Wherein I conquer new heights

After all the museum traipsing I did in the Netherlands (oh … well, the 2 museums that I visited; but I was thorough, so it was exhausting), I wanted to do something exciting in Germany. My cousin suggested we visit the two museums of her tiny town, but I wasn’t up to it, so instead we went shoe shopping and tree climbing. I’m not sure which one took longer.

In my defense, the shoe shopping was for the tree climbing, and thus totally justified. Plus a 10 Euro pair of cute Keds was called for. Now the reason one of the reasons I love my cousin is that she is always up for something active. That makes her pretty much the only person like that that I know. The rest of my friends are less … fitness inclined. I wonder if that’s a coincidence …. Hmm.
Anyways, instead of staring at another set of old relics, we went to climb some trees.

If you can’t see, it was a pretty extensive operation. And the harder ropes courses were up SO fricking high. And when you have to swing across a 5 meter gap at what feels like 20m above the ground, well, you, along with your adrenal gland, get plenty of exercise. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever had as nerve wracking a three hour shift as this one. Also, my arms were hard-core shaking by the end, and the next day, my lats basically refused to work. Which made, for example, raising my arms and putting on clothes pretty darn hard.

Some of the more terrifying examples? In one course, you basically had to jump straight down off a platform at the end. Bungee-jumping and all that. Except that we pulled on the rope to test it, you know, to see that if you pull hard on it, it doesn’t come as easily, but nope – we just kept on pulling and pulling and it just kept on coming and coming. Not too reassuring. The hardest part was just taking that first step off the platform of course.

There were other parts where fear literally seized my body and I couldn’t move. It’s this racing feeling in your veins and in the pit of your stomach and you’re just so, so scared. Maybe it seems silly to write about fear when I was in a controlled environment with a heavy duty harness attached to a support rope that would never let me actually fall. I’ve probably never been safer (unlike that time that I was 6 and my mom and I were on a climbing trip in Crimea and it was pouring rain and we were stuck on a little ledge on a vertical cliff face and had to wait for the rain to stop … oh yea, there, I just fell asleep and slept through the whole thing without a thought of the danger). But fear is something that is irrational and can be experienced in any environment whatsoever. There is not right or wrong place where it can occur because you can’t really talk yourself out of it. It’s like trying to talk yourself out of sweating. Or feeling in love. Both equally iffy enterprises, of course.

But what I realized is that my philosophy for things I fear in general is to face them head on. I knew I was scared to step off that platform but I also knew that there was absolutely NO WAY I wouldn’t step off the platform either. And that’s what I try to do in life as well. If I feel like I am too scared to try something and the reason is something silly like I’m afraid of what people will think, or I’m afraid that I will fail, or I’m afraid because I don’t know what will happen, which it usually is, I try to just leap straight into it.

Now all this deep metaphorical thinking above ground definitely exhausted me, not to mention the little climbing-on-a-itty-bitty-tightrope-excessively-high-off-the-ground bit, so my cousin and I trooped into town to grab a bite to eat.

It was a cute little place, and OF COURSE it had a big screen TV to show the Germany-Greece soccer game that was happening. Because, duh, it was a soccer night. My cousin and I almost bought matching Germany-coloured dresses just to fit in to the young crowd milling around. But the fact that I initially thought those dresses were shirts (happens to me ALL THE TIME!) … well, I think it’s a good thing we opted out.

I was surprised that beer cost less than water here, but wasn’t feeling into alcohol after such an active day, so instead, I ordered another German specialty – schnitzel.

Yes, Mr. Schnitzel, that you were.
 
By the time I finished salivating and raving about my schnitzel, and obviously taking a million photos of it, like the (fake) food blogger that I am (not), it was getting a bit late, so I actually had to gobble it up pretty quick so that we could make it home in time to fix the projector up for the game.

I wish we could’ve gone to a, you know, German pub, during the Greece-Germany game, but my cousin’s boyfriend was excited enough for a crowd. We watched it at home and it was still pretty rad.

Germany won, obviously.