Nele describes some of the time in the first few weeks that I was here as fremd. Fremd meaning foreign. By this we mean that we barely knew each other, and spent a fair amount of time together. I feel like we got along straight away. But of course we are closer now than then. About 2 weeks in we rode our bikes to the closest shops in Pasewalk. The route we took was almost 10km each way. We rode over cobble stones, a dirt road, through a small town, and into Pasewalk. It took more than 3 hours I think, there and back, and the time we spent in the shops. When we left Broellin it wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t raining either, it didn’t even look like it would rain. Nele has her bike here, from her home. I had to find a bike in the cellar. The first bike we dragged out wasn’t right, the seat was far too high, and I was sure I would fall off, it took me a few tries to get up on it to ride, so we put it back. The second bike, the pedal fell off, before we managed to get it out of the cellar. The third bike, the seat was too low, but I wasn’t worried about falling off, it was pretty difficult to ride. I hadn’t ridden a bike in at least 5 years, maybe since the last time I was in Germany. Wait, that isn’t true, the first few months I lived out of home, with Erin and Kelly, I rode mums bike to the train station in the mornings, to get to work.
When we arrived in Pasewalk, we went to Kaufland. We decided we wanted to bake a cake, and get some chocolate and wine for the weekend. Nele had introduced me to red wine the week before. And now it is possible I like it more than white wine. Maybe not in summer though. We bought cooking chocolate, and peanut butter, tinned peaches and other snacks. We bought a cake tin, and I bought tracksuit pants, I only really have summer clothes with me. As we came out of the centre, we saw the sky, it was absolutely pissing down. That’s not the right expression; it was raining cats and dogs. For starters, we only had one backpack, I was going to put the shopping bags over the handle bars. But we had bought too much, that the bags probably have torn, and got far too wet. Then only Nele had a rain jacket. It took about 15 minutes to find a backpack that wasn’t 15 euros and 2 ponchos. We packed everything, including the 5 bottles of wine and champagne in the bags, put them on, then put the blue ponchos over the top. I don’t think I have laughed so much in my whole life. It was just so silly. My legs felt like jelly, and we looked like The Hunchback from Notre Dame. As we started riding back, the rain eased. Every time I pushed down on the pedal it would click, and make us both laugh. About 10 minutes into the return ride, one of the reflectors on my bike fell off, the stupidity of it made us laugh more.
We got back to the castle, I was wrecked. The following day, when we went to make the cake, we realised all the eggs had been used. We could wait, and maybe Nele could pick some up the next day after work. Instead we decided to meet the neighbours. There are about 20 houses, maybe less, maybe more in Broellin. Nele thought maybe one of them had chickens, and therefore, maybe eggs they could give or lend us. We went to the house with the supposed chickens, but they were not home, or maybe we saw the older lady first, before we got to the chicken house. Anyway she didn’t have any eggs, and neither did her neighbour. It was about 6pm, and getting dark. As we were walking back to the castle we saw a lady walking around in her house. We stood on the foot path, deciding whether we should walk down the drive way, or press the button next to her letter box. I was too nervous to just walk to her front door, as we were contemplating; she opened her door and asked if she could help us. Nele asked for some eggs, and we saw her go to her fridge and pull out a carton. We needed 6 eggs, and she gave us 6. Without even asking how many we needed. The cake was amazing. I made dinner as Nele made the cake. The whole cake was eaten by breakfast the next day.
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