Happy New Year to everyone! 😀

I’m two hours and 50 minutes into 2007 and I already think it’s going to be great.

I told Florian that I would put him on the front of my site, so here he is in all his German glory.

It seems like every year I write an update on December 31st listing some of the major events of the last year and some things I’d like to achieve over the coming year…

Well, my goals for last year included only moving house twice, which I actually managed. 😀 Only once in fact. Move country, which I definitely failed. Find a girlfriend which I _have_ succeeded in… So that’s not so bad.

Major events… Yikes. I don’t really want to get into many of them, but I met Sandra and we’ve spent about 4 and a bit weeks together over the course of the year. It doesn’t sound like a lot, and it doesn’t seem like enough either, but it’s been _completely_ awesome. We went to Centre Parcs and had a great time there. I’m in Germany at the moment and the last two weeks have been absolutely incredible. We’ve been all over the place and done loads of things. Most notably is probably the trip to France a couple of days ago. 😀 I also met Floian (Opa[TROLL]) for the first time, even though we’ve been speaking online for about 5 years now. Then of course I’ve met Andreas (Midknight), Simon (ps), and a bunch of other German people 😛

I ate snails, kangaroo, octopus, squid, mussels, 25 Turkish Delights in a row, and a whole selection of other disgusting things. I’ve seen about a bazillion films, listened to a few hundred albums, finished some classic games, and lots of other things that I have on “my list on 43things”:http://43things.com/person/essteeyou/ including donating blood and becoming a registered organ donor.

Over the next year I’d still really like to move country, as usual. I’d like to own a house somewhere, even if that is in England if I fail to move country. I’d like to sort something out so I can see Sandra more than 4 weeks out of every 52. o_O I want to buy a laptop… A Nintendo Wii, pass my driving test, as usual… I also need to move to Stuttgart for 3 months so I can register my car there and get the registration *S TU 1337* which would be pretty awesome. I’d like to do a _lot_ more traveling, and basically this all means I’m going to be a very _very_ broke person for the course of the rest of my life.

Happy New Year! 😀

Hello…
This is Sandra… and that´s the reason why there will probably be a lot of dots in this text O_o For some wierd reason I seem to like doing that a lot O_o.
I think this is the first entry on this website which is not written by Stuart himself… Which makes me kind of proud :p

But yeah…
I´m not really going to write much more than this ’cause people don´t read this website to see how I think about things ;p

All I´m gonna say for now is that it´s been a totally awesome time so far and I´m sure the rest of the time, a bit less than another week, will be absolutely great as well 😀

So yeah…
Bye bye.

I can’t really list all of the things I’ve done since I last updated because there’s just too much! 🙂

I’ve been ice skating, shopping, eating, drinking, drinking, drinking, traveling all over the place… Loads of stuff, really.

I’m uploading pictures at the moment, but there are so many that it’s going to take quite a while to get them all uploaded. The connection here isn’t as reliable as Sandra’s in Emden so I’ll probably try to keep the rest of the pictures on my memory card until I get back there instead.

I have to end this now because we’re going to go and buy some fireworks for tomorrow night. 🙂

There will be more pictures in the usual place over the next few days. I’ve taken over *600* while I’ve been here, so far!

Sandra and I went shopping in the early afternoon for a few last Christmas gifts since it’s Christmas today in Germany… Not sure why, but ok. I bought two new sweaters to wear because I wanted some more variety. I also bought a scarf of my own.

After shopping we went to the fitness studio where Sandra used to work and I met a few more people. Sandra gave me a tour of the place which included her walking through the men’s changing rooms right past some naked guy… I wonder why we went that way, hmmm.

After the fitness studio we hung around the house for a while getting ready to go to a concert with Katharina. Katharina picked us up and drove us over to a place called Halle 101, which is a converted air hangar. There was a band called Back Beat playing first. It was 4 middle-aged to old men playing classic songs from the 60s and 70s. It was really very cool. One of the people on stage was Sandra’s old music teacher.

We went to get a cool hotdog between the bands. It was a proper German sausage style hotdog. Bratwurst is what I think it’s called anyway. It was very nice.

Some more of Sandra’s friends arrived after a while. Max, Celine, and Serena. Not sure about the spelling of Serena and Celine probably has an accent on it somewhere, damn foreign names! They all seemed cool, and could speak English. Max was funny, especially when you consider that german people have no sense of humour whatsoever (Michael Schumacher, Hitler are just a couple of examples). 😉

The second band was called “The Livin’ Music Family”:http://livinmusicfamily.de/ featuring probably the gayest person I’ve ever seen in my entire life. They were really very good though. They did a bunch of covers of bands like Outkast, Mousse T vs. The Dandy Warhols (this was really good), and some older soul music that I didn’t know too.

The last act on stage was a Robbie Williams tribute group, which isn’t really my kinda thing so much. He kept covering album tracks, so Sandra and I went to wait in the car instead.

Katharina drove us home and then I slept until gone mid-day. Bliss!

I went out to Mannheim last night with Sandra and Katharina. It was a cool evening. We went shopping and I forgot my wallet completely. I’ve paid Sandra back for all the money I had to borrow already. I felt stupid.

On our way to Mannheim a little car sped right up behind us and flashed the lights because they were dickheads who wanted to speed on by so they could crash and die sooner. When Sandra moved the car over I blew them a kiss and the passenger blew one back. It was funny, but they were still assholes because they carried on being stupid and moved over ahead of us and kept slowing down and stuff. Very annoying, but fun.

Anyway, I bought a massive Christmas bag to put Sandra’s presents in, some orange wrapping paper which I’ve crumpled up and put on top of the gifts in the bag, and a little bow to put on the front. After that we went to look for some other gifts in clothes shops and stuff. I bought myself a new jacket in C&A. It’s brown leather, and it feels very nice. It’s comfortable, warm, and smaller than my other jacket. I’ve never had a leather jacket before this.

After shopping was complete we went to a cocktail bar at the top of a huge building overlooking the square with the Christmas tree in it and stuff. All of the cocktails were named after famous people. I had Chevy Chase 😉 and also the cocktail by the same name. I have forgotten what Sandra and Katharina had already, but mine was _easily_ the best one! 😉

We made it to Speyer safely and without missing any of the trains or anything. We did forget to bring the sandwiches that we made the night before though… They’ll be nice and mouldy by the time we get back to Emden!

We celebrated Andreas’s (Sandra’s brother) birthday yesterday by going for a Greek meal. It was very tasty.

I met Katharina for the first time at the train station, but again in the evening. I also met Jasna for the first time. It was strange to meet people that I’ve heard a lot about, and even spoken to before.

Today I went out of Speyer with Andreas while Sandra was having her hair cut and stuff. We went and met Simon (ps) and some other people at Simon’s house where they performed a few songs (they’re a band). I asked them to cover 99 Red Balloons for me because I don’t know any other German music, apart from Rammstein, which I don’t think Sonja (Andreas’s girlfriend, and the singer in the band) could stretch to. 😉

I walked around Speyer town centre for a while with Sandra and Andreas, and their parents too. I got to see the cathedral, which there will be pictures of in the gallery when I’ve managed to upload the other 100 or so that I must have taken over the last day.

Sandra and Andreas had to sort something out before they came home, so I walked back here with their parents. Sandra’s dad speaks much better English than he lets on. I haven’t dared try out my German on them yet. Maybe one day soon.

It’s another early morning for Sandra and I today. We’re going to catch three trains to get down to Speyer today. We’ll be stopping off in Münster (haha) for about 8 minutes, during which we have to get to a train 7 platforms away, presuming our train is on time. That train will be an Eurocity (Intercity?) or something or other train, so it’ll be fast and nice. Then we’ll stop in Mainz for just over half an hour in order to switch to the train to Speyer.

I’m hoping we have a lot of luck with that first connection. It seems entirely possible that the train we’re on will be 8 minutes late, or we’ll have some sort of problem finding the platform we need to leave from… Oh well. An Eurocity train should be easy enough to spot.

We have a taxi coming to collect us and take us to the train station in about 10 minutes, and I’m fully packed. Just waiting for Sandra to finish up a couple of things and we’re good. 😀

It should be an interesting 7 hours and 22 minutes… o_O

I got up at 0605 today to get to college on time with Sandra. It was dark when we left the house. It was dark when we got to Pam’s house, and it was still dark when we left Pam’s house 30 minutes later. It was just getting light when we arrived in college.

I sat through an English class that was all about stocks and shares and stuff like that. It was quite cool to be in an English class, but quite boring when all is said and done because the teacher is repetetive, dull, and repetetive. After the English class Sandra had a couple of classes that I didn’t want to listen to because they would be entirely in German. She wrote down her username and password and showed me to a computer room. I tried to sign on a few seconds after she’d left only to remember that I showed her how to change her password the day before. I tried to find her, to catch her up, but failed. I ended up going shopping and wandering around all over the place instead. I got back after one of her classes and told her, but then I only realy wanted to play on my PSP anyway.

Sandra and Pam came and found me after their class and then we went to the library. Sandra and Pam managed to feed some paper into the photocopier the wrong way and got 20 blank pages before realising.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to college again for an economics class, so that should be quite cool. Hopefully more interesting than the English class anyway.

After college today we went and had Italian food (pizza for me) at a cool little place in town. Then back to Pam’s house where I tried to fix her computer, without success (I have no spare parts to try things out with). After that we went to the Christmas fayre place and I had a half-waffle thing this time, and we both had some kinderpunch which, contrary to the sound of the name, is not where you hit a small child. It’s a scrumptious drink.

A long day, and it’s not quite 1800.