A Sweet Game of Pinochle

We are spending the weekend here in Aalborg, no trips or visitors to speak of. Just a quiet weekend at home to relax. We did have a fairly exciting week, though: we gained access to the laundry room in our building and I played a very good game of pinochle against Andrew at one of our neighborhood pubs last night. Andrew and I were out at the local British pub - the John Bull Pub - last night for a beer (and a water for me) and we brought the pinochle cards. Mom, you'll be proud, because I've been kicking his butt almost non-stop lately, but last night's game was an especially good one: I won in only three turns and the final score was 24 (Andrew) to 125 (Melissa)! Check out the scorecard, which I insisted Andrew take a picture of:

Getting a key to the laundry room was another source of excitement, as we've been lugging our clothes to a laundromat a few blocks away each week. Today, though, all I had to do was carry it (it being the several loads we've been holding on to since our return from Norway, while we've been holding out for access to said laundry room) down a few (5) flights of stairs to the laundry house out back. All was going well until the first load was finished washing and needed to go into the dryer, which I couldn't figure out how to start! I translated all the directions, tried to pay, and pushed just about every combination of buttons in the room: no luck. Thankfully, it was a sunny day, so all of our laundry got sun-dried on the line. If it's sunny again tomorrow, I will do the rest of our towels and a few blankets, but I'm hoping to hear back from someone at the university about help with the dryer in anticipation of our long, dark winter.

Sometimes I feel like a real idiot here - like today, emailing a woman to ask for help on how to use a dryer. Or when we had to go to the hospital for the first time and we walked to the wrong one (there is the North one and the South one and they do different things at the different locations). Or the first time we went out for dinner, and we didn't know if we were supposed to seat ourselves or wait for a host (Andrew ended up searching the restaurant for a server after about ten minutes). Or navigating the grocery store and not being able to find basic things like baking soda for over a month. Some of these may seem very small, but they start to add up and soon you feel like nothing is easy.

There are so many wonderful things about moving to a different country (we've been in a total of five different countries in the past two months!), but it can also be overwhelming at times. Even the smallest tasks can seem impossible when you don't speak (or read) the language, and we haven't really met any new friends yet, which is hard. We're going to call about language classes next week, though, which I hope will help with both problems. Also, we're looking forward to my parents' visit in a few weeks, as it will be so nice to have two very friendly faces here in Aalborg with us.