Train door bingo and the art of non-shopping

I am in the airport to drop Teresa off after a way too short weekend where we have spend way too much time on the trains here. In doing so we have come up with the term “train door bingo” which is a terrible game apparently played by the conductors as they only open a few random doors in the train set at each station. Teresa and I both think that they try to open the doors the furthest from any passengers waiting on the platform just to see everyone scramble and run to make it to a door. And we also bet that they have an internal point system for whoever can make the most passengers run during a single ride🙄And since there has been construction work with incredibly poor notifications to the passengers we have also had plenty of time to admire the local artwork and take pictures

But we did make it downtown on a sunny Saturday to browse through all the stores. Without really buying anything..... still we did get bubble tea in old town at this amazing place where we got to pick the perfect window seats and have pineapple mousse cake:

And we also found a place where you can drink coffee and honey/ginger/lemon from little bowls

Oh. Oh, and we ate a fantastic vegan lunch at VStreet. Forgot to take pictures though as we were REALLY hungry......

Unfortunately Sunday has been kind of short, as Teresa had to catch a flight back to Ann Arbor in the afternoon. She really wanted to go Doylestown to get brunch as this is one of the areas we have on the radar for living. It was really nice with a charming downtown section and a very posh looking highschool. There’s even bike lanes! So Teresa and I are now absolutely in love with this area, albeit it is not one of the cheapest places to live.....When we were done we rode the slow train some more - sigh - to get back to Philly where we had time for another cake stop in Chinatown:

They tasted as good as they looked and I can’t wait to bring everyone, who will ever visit us, to this cafe to have cake.

Unfortunately the weekend is sort of over now and I am not looking forward to go back to my empty apartment. I try to think that every day I do this is one day less I’ll have to wait for everyone to move here

She made it!

I have been looking forward to this weekend like crazy. Teresa is visiting. Just her and no one else. Luca has a confirmation retreat with his dad, so they will be gone most of the weekend and it was not a hard choice for her to make between staying home by herself or flying over here.

But it got a little intense last night as her flight kept getting delayed. First for an hour. Then another half hour. And when they finally boarded they were grounded because of a thunder storm. In the meantime I was waiting in the most insanely boring arrival area. Stuck with a boring book and a phone that might run out of battery if I used it too much. Sigh!

But she made it! And after a late night uber ride back to my car parked by the train station (not a lot of trains late at night) and an even later drive in small dark Pennsylvania roads we had some midnight pizza and now all I have to do is wait for her to wake up!

A small step for (wo)man kind.....

......a big step for Henriette!

Today is a very special day as I have done something that I have tried to stay away from for the longest time. Something embarrassingly simple that most people do on a regular basis without even thinking about it. One of those things where it just grew even more embarrassing with every day going by where I did not do it. And for years I just did this:

But now I am in Pennsylvania all by myself with no one else to do it for me.

What can this be, you may ask yourself? What is is that she cannot do, this women who speaks at international conferences, who has fearlessly biked in snowstorms, and given birth to 3 children, and who can do complicated surgeries in animals?

Well.

I put gas on my car today🥳

4 weeks.....

I have said my goodbyes and hugged Luca extra hard tonight as it will be 4 weeks until I see him again. And Kristian. And Bailey. But not Teresa, who will visit me in only two weeks when Kristian and Luca are on a confirmation retreat with our church. I am on my way back to Philly after such a nice weekend in Ann Arbor. I have managed to do a bit of all the things I like the most, such as biking (gosh - I miss biking) downtown for icecream. I even came across a new succulent, which is tugged nicely away in my carry-on luggage after having been out for a check at security

I have snuggled with the dog who actually forgave me for giving him a bath. A much needed bath. So needed that I suspect he actually liked getting clean again.

I have been outside with one of my favorite ex-colleagues and her kids. A short hike, but the sun was shining, Ellie was chasing Luca, and Bailey managed to jump onto a fallen tree without immediately falling off. Quite an accomplishment for our chubby clumsy dog - LOL. He was so proud he was beaming. And then he fell off and couldn’t get back up.......

I have been eating Danish easter candy. THE best Easter candy. Period. The marshmallows and marzipan eggs are light years better than all the peanut butter crap they tend to sell here. I was lucky that my sister sent us a box which happened to arrive the day before I did. Perfect!

And as side note I would like to add that having those earbuds have really helped my sleep. Even though I know I am going straight back to my ridiculous upstairs stomping neighbors, I know that these little thingies will allow me to fall asleep to the sound of rain, and that makes a world of difference.

How much is sleep worth?

A lot I would say! It doesn’t take many nights with only little sleep to truly start thinking about how valuable it is. But how valuable? That’s a question I am asking myself these days after another sleepless night because of the upstairs neighbors. They usually come home late on Mondays - around 10PM where they will start to cook and walk (stomp) around, and I have been trying to not stress out about it, stay up a little longer and sleep in a bit on Tuesdays. And on Fridays one of them go to work at 4:30 in the morning, and on Wednesdays....... you get the picture right? Well, yesterday I waited and I waited. And when it was 11:30 I was like “screw that. They are probably out overnight. I’ll just got to bed”. As if! 🙄 all I could do was listen for them without any sleep - until they finally arrived at 1:30AM. Add that to the many other nights of little sleep and the situation is getting a tad bit desperate. I have quite seriously considered just coughing up 2x rent to break the lease and just move straight into a house rather than wait until Kristian and the kids get here. A quick calculation brings that to around 5000$ of extra expenses. Is my sleep worth that much? Maybe. But I googled around for solutions and went straight to Best Buy after work to get these:

They were certainly not cheap either, but 250$ is after all less then 5000$. And tonight they will get to hang out with two other sleep friends: Big Glass Of Red Wine and NyQuil. I do hope they will make a lovely effective trio that will leave me functioning slightly better tomorrow😴

#DCcherryblossoms

One of the things I promised myself to do while on the east coast by myself, was to make it down to DC for the cherry blossoms at the tidal basin. And I have been worried that I might miss it, but I didn’t! I am here now and it has been a loooooong day........

I planned to take the train down but Amtrak tickets were 240$ for a return trip and despite being shorter than a bus ride I still figured that I wouldn’t mind spending an hour more each way to save 200$, and i ended up booking with mega bus instead. I have to admit that I did consider just staying home for the weekend on Friday night, but I also knew that I would be mad at myself for not going once I set myself up for it, so off I went. Everything went super smooth until Baltimore, where the bus broke down. Luckily it happened to be at a stop right outside a mall and there are certainly worse ways to wait for a fresh bus than this:

But in the end I didn’t make it to DC until around 3:30 PM. I started out going straight to the hotel, which turned out to be a hotel for deaf people🤨 It is on a university campus and I have since learned that it is a university for deaf people, so that makes a bit more sense. Right across the street was Union market:

Where I got to taste arepas for the first time

While I was being watched carefully - LOL

And then I started walking. First sight of Washingtonness was Capitol Hill surrounded by flowers:

And then I walked and walked and walked some more all the way down to the tidal basin. It was stunning (and super crowded - which is why the pictures are all kind of upwards towards the sky)

And then I walked and walked and walked back until I gave up and booked an uber pool. Which got me back to union market 2 minutes after they closed🙁 = no dinner for hungry me😩 luckily they did have some snacks at the hotel so my dinner tonight was a (small) bag of chips and a beer. Not really what I envisioned, but sometimes you just gotta go with what’s available

A surprisingly OK weekend

I had not looked forward to Saturday morning where everyone except me was leaving back for Michigan, but it actually turned out to be OK! I didn’t cry when they drove off, and I got back upstairs and spent some time vacuuming (I didn’t just buy a new car this past week I also bought a vacuum! Uuuuuuh) and reorganizing my few things. And because the weather was incredibly nice with a clear blue sky and temperatures high enough to wear a t shirt outside I decided to soak it up outside. I searched for hiking trails on google maps and found this place:

Which turned out to be quite close by (if you walk the right way that is. Ahem) and which was much nicer than I anticipated:

I even got the first mild sunburn of the year✌🏻

And then I got in MY car! And drove to the secondhand store to look for an additional lamp. I found a few other things as well and the apartment looks way more homey with these few extra items:

I even attempted a target run without my GPS on..... well, three times a charm right? Because that’s how many times I had to try to get there without happening to end up in the wrong lane at one point or another. On a positive note I got to see a bit more of the local neighborhood!

When I got home I reached out to a couple of other Danish women living in the Philadelphia area and one of them invited me for brunch in New Jersey Sunday. She lives about 20 minutes away and I just had to show up at her house then they would give me a ride to New Jersey. And not just any New Jersey but super fancy Montclair right outside Manhattan. Where I met some more of the family. It was such a nice day and honestly - the first time a stranger offers to have you over, when you have just gotten to a new area makes you breathe a little deeper, relax the shoulders, and genuinely start believing that everything might be OK❤️