Today might have been my most enjoyable day in Germany so far. It was or course Saturday, so I slept in a bit, then went geocaching during the afternoon, and picked up 6 of them by riding all over Ingelheim and Gau-Algesheim on paths that I did not even know existed beforehand. The pictures were taken while I was out geocaching. One is of a Jewish cemetary that predates the World Wars substantially, and was the location of a geocache. It was a bright, sunny, warm day and I got some nice sunburn. I got to meet a fellow cacher, who pointed out where one of the caches was, after he saw me struggling a bit (he looked like the cacher type, and I could see he had some sort of handheld that was not a cell phone, so I didn't feel like I was giving anything away, by searching while he could see). After the caching bout I returned, cooled down, had some food and a shower and watched some soccer before meeting Nadine and her friend on the train for Mainz to meet Dirk. I met Nadine and Natasha just fine on the train, though we had to wait quite a while for Dirk, Tina (his girlfriend) and Tina's friend (She is American-German, but I cannot for the life of me remember her name; it was nice to talk to her, and she was very amiable. Her father was in the army and based in Wiesbaden, and neither English nor German is a foreign language to her) to arrive via Straßenbahn (streetcar). They finally came, and we went together through the packed streets to the city center that is near the Dom. If you think of the Hudsonville fair sans animals and packed into the streets of the old part of a stereotypical German city, then add copious amounts of alcohol consumption, you will have a pretty good idea of Johannisfest in Mainz on Saturday night. It was actually a really cool atmosphere though, and there were really no crazy drunken people, just normal, safe levels of consumption (at least where I was; as we left there was of course the typical drunk crowd on the outskirts). We sat the entire night over food and some wine, just talking and listening to some American music classics (classic rock mostly: Smoke on the Water, American Pie…, some Elvis and others) as well as some German ones. The German songs were completely outweighed by the American ones though. I talked as much as I could in German, for a while with Natasha, Nadine and Dirk, then later with Michael, one of Dirk's friends, and finally with Christian and Sonja, some more friends of Dirk. They were all nearing 30, which made for some great conversations, about philosophy and culture differences. I used bad German, they used good English and it was all good. After a wonderful night of hanging out and talking with people (the only bad thing was the U.S. losing to Ghana, which I was actually not able to watch, but don't really care, because I had so much fun with Dirk's friends), it was time for Nadine, Natasha and I to separate from Dirk, Tina and her friend to head back home. We bought our ticket and were running to get to the last train…and then it left without us. That was not so cool. We ended up finding a taxi and combining with two other people for a much more expensive trip back to Ingelheim. That really doesn't even bother me though, because of the fun I had just hanging out with some people for the first time in maybe a month (except the awesome times watching football with Dirk, Matthias and Christian of course). Ah, I cannot say enough good things about this evening.
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