My week: June 5 ed.

Monday was Memorial Day and I had it off. While it's sometimes not optimal to have American holidays off vs. having the German ones off, I do enjoy being able to get some things done when all the German businesses are open and everyone else in town is working. It feels like a tad bit of freedom.

I used this freedom to pick up my Moo-sitting friends A and R up and to take them to lunch at Royal Aroma restaurant in Hohenecken. We enjoyed the buffet there and even A, who's from SE Asia, gave her approval.

Another day, I met tandem partner J and was walking through campus. All of a sudden, a small bird flying overhead almost crashed into me and then dive bombed the curb. Upon inspection, he appeared to be quite young and was just learning to fly. He sat on the curb for a while, dazed. Poor guy!

I picked up a dehumidifier to help reduce the humidity in the basement following the flood from last week. The selection of dehumidifiers was very disappointing; they are very small and are reasonably expensive. The one I chose was the size of a carry-on piece of luggage, only had one liter of capacity for the water reservoir, and was 100 euros. Oh well; it certainly helped with the moisture.

My neighbor was working on the other basement storage rooms, ripping out the flooring damaged by the floods. It's interesting to see that there's a brick floor down there. I think that the building is from the 50s; it was in an area that had been bombed during WWII. Considering that 60-70% of Kaiserslautern was bombed, it wasn't too surprising.

During the weekend, I mostly stayed around town but A came over and I baked some pizza for us, which A declared better than any restaurant's. In the past, I made it more often but because I now know I have a slight allergy to the cheese and crust, I try not to eat it too often.

We also took a really nice bike ride along the Lauter River and to Weilerbach. It's great that there are so many bike trails around and we're looking for the Auto Freies Lautertal bike ride on the first Sunday in August. I've attended every year since I arrived in 2013 and am looking forward to continuing that tradition.