Hotel Foltice Pt. 1

Bryan, John and the babies in the Borken town center.

We are in the middle of having company here at Hotel Foltice.  Our friends from church, John and Rachel (and their 7 month old) came to visit us for a couple of days.  John is heading the leadership/pastoral team for Celebration Church in Belfast, Ireland.  Hopefully, it’s the beginning of great things to come in Europe. 

It was great to have them over and Dana always steps up the cooking when we have company.  I love it.  She had spaghetti ready on my way back from picking them up in Dusseldorf Weeze (though they really need to drop the Dusseldorf part…it’s not even close to there.)   The next day, she already had sheppard’s pie cook.  It just needed to be reheated and we were set. 

We spent their full day with us showing them around Munster.  We introduced them to Doner’s for lunch and showed them some good shopping around the city.  Strangely enough, the highlight was trying to get their British Pounds (they had just come from Ireland) converted into Euros at a bank.    

We first found a Sparda Bank, where we were told that they did not change money over, regardless of what the currency was.   We were directed down the street to the nearby Sparkasse Bank and went inside to get their money changed.  

When we arrived at the counter, I asked the banker, in German, to change the money into Euros.   We handed him the British Pounds and after 2 seconds of looking at it, the banker gave this horrific look on his face as if we farted after eating hot dogs and ice cream all night (not that I would know anything about that) and quickly passed the money back to us.   He told us to go to a Western Union down by the train station (15 minutes away by foot) to get the money changed.  I even tried to ask in English (maybe I asked wrong somehow) and the answer was the same.

Afterward, we speculated what the banker would have done if we had given him a less valuable currency and easily agreed that he would have wiped his nose with a US dollar if we tried to change it over there.   

Nevertheless, we gave up on that scavenger hunt and went on with our day. 

Dana and I had a great time and really got to know John and Rachel even better.  Dylan was a gentleman to his friend, Anikah.   We joked that for 5 years, we lived 8 houses down from each other in Florida, and it took us both travelling 5,000 miles to get to know each other better.  

Here are some pictures from last week. 

Dylan and Annika were fast friends.  He did a good job sharing all of his toys.

"Here, Annika - smell my feet!"

Dylan piled up all his books around Annika and they had a book reading party.  So cute.

Our little travelers.  So good together.

Rachel and I in the Borken town center.