In Hamburg sagt man tschüss.

And just like that, my grand adventures in Deutschland have come to an end. I left my fair city yesterday with all of my worldly possessions in the pouring rain and was nochmal warmly welcomed about four hours later in Detmold, where I've been sleeping, repacking, and savoring my last day of German and Germany with these wonderful family friends. Tomorrow morning I catch an early train to Frankfurt, where I'll be leaving on a jet plane north north north almost to the Arctic circle. Navigating Reykjavik solo with all of my STUFF should be an adventure, but after the first full night of sleep I got last night, I'm feeling prepared enough.

There are still lots of pictures and adventures that I'd like to document (including the three days I'm about to spend in Iceland!), so I'll keep updating until they've all been squeezed out. However, that probably won't be until I make it back onto aMUHrican soil. Until then, here are a couple final and fond memories from the last week.

All year long a group of us had been wanting to rent paddle boats and go toodling around on the Alster. Last Saturday we finally did just that. Propelled forward by Milka, we pedaled our way all the way across the lake to the Binnenalster, which holds my favorite view of the city. The only problem was that, unbeknownst to us, most of the lake was reserved for some sort of rowing competition, meaning we soon got kicked out of the prettier parts. After our pedalers got tired, we retired and found some gourmet hot chocolate somewhere to replace all the calories we'd just burned. Lecker lecker lecker.




On my second to last evening in Hamburg, I spent some time sitting by the Alster by myself before joining others to see the English sneak-preview movie at a cinema nearby. (The sneak movie turned out to be Inception, which was great, especially because we saw it before all other Germans AND Americans. BWAHAha.) The sky couldn't figure out whether it would rather storm or sunset, so what I witnessed was a pretty mixture of both. I'm such a sucker for dramatic skies.

It was a good, quiet time. Very special for my innards. I'm going to miss it so much.