Last weekend in Germany

Just a couple of hours are left for me till I‘m off to Finland. After repacking my big suitcase for 90 minutes (opening and closing that thing 10 times incl. sitting on the suitcase to close it the first 5 times!!!) I give up and hope that my teary eyes will be enough to prevent me from paying for 3kg of overweight. Everybody should cross their fingers. Now hand luggage it also almost packed besides laptop and toothbrush :) So I’m ready to go.

But before I arrived today at my parents place I had the best weekend in a very long time.

Usually I don’t leave the house on weekends and just relax but this time I had to finish packing the last things in my flat, cleaning up, returning the last 30 books to the library (went there 3 times in the past 3 days to return the 100 books I probably had for the past 2 years), preparing some food for my going away party and just preparing myself to say goodbye to some of the best friends I’ve ever had. So I was pretty busy which meant not more than 3 hours of sleep during the past 4 days. But it was really worth it.

My ‘Going Away Party’ (which I had together with my friend Janine who is leaving Magdeburg next week as well) was really awesome. Great food, lots of nice people and interesting small talk topics. But one should never put 4 political science students in a room together, they will end up talking politics if you want it or not. :D Very funny. But I think everybody else felt immediately asleep then ;) And I got such cute going away presents and am still proud that I didn’t cried when people were leaving and it was time to say goodbye. I saved those tears for the time when everybody was gone. :’( The party ended around 2am (way too early ;)) with a huge laugh. But don’t even try to find out what the topic was. What happens in Janine’s and Kathrin’s living room stays there ;)

On Sunday morning I left Magdeburg for good, and as usual forgot half of my stuff there (my version of a going away present: leaving a dirty salad bowl behind including salad servers that didn’t even belong to me ;)) and spent the rest of the morning in Halberstadt visiting my favorite LDS ward. The afternoon I was in Veckenstedt with Jessi and her family, great food, 3 American ‘girls’, good games (I’m so kicking ass in Activity – thanks Janine! :)) and lots of (mini)airplanes and (mini)harvesters. Little boys can be sooooo cute. And I think I haven’t heard my name that often in my whole life. ‘Steffi look here …, Steffi do this …, Steffi see that… , Steffi come and watch…’ all afternoon long. :) Gosh I’m going to miss that because at one point it was again time to say goodbye. Again very emotional and sweet since I even got a kiss – how long I waited for that ;) – from 3 year old Fabi. ;) Well it’s a start and one has to be grateful for the little things. :P

So that was my weekend. I enjoyed every bit and at a few points I probably would have said Ok I stay if somebody would have begged me to. I used to like going away but after 4 years it is so hard to say goodbye. :’( So thanks to everybody I saw this weekend and also to those I didn’t manage to meet again before I left. Thanks for the past 4 years. I’m glad that I meet you all and that you enriched my life, overlooked most of my strange habits, weird comments, active arguments or dress-faux-pas’ (although I’m still convince that I didn’t have any ;)).

I love you all more than you can imagine and going to miss you like crazy. But don’t you think we are done yet. It is pretty hard to get rid of me, which is more a promise than a thread. :P

And as I said already to most of you, if you are in Finland, Sweden, Norway or Estonia, just give me a call and we meet up.

So that’s it for now. Maybe 3 hours of sleep and then off to Berlin, Copenhagen and then home sweet home Turku where again a Steffi is waiting for me. :)

I’ll promise to keep on posting here with or without a steady home which I won’t have for another 10 days. But well being homeless shouldn’t be that bad, I hope.

*hug* and good night or as ‘we’ say in Finland ‘Hyvää yötä!’

Und in Kurzform auf Deutsch:
Hatte ein sehr tolles Wochenende, will nicht mehr weggehen, aber Koffer sind nach langem Kampf gepackt und um 15:45 geht mein Flieger gen Norden. Danke an alle in MD und ganz LSA bzw auch Deutschland und der Welt ;) für tolle 4 Jahre. Wir sehen uns wieder, egal ob in Deutschland oder woanders in der Welt. Versprochen!