City tour attempt

Today I went with my dad to look around the Altstadt, "Old Town", downtown Regensburg. We went to eat Doener, which were absolutely delicious, and then we went sightseeing. But even though we had a plan of the city, we got hopelessly lost in the winding roads and ended up on the other side of the Altstadt than where we wanted to go. But we found an ice cream store with really good Italian ice cream and a big TV where world cup games are played on. We watched a while as we ate, and then moved on. In the day we saw the Alte Kapelle, a beautiful white church with a lot of murals and gold on the walls, the Regensburg Dome, the Jakobstor, a gate to downtown built in 1301 as the only way you could get into Regensburg, and the Steinerne Bruecke, the first bridge across the Donau River for 800 kilometers.

Today, Dad came with me to soccer practice. I thought the whole team and I played badly but Dad said I did great and the team looked awesome. The training is a lot more serious than ours in Durango and everyone there wants to play and probably had a choice of whether they wanted to come or not. Also, every player has skill and can pass the ball, so play doesn't get held up by one player all the time. I need to cherish my last practice with a good team before I go.

Germany vs. Australia

Sorry about all the World Cup talk, but there's nothing else for me to write about. Germany have had a hard series of injuries to vital players who would surely make the starting 11. First, national keeper Robert Enke committed suicide in November. Then Simon Rolfes, Rene Adler, and Michael Ballack all went out with knee injuries. Finally, a few days before the world cup, Haiko Westermann picked up an injury in a friendly. Despite all this, the Germans put on a great show of patient, precision passing and great goalscoring abilities. Their defense was well organized and they only made one mistake back there in the entire game. But their offense was amazing. They would work the bgall around the middle for a while and then pass it wide to Mueller or Podolski, who would either cross or lay it back to a forward, which almost always resulted in a goalscoring opportunity. But I think that my favorite thing about this game is that Miroslav Klose broke his 13 game goalless streak with a powerful header, putting him in a tie for the 2nd top German World Cup goalscorer of all time.

USA vs. England

Today we went to Frankfurt with the ICE train. When we got there, we watched USA play England in the3 World Cup on TV. It was a great game and USA went out happy with 1:1, a great result. England scored in the 3rd minute and it looked like USA didn't have a chance in this world cup. But then Mert Can, a friend of the people we are staying with, said that it would be the goal of the century if a goalkeeper had the ball in his hands and then let it go into the goal. He got his wish in the 40th minute, when Robert Green fumbled an easy shot by Clint Dempsey, the 1:1.

Match highlights:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr95zZu6G64

Dad's in Germany!

Today my dad came into Germany. He's right there next to me as I'm writing this post. Funny thing is, every time I think about my dad I think of soccer. This connection is growing stronger because Dad came in 3 hours before the first game of the World Cup 2010, which we are looking forward to watching.

Today I again narrowly avoided my first F in Germany. My class has had 3 years of physics. I haven't had any. We had a huge test which I understood almost nothing of. Luckily, I answered all the questions that were just reasoning and not calculating right and came away with a D-. How much longer can I hold out?

German assignment

Today I narrowly 'avoided' my first F in Germany. The German teacher handed back my essay with red pen wherever I made a mistake. My essay was hardly visible underneath the deep red blob of 'Rechtschreibung'. But he's a nice guy and, instead of giving me the obvious grade I deserved, he said on the back: "I know it's hard to write in a foreign language. Good job in trying your best."

In Biology I had a boring experience. Our teacher is probably the worst teacher I've ever had, so we weren't looking forward to class. As we wrote the title of the chapter, "Bacteria and Insulin", a classmate of mine piped up: "What's insulin?" The teachers reply was a 20 minute discussion on how insulin is so great and can cure diseases and diabetes and there's 2 types of diabetes and one's inherited and the other can happen when you get overweight so don't eat too many potato chips, kids and I feel like I'm writing a pretty good description of how the teacher went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and am I repeating myself?

By the time she ended her sentence class was over.