Möhnesee Tagung

Apparently people have been worried about me because I haven't posted since Friday, even though I announced that I would be in Möhnesee for the weekend. Short memories, I love you anyway.

Gordon, Monique, and Isabel picked me up from the church around 8. We played BS and listened to Gordon's amazing array of music and even got some sleep. We got to the hall at about 12:30. Gordon had no navigational system (what are those called in English? Satellite map thingies?), so it took us asking five random people walking/biking in the middle of the night (all of them gave bad answers) and finally calling someone with a navi to come get us. Then we were free to dance for a couple of hours. It's cool to recognize people now. And dancing is just becoming more and more enjoyable.

Saturday, I wanted to sleep longer until I suddenly saw a spider on my sleeping bag. Because of my complaining the night before, they added another session of paddleboats for those who would be participating in the football tournament. Wow, it was fun to play, but our team (Team "Nutella") was awful. First of all we didn't have enough people so each game we had to take two random players. I won't mention the "second" part. Team "Chuck Norris" won. Ha ha. It was so sunny and warm, I put on sunscreen three times. Almost everyone else got burned.













The lake where we tried out the paddle boats was beautiful (Möhnesee).




I tried out a row boat. Wow, it takes more thinking to figure out which direction to row than I thought. The water was too cold to get into, so the only thing that got wet was my bum.















The drive there and back was gorgeous. This is the love of God:



I showered (which was complicated because the men's shower was broken so I had to wait for the guys to leave), played some kicker, and took a nap (or tried). Then the dance started. I met the couple in charge of the institute in Dortmund. He is a linguist, so we were talking when we discovered that he knows Herr Tschirner, the man I work for at the Herder Institut. Then to my greater surprise, I found out he was the BYU professor who had co-written the famous book (with Herr Tschirner) that sits in the office and which I find to be quite fascinating.

Sunday, everyone slept late (I couldn't sleep later than 8, it's no fun with 100 other girls' alarms going off every few minutes). We had church. The testimony meeting was great. I bore testimony of the fact that for every excuse we have in spending time building our testimony of something, there is a solution: prayer. If you don't have time, pray that you will be able to accomplish things faster. If you don't have faith that you will get an answer, pray that you will. If you don't have desire to pray, pray that you will. Etc. Then we sat on the grass outside, which I think is a good time to mention that my nose and eyes hated me for being in the middle of farm land. We watched the fireside from Elder Russell M. Nelson about using music to uplift. He said that the purpose of music in our meetings is to preach, not to perform. I've been wondering a lot about that lately, because since I've been in Leipzig, I've noticed that musical numbers in sacrament meeting aren't like in Salt Lake. They are like recitals. So, since I was asked to do the musical number for next week, I've been debating ever since if I should also play some Chopin or something similar or if I should find something more hymn-based or something. I guess Chopin can uplift, but preach? Anyway, then we drove to Dortmund and attended the Vocalis Choir's (it's a choir of German YSAs including Jessi) musical fireside, which was amazing. I was so glad to see Jessi and the music was a powerful follow-up to Elder Nelson's words. I was breathing the Spirit; I felt like my lungs would burst. After dinner back in Möhnesee, we played 6 Nimmt and I went to bed around 12:30. People were still making a racket several hours later when I opened my eyes to see that it was light outside.

Monday, we ate breakfast (my absolutely favorite meal here) and danced, danced, danced. How ironic that in a hall used to being absolutely soaked with alcohol, there wasn't an alcohol drink to be found in the place and the people were dancing even in the morning. We danced in groups, copying each other. We danced in couples, we danced in lines. We danced until we couldn't stand anymore and then we kept dancing. I did a somersault and the three stooges running-in-a-circle thing in the middle of a group of people. Favorite people to dance with were Stefan, Gordon, and Matthias. Rebekka, the sister of one of the old elders in Leipzig, was so fun to be around. (I'm going to visit Basel at the end of May.)












People eventually drifted off to head home. We were one of the last cars to leave.

I fell asleep almost immediately, but when I awoke, we were driving through beauty. I can't get enough of the yellow fields, the green hills, the red rooftops. We stopped in Seeborg to look at a castle on a lake.













I saw this special there:












The sign says, "Daily from 10 AM to 6 PM." The time limit is supposed to be for the parking sign not shown, but I thought it was hilarious to include it in the picture.

I'm still fighting the effects of hay fever. Those little yellow pills don't do much, do they? I'm almost out anyway. Fortunately, one of my roommates is a fellow extreme allergy sufferer and had some good advice of what I should get at the pharmacy tomorrow.