wouldn’t put a completely different name on your cup would you? Well in fact Katie sometimes sounds like Tracy apparently and so began a whole week of misspelled Starbucks cups as you will soon see.
So once we arrived in Germany and settled into the hotel we went out for an evening meal then got an early night for the busy few days ahead of us.
Day 2
After a lovely breakfast in an overly extravagant dining room we headed out for a day of sightseeing. We visited the Brandenburg Gate and The Holocaust Memorial which is just around the corner. Although with an important and sombre meaning, the memorial also an amazing sight in itself. It covers 19,000 square metres and contains 2,711 concrete blocks.
We then headed for our first German Starbucks where they managed to spell my name better than they had in England by only missing out 1 letter.
We then continued to revisit some of the places we’d been last time we were in Berlin to get our bearings back, and went to the Sony Centre.
It’s not got a lot of things of interest there other than some shops, but it has an amazing roof that you can see for miles out of the city so I thought I’d share it with you:
After some more visiting we went back to the hotel room to get changed for a meal out and then to a lovely little restaurant 5 minutes walk away.
Day 3
SCIENCE MUSEUM TIME!
Although this may not sound like the most exciting thing to be doing, it was actually incredibly interesting. There were windmills and all sorts…
I don’t want to overload you with the excitement, so I’ll be doing another Germany post soon (yay) so check back next Friday.
Also, I just realised how many times I said Germany and Holiday in that. If you were wondering, I counted:
Germany: IIIII
Holiday: IIII
I started collecting these a couple of months ago and I felt like I’ve got loads. Then I counted them. It’s a total of £1.91. That’s not even enough to buy a ’99. Remember the days they were actually 99p?! Anyway, 2ps are deceivingly big.
They always say that ‘It’s better to give than to receive’, but that’s the sort of statement that you can’t believe until you’ve become … well, old(er). It’s like when you were in Year 8 and everyone would say, ‘Your school years are the best years of your life‘ and you’re like ‘Urm nah, this is so dull.’ It’s not until after you have a job that requires you to work from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon without spending the majority talking about ‘fit’ boys and who kissed who, that you begin to realise, actually that wasn’t so bad after all.
And so it was with the whole ‘It’s better to give than to receive’ malarkey. Is that a word? I love getting presents. Who doesn’t? Unless they’re from your grandparents and turn out to be a pack of paper (yes, that happened to me once. My 11th birthday, 11 sheets of paper for every year of my life). But I discovered recently that wrapping presents is my highlight of anyone’s birthday. It’s just the watching people tear them apart that I can’t deal with.
These are my creations. Two of these were for my eldest brother’s 26th (and one of those may or may not be a Thomas the Tank Engine book…) and the other’s for my American sister’s 20th. Seen as these presents will be travelling all the way over to the US I wanted to make them extra special (and also to make her cry. It’s the mark of a good present don’t you know).
It was also an excuse to spend many hours on Pintrest, without feeling as guilty when I should have spent the last few hours making dinner.
I also added little pieces of paper to tell her why I’d bought each present. The first – “Because of what you said the first time I talked about this” – is a bar of Cadbury’s dairy milk, and is in remembrance of the time I took her for her first English McDonald’s and was going on about Dairy Milk McFlurries. She asked me what was sprinkled on top and I repeatedly told her ‘Dairy Milk! Dairy Milk!” to which she replied “Yes I know ice-cream’s made from milk but WHAT’S SPRINKLED ON TOP!” Bless. It’s so easy to forget to America isn’t actually England with a funny accent.
The 19th Main Street 