Day 1: Frankfurt, Germany

July 10, 2013: 

We arrived! We are officially in Europe! I (Angie) promised some peeps I would try to blog as we go as much as I can, and I will! But before I do, two things:

   #1- I will be the first to admit, I usually don't like reading blogs that have lots of words and little to no pictures (Gaston Syndrome), but since we are taking most of our photos on our real camera I won't be able to post many, just the ones we take on our phones. But I will try to give you a little somethin visual to keep you entertained when I can.

   #2- I might write a lot and maybe you are so excited for that, but maybe you're not because you don't wanna read a lot. So I'll try to give a list of highlights at the start of each post in the order I write them in so you can skip to whatever you actually want to read about. If you read it all, bless you and all your loved ones. 

So here we go! This post on Day 1 covers:

    Arrival

    Impressions

    Frankfurt Temple session

    Interesting sleeping arrangement

    The sleep walks and talks of Robbie, round 1

We got here around 1:00pm so now we are those typical American tourists with humongous backpacks who get flustered every time someone tries to speak to us in German. I look especially ridiculous bc I figured out that if I wear my side purse thing on the front and take if off my arms its way more comfortable. Unfortunately, that makes it look suspiciously like a fanny pack, and we all know THATS a good look. Hello. AMERICAN IN YOUR MIDST! Okay, lets be honest, it's not the fanny pack that's giving me away.

Language-wise, we have learned our first two important German phrases:
"Entshuldigung" = "Excuse me," 
"Vo ist..." = "Where is..." 
They have come in handy lots of times already. I couldn't get used to the first one because its hard to remember, but on the metro I accidentally bumped into an elderly man and it popped out right as he was saying it back to me! I felt so...German :)

So today we spent our first day in Frankfurt exploring and trying to get our bearings. We discovered we love Germans. They are so nice! Today while we were wandering, this young mother with two little girls walked up to us holding out an ice cream bar and speaking German. I'm sure we looked super confused, both wondering if she was trying to swindle us (we read too many scam warnings from Rick Steves I think). So she repeated in English that she bought a box that came with four but she only needed three. Would we like the fourth? What?! It was so nice! And it was blazing hot so it was much appreciated.

So we knew right off the bat what we wanted for lunch. Since we both served our missions in Romania, we became really addicted to these things called kebabs, or meat wrapped in a pita or on a bun with lots of other things. Well it turns out Germans eat them too! But they call them Döners. You better believe that was our first meal in Europe! It was delish and so cheap. 

Since we were planning to sleep in the temple housing that night (and we didn't know what time they stopped receiving people) we decided to make our way there and hit the last session of the day in the temple at 5:00. Of course, we got lost (who's surprised?) so by the time we got there, the cute little lady at the temple was like, "You better run! I'll tell them you're coming!" So she gave us our key, we ran up to our room (more details on that in a minute), changed as fast as we could, ran up to the temple entrance, got hustled through (me by about 6 sweet little German ladies doing everything for me), got our headsets for English translation, and finally made it into the session just in time. Needless to say, I was sweating bullets by the time I finally sat down. I was hiding my face from the woman next to me for about 10 minutes until my face turned a normal shade again and aired out a little bit.The session was beautiful! I've never heard it in another language so sometimes I would turn down my translator just to hear it in German and it was such a neat experience. Robbie was especially touched during the session by a man in a wheelchair. Here's what he says, "As I saw him go through the session assisted by the workers and friends, I was really struck with how amazing the promise of the resurrection is. That he'll have a perfect body. That no one will suffer physically after this life. Everything is made perfect because of Christ and the gospel. It's just really cool." It's so incredible how powerful the temple is. How it puts everything into perspective. How all that is unfair about life can be made right through the atonement (Read that talk from Linda Burton. So good). We just feel so lucky to be a part of it and to have the things we have in our lives because of it. We are so blessed. 

So after the temple session we finally had some time to breathe (and we were major jetlaggin) so we headed back to our room. Or should I say, closet. It turns out, the real rooms were all booked so they had to put us in the service building. We are obviously not picky people (blessed with the ability to fall asleep on command on any surface known to man) so we were fine with it. Plus, it was cheaper! (Win). So when we first went to our room, we weren't sure we were in the right place because the outside of our room looked suspiciously like a utility closet. Well, we were in the right place. Once you stepped inside, you saw two narrow bunk beds against one wall and about a foot of space on the other side to get past them to the window. And the top bunk was super high, about two feet from the ceiling with a legit ladder to get up there. And that was it. That was our closet for our first night. Haha. It was awesome. Definitely not fancy, but had everything we needed so...good enough for Murray!

Now whoever you are reading this. You may or may not know that Robbie sleeptalks and sleepwalks. And he does it the most when he is in a new place. Yes. This trip is gonna be fun. So that night, about 3am, I woke up to Robbie yelling louder than I've ever heard him yell (in sleep or real life) from the top bunk. I had to shout up there several times to ask him if he was okay, which almost made it funnier. It turns out that because his bed was so close to the ceiling, he sincerely thought the roof was caving in on top of us. After that we couldn't go back to sleep for a couple hours so it was a 3am party in our closet :)

All in all, it was a great first day! Tomorrow we start driving the Romantic Road!