Sunday, 31 March 2002

Very Busy

Yesterday was a very busy day. We got up at 8:30 (on a Saturday morning!!) to bring Foo to the garage so it could get summer tires (finally) and part of that technical inspection. The mechanic said that the repaired exhaust pipe wouldn't last long because the guys at the garage in Berlin hadn't done it properly. He said should we have any problems we should go back to that garage and let them fix it again (cause they would have to do it for free).

Anyhow, when that was done we took Foo to town to shop for ingredients for the cake we were going to bake for our friend Tim's birthday party. We had just arrived on the parking lot of the supermarket when suddenly

*CLUNK* *metallic scraping* *very loud motor sound*

we lost our exhaust pipe. It just fell to the ground at the front of the car and was only attached at the back. We were very lucky that this hadn't happened 5 minutes earlier when we were going 100kph. I'm sure it would've just been torn off at that speed. So we quickly parked the car in a free spot at looked at the damage. It was clear that we couldn't just drive back to the garage with the exhaust pipe dangling on the ground. So we called the mechanic and he said to tie it up somehow and come back so he could fix it.

Unfortunately a part for the car jack was missing so we couldn't use that. We called Michi's dad to bring us the missing part. We tied the pipe up with some wires and cords as tightly as we could and slowly drove back to the garage. It was pretty cool acutally cause Foo now sounded like a race car *VRRROOOOOOOOM*

The mechanic welded everything together again and only charged 15 Euro (as opposed to 55 Euro the guys in Berlin charged us for 5 minutes work that lasted exactly 2 days).

When that was done we baked our cake, wrapped our present (cool Converse Chucks with flames printed on the sides) and then drove off to the hut in the woods where Tim celebrated his birthday. After a small hike through the woods in the wrong direction we finally found it. It was pretty cool. We played some Pétanque and a very fun Swedish game called Kubb which we had discovered last year (unfortunately I don't own the game yet. We have built ourselves a replica but it's not quite the same as the original). Later we had some barbecued meat and then played Poker for quite a while. Michi won quite a bit, I lost a little but not that much.

It was pretty cool to walk back through the dark forest at 3 in the morning talking about all the wild boars, bears, werewolfs and whatnot that were going to ambush us any minute now. Fortunately nothing like that happened and we got back safely.

And it's summer time (daylight savings time I believe the Americans call it) now. One more hour of light in the evening. Yeah!

Michi is currently vacuuming Foo. I'll go out in the sun (W00t!) and help him now :)