Quiet weekend again

As with the last few weekends, this one was a quiet one.

Saturday surprised me and turned out to be rather sunny around 11am. So, I hopped on the 11h16 train and went to Bonn for a Capitals Spring Training baseball game (arriving 10 minutes late).

After stopping at Rewe to buy the food I needed for a baseball picnic, I pedalled off. The sun was still shining and while I was riding along the Rhein towards the fields I remembered how much I love cycling. My bike has only been a method of transportation to me since November due to the weather, but riding along the Rhein in the 10°C sunny weather made me think about the long summer days of cycling to come. .

They were playing a Belgian team, so I figured it’d show me the quality of baseball in that country and quite frankly, if that’s how the Belgians play baseball, I’ll not be attending another game that they play in. They were awful.

The Caps played like they usually do – sometimes good, sometimes bad – and easily won both games. Spring training is much different here than I remember it being in the US. Actually, as far as I know it didn’t even exist until 2006, and has changed quite a bit since then.

In 2006, the games weren’t actually organised other than having both of the teams show up. There weren’t any umpires and the number of innings to be played was agreed on by the two team captains just before the game.

In 2007, the games were more organised, but I don’t remember an umpire being there. There was inter-league play and the quality was quite good. A pleasant surprise.

This year there is inter-league play as well as international play (the above-mentioned Belgian team and a team from the Netherlands in a few weeks) and two umpires.

In all of the years, the Caps try out players from their minor leagues apparently to see how well they’d do in the Bundesliga. However, the major league here can in no way be compared to the either the major or minor leagues in the US.

Quite frankly, German baseball sucks – but it’s my only outlet to my favourite sport so I'll continue to attend games.

The Caps also a second Bundesliga (major league) team that I don’t quite understand (this is the first year they've had it). It appears to e made up of older players and they were playing a second Belgian squad from the same team, but despite being called a Bundesliga team, they weren’t. Perhaps they were former players of the Capitals because most were around my age.

Slowly but surely the clouds came in and blotted out the sun and then the winds picked up, both of which made it colder so I left, enjoying my cycle to the train station as much as I did in the other direction (the photo of the train sign posted on Saturday is what happened when I go to the train station)

I was quite tired that evening (perhaps from having too much work last week) and went to be at 22h. The disadvantage of that was waking up at 6h00 and not being able to get back to sleep. I finally gave up and got out of bed at 6h30.

What to do at that time of the day?

Nothing, which is all that one can do here in Germany on Sundays.

So, I made a cup of tea and signed in to the chatroom I visit from time to time and chatted for a couple hours while catching up on the news and listening to AFN http://hessen.afneurope.net. After becoming bored with those things, I took a shower and cleaned the bathroom (that’s how bored I was).

There are things I could have done, but Germany doesn’t permit me to do those types of things on Sundays. I could have taken care of some needed purchases, but shops aren’t open on Sundays here. I could have done my laundry, but not even the launderette is open then. The only things that are open are (some) restaurants and bars.

Unfortunately, yesterday wasn’t sunny like the day before so I chose not to do some cycling other than cycling to the Pub in Old Town to watch football (soccer). The Pub has become my ‘local’. The bartenders know me and pour me a Weissen as soon as I walk in and I know several of the other football-time patrons as well as the owner (there usually aren’t more than four patrons there at that time of the day)..

The team from my town was playing Cologne, so of course I rooted against the former due to a performance of theirs last year and Cologne beat them 1 – 0.

Even though Leverkusen was playing, I left before it got too cold due to transportation issues. Unfortunately, I have to work at 7h30 this morning and the class is out of the city, so I need a car. That’s not a problem as we have a few of them, but I didn’t want to have to go to the garage to get it this morning, so I brought it home with me on Friday for the weekend. However, since I knew that I’d be drinking a beer or two both days, which meant that I wouldn’t be using it due to the fact that I refuse to drive after even a sip of alcohol. So, I had walked to the garage and retrieved my bike before heading to Bonn on Saturday and deposited there (as I usually do when I need the car to keep it out of the rain) again and walked home yesterday evening. Luckily, even tough my city has 110,000 people, it’s quite compact and it only takes me about 12 minutes to get from the garage to my building by foot.

I spent the evening watching DVDs and doing not much of anything.

All in all, an okay weekend, other than being bored for a lot of it.