the tiny german village in which i live

The entire town's area is a little over 2 sqaure miles. The other afternoon, for instance, I went running (which, in reality, means jogging, which, in reality, means walking at a brisk pace with my iPod and ear buds!) and realized after 20 minutes or so that I had reached the next town.

 To better visualize, know that this little village consists of: 1 main road (and lots of side roads), 1 supermarket, 1 liquor store, 2 banks, 2 restaurnts, 1 bakery, 1 pharmacy, 1 doctor's office....and 2 bus stops.

 Needless to say, there is nothing to do here, so on the weekends, the best option is to take the bus in one direction to Nuremberg, or the other direction to Erlangen. It's cheaper to go to Erlangen, so that's where I've been spending my time lately. Erlangen and Nuremberg are where I'd love to live....still working on that one. Anyway...last weekend, when Katherine came to visit, we took a walk through the 'town' and after 10 minutes, we had seen everything there is to see. We met some friends in Nuremberg and then caught a bus home that night around 9 or 10 to Eschenau, where we would change buses to get back to my village, only to realize that the next bus going back there left at..... 2:45 in the morning.

 Katherine said, "Can we walk it?". We had a friend in Nuremberg google map the distance, which turned out to be 12 km...so no, we could not walk it. We could either wait until 2:45 am (at that point, it was 11:00 pm), call my landlord and landlady who were most likely fast asleep and ask them to pick us up (which I was not going to do) or take the train back to Nuremberg and stay in a hostel or with friends.

For some reason, I had a very strong feeling that we would get home safely, though I can't really explain how. Katherine kept saying, "What are we going to do?" and I kept saying, "It will be okay, it will be fine, I will take care of it". I knew there were other buses leaving from the Eschenau station, and I saw that one was parked with a driver in the driver's seat but no passengers on board. I decided to go talk to him and ask him what we should do, if there was a taxi number we could call, etc. Just for the record, the fact that the buses stop running this early (most buses stop running well past midnight) only further emphasizes how small this 'lil town really is. And - lesson learned- in the future, I will always check the bus timetables before leaving town. I stepped on the bus and was delighted to see that the driver was "my driver"; my favorite driver who drives me home from school everyday on the bus. !!!!!!  I explained to him our situation and he told us that if we waited 30 minutes and no one got on his bus (which was a different route), that he would change routes and drive us home on a special route. We thanked him and sat and waited.....

While we were waiting, we saw something that looked like a rat....which turned out ot be a hedgehog. Katherine wanted to hold it and take it home with us. I did not.

Finally, after no one showed up at the bus station to catch the bus, "my driver" got out of the bus and called us over. We thanked him approximately 100 times and he told us not to worry. As we were driving away, we saw a group of teenage boys running to catch the bus. Katherine and I knew that technically, this was their bus route and the driver would probably stop and let them on since he said he would only drive us home if nobody needed to get home on the other route. So I watched in fear as the boys chased after the bus, yelling and hitting the windows, asking him to stop. Thankfully, though, "my driver" yelled back while shaking his head, and then commented to us that they were drunk and stupid. We felt very priveleged to be driven home on a special route! I guess one good thing about living in a small town is that you get to know people easily....which is especially helpful if the people you get to know drive buses.