The Month as we knew it...?

By Dave:

Oh, hello Team Blog! How are you doing today? I'm doing quite well myself, thank you. It seems like it's been so long since I saw you, what have you been doing? Waiting for me to post on you. Oh. Well...ahem. I'm sorry about that, but I've been slightly busy with...well, with what I'm going to write about :D
So, what has the last month held for good ol' Team Deutschland? Quite a bit. I can't remember all too much of it (although my memory really isn't good at all), but the most recent events stand out to me. I'll brush over those, as I must post something.
We enjoyed a nice New Year's with one of the youth from the church here. His name is Max, and, as he speaks English, we can do more than pitifully stumble through a 'conversation' with him. We spent the night at the church building to protect it from drunk youth and whatnot. We had no troubles of any sort, though, and enjoyed a time of Monopoly, and fireworks, which is quite tame for a German New Year's.
It quite surprised me how big a deal it is here. The whole city of Berlin literally sounded like an active war zone from all the fireworks and firecrackers (I'm not exaggerating). The air everywhere smelled of gunpowder, and, the day after, the ground was so littered with firework remnants and beer bottles that one could hardly take two steps without stepping on some trash or other. I was not expecting it to be nearly as important as it is. Our 80 euro worth of fireworks was meagre in comparison with what most people blow up in the sky.

The next morning, we found ourselves on an ICE (Inter City Express) train, en route to Borkenwirthe, which is a small farm-ly town right on the border of Holland. It was a little 'vacation' for us; a small break to regroup, and get some reading done. It was quite beautiful up there, especially after a night's snowfall. It was wonderful to look out over a flat, white landscape, red brick houses poking up here and there.
We made a trip into Holland, bought some superb Dutch cheese, saw a windmill, and bought old, rare books from a handy old, rare, English bookstore in an entirely unimportant, small town, which was a thoroughly wonderful treat (I bought a charming book about wild Otters, among others).
We also took a trip to a nearby German city called Münster, which is the location of several absolutely magnificent cathedrals (as well as a historical blunder of epic proportions, but this isn't a history lesson, so I won't go in to that). Going into the churches there caused me sorrow over the fact that churches are no longer built in that manner. They are so beautiful, and the appearance of them most surely brings one to a most reverent and thoughtful state of awe.
We spent some time with the director of MBMSI Europe, Johan Matthies. He was a fascinating person, who served as a missionary for many years in the Balkans, smuggling Bibles into Muslim countries, and other such shenanigans. He imparted some of his life experience to us, and led us in a study on the book of Daniel.
Our team was in charge of leading the Sunday church service at a local non-state church. We did the worship, our team leader preached (he speaks German), and it all went quite well. They were very welcoming and appreciative of our being there. Good people, all of them.
And we went on a frozen pond, but eventually got scared and left...

Upon arriving back in Berlin at around 7:30 pm, the guys of the team moved into a new apartment. It was interesting, arriving back from a trip to move into another new habitation. The apartment belongs to a family that used to attend the church we're working with, but have moved to Northern Germany because of work. They kept the apartment, however, and leave it open for guests of the church to use should the need to arise (and they use it whenever they are back in Berlin).
We're not sure how long we'll be living here, but nobody's really sure of anything around here, so we'll just have to wait and see how that pans out :)

And that, in a nutshell what we've failed to update you on for the last month. We'll try to be a big more regular with the update things...but I've said that numerous times. I'm just bad at schedules...and remembering things...and most every skill required to put out regular updates... Not that it's an excuse, I'm just saying.