4th of July and a Carnival!

Hi all :)

It has certainly been a wet summer here in Bamberg. It rained all weekend in Salzburg, I got woken up the other night by a HUGE thunderstorm, and I've chilled by the side of a public pool just around the corner from my residence. So if there's one thing I know - it's that playing in the water is fun!!

And that's just what we did on the 4th of July weekend.

We celebrated the Fourth of July in style here in Germany... And what a blast it was! My American friend Sean was the mastermind behind the brilliant plan to spend the afternoon on the river and then have a good old American style BBQ in the park that night.

So everyone headed out to buy their preferred floatation device - rings, air mattress, floating crocodile, kiddie pool - one of the guys bought a googly-eyed frog... with bells in the eyes! And then we met up at noon at the bus stop. It was total chaos, as you can see below.


Now, I'm still not 100% sure why people started to blow up their rings before we got on the bus... but they did. Which meant that 27 exchange students crammed into a bus with about 20 inflated rings. We took up a whole section of the bus and we sure got some funny looks as we headed out of town and up the river.

Once we got off the bus and onto the river it was nothing but relaxtion. The current took us downriver for the next 2 hours. We just floated, chatted and, in some cases, shivered. It was not what I would call warm! But we were lucky - instead of the thunderstorms the weather man was calling for, we got sunshine :)

We eventually made it to the park in Bamberg, where we climbed out and grabbed our dry clothing that was waiting for us there. And after only 20 minutes of convulsive shivering I managed to regain feeling in my toes!

Floating down the river worked up quite the appetite - so it we tossed the hamburgers and hotdogs on the grill! On top of that we had some delicious watermelon, and s'mores for dessert. The s'mores were a first for quite a few exchange students.

And that was our 4th of July Saturday. Sunday was recovery day for all the people who got sunburnt. I, on the other hand, with my 50 SPF sunscreen, longsleeved shirt (for the cold), and umbrella/parasol had no such war wounds!

But you don't always need a river or a lake to have fun in the water. Rain works just as well!

This weekend is the Internationalen Straßen- und Varietéfestival "Bamberg zaubert". That is to say, it's a weekend-long street festival full of magicians and performers. So last night, some friends and I headed on down to the city centre to see what was happening. We saw jugglers, a 4-meter unicycle, dancers, magic tricks, and card tricks. It was loads of fun! But the best part was the hot roasted almonds, which are my favourite carnival food ever!

Afterwards we headed into one of the many cafes in the city centre to hang out and chat for a little while. Only problem was... it started to POUR while we were inside. And I had ridden my bike into town. Hmm... what on earth should we do?

I know! Wear a giant blue garbage bag as a raincoat!

So not only did Axel, Sebastian, myself and Frazni look quite spiffy, but we were nice and dry on the ride home. Althoughthere was a trail of laughter and funny looks that followed us...

But the best part about being rained on in Bamberg, is that I have a nice warm bed and dry pyjamas waiting for me at home. So there's really nothing else to do on the way home but aim for the puddles and smile :)

See? Esther and I got home soaking wet and loving life.