week 12- charity & cherry trees

            The school week was normal, but we had a jam-packed weekend. On Saturday morning, all of the students from the study abroad programs met at the AIB to meet our charity day group and get our projects. My group was assigned the task of repainting an elementary school. When we arrived at the project site, we were shown the rooms we were going to paint. To my surprise, they were huge and each one was covered in an old coat of bright paint. I was a little daunted by the bright walls, not sure how we were going to be able to cover 4 rooms in white paint in one day, but we got to work. Fortunately, after five hours and a pizza break, the job was complete! In my opinion, the real Big Event would never last that long, but it felt good to do my part and give back to the Bonn community.

Sunday was the Deutsche Post marathon day!! I woke up nervous, but more excited than anything. I’m not sure why I had so much energy, actually. I was going to be running the third leg (6.2 miles) of the marathon for my relay team. I didn’t train at all, nor have I ever ran 6.2 miles in my life before, so I definitely overestimated my abilities. I’m not surprised that the run was NOT easy for me, since the extent of my training was sprinting for the bus stop when I was running late. Anything for charity, though, am I right? In the future, I would definitely like to train for and run a half marathon. I really liked the atmosphere of race day and it was really fun to cheer people on and get cheered on. 

This week, Bonn’s famous cherry blossom trees were in full bloom! I’ve been looking forward to this all semester, so it was really great that they finally came out. The cherry blossom trees line both sides of this narrow street, so it was just like walking through a tunnel of pink flowers. A lot of tourists also came in this weekend to see the cherry blossoms, so it was a little crowded over the weekend, but I went a few other times when there weren’t as many people.