Today was quite a lot of fun. In the morning, we drove to the stables where Nina keeps her horse, and helped get a stone wall built around one side of the jumping pin. This involved first digging the rocks out from this massive pile of dirt, grass, and rocks. The pile originally was just rocks, but since it had been sitting for 5 years, Nature kinda took its toll on it. To dig them out, we had a large tractor that would shovel a scoopful of dirt out of the pile, and we would pull the loosened stones out of the dirt.
Then we loaded the brushed-off stones back into the shovel of the tractor, and the tractor carried them to the wall where other people put them in place to make the wall. After the stones were put in place, they put more dirt in between the cracks to act as a sort of mortar. On top, they planted little vine plants that will grow and hold the stones together as the wall settles.
It took about 2 hours to get the wall finished. After that, they built another circular stone wall around a 30,000 L gas tank in the ground (essentially to protect it from the horses. There were enough stones left over at the end that they decided to just make a 1.2m diameter fire ring in another part of the yard. After we were done, Nina wanted to ride for a bit, so Mrs. Thiermeier and I walked around the town where the stables were located (which is about an hour north west of Berlin).
The town itself was really nice. There was an old church with a beautiful organ inside (but they closed shortly after we got inside, so couldn’t stay long),
a tower with a stork nest on top,
an old Law School,
among other really cool looking houses.
After heading back to Berlin, we actually went off to another place for dinner. We had been invited by family friends of the Thiermeiers to attend a house-warming party for the daughter of the family they knew.
The apartment itself was really nice – it had wood floors, high ceilings, and rather large rooms. There were about 20 people there, all of them really friendly (they all knew the Thiermeiers as well). There were a lot of hors d’oeuvres and desserts, and also there was the Eurovision singing contest on TV (if you’re not familiar, youtube it – it’s basically American idol, but where each contestant is an entire group, and each group is representing one of 25 countries in Europe) which we watched for a while. It was pretty cool, Germany ended up winning! I actually was rooting for Russia and Portugal, but Germany’s group was pretty good as well.
We stayed at the party till about 1:30, and then headed back.
