Cool News

This last time we were in Africa Jason and I decided that God's not done with us there yet. We thought and prayed and talked about it tons and we really felt like the needs of Guinea-Bissau and the specific ways that the Church and the Youth Center have of meeting those needs correspond really well with the talents and abilities that God has given us.

It wasn't an easy decision. Living in West Africa is one of the hardest things we have ever done. It has forced us to depend on God and it has changed us in a million ways. With that said, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's one of the best things I've ever done. The more that we thought there was a possibility that we could be leaving forever the more our hearts broke.

Since we decided to go back God has confirmed that decision in a million ways. We need to raise financial support and spend some time with our families, but if everything goes smoothly we are hoping to be heading over to Guinea-Bissau in January. We are planning to go for two years, come home for a few months, and then head out for another two years. After that, only God knows, and I'm ok with that.

Because we are heading back we decided that it would be really cool to have a place where all of our information could be organized so that people can keep up with what we're doing. So... I now have my own website!!!!!! (shared with Jason... hehe): www.jasonandemilyatkins.com!

The website has lots of different pages with pictures, videos, and information about what we've done in the past, what we're up to now, and plans that we have for the future. It's still a work in progress and over the next few weeks we are going to be adding more stuff to virtually every page.

Along with the new site I have a new blog: emilymarieatkins.blogspot.com. Myspace has been good to me, but there's a lot of things it can't do and a lot of people have had problems getting on our blog. Anyone can see my new blog at anytime and anyone with a google account can leave comments (to see how to get a google account, read my first blog on the new site). So, it's with a little sadness that I say goodbye to my myspace blog. I am still going to keep my account for now, but I don't think I'll be on it super often. Feel free to check out the new site and let me know if you want to get an email when I post blogs at the new address.

I'll leave you with a funny picture of Jason inside a tree that I took earlier this summer.

New Stuff

Welcome to my new blog! I hope that this one will be easier to get to and more fun for everyone! Anyone can read my blogs but if you want to leave comments you need to have a gmail address or a google account. If you want to get a gmail address go to: www.gmail.com to sign up. If you don't want a gmail address but you would still like to be able to leave comments you can go to: www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount to sign up for a google account with a non-gmail email address.

Right now we are in Arkansas soaking up some sun, visiting my family, and working on our new website. It will probably be a few more weeks before we get it totally done, but if you want to check out the work in progress go to www.jasonandemilyatkins.com

Berlin

By the time we got to Berlin we were pretty exhausted. I'm not that great of a traveler, and even though we were seeing some pretty amazing places, I really wanted to go home. We got to our hostel and pretty much crashed and burned the first night. The city has two buses that just go around all day and visiting cool sites, so we rode around on one for a while and got off at a cool park. In all of the other cities we had stayed mostly in the metro areas, but in Berlin since we were so wiped out we decided to take a leisurely stroll.

The park was beautiful and I tried my hand at a few flower pictures.


We found a low wall by a pretty lake and Jason took a load off for an hour or so.


After that we did some more exploring and found a few more peaceful parks in the city. One of them had lots of fountains and statues.

We liked this one because the boy is riding on a goat. Don't ask why, but that struck us as pretty funny.

After that we bought some food and went to bed early. The next day we did some historical exploration. We went to the Brandenburg gate and the Reichstag - which is the German parliament building. Tons of German history has happened in this building and we even got to look through some glass windows at a curent parliment session. The building itself was pretty old and impressive, so we waited in line for a freezing hour and half to go up to the top and see the city from this huge glass dome thing on the building. The views of the city were nice, but the dome itself was far more impressive.

It had this huge mirrored funnel down the middle that brings natural light and heat down into the building to make it more energy efficient.

One thing I have to tell you about Berlin is that Berliners love Currywurst. You may be wondering what that is, so let me explain. Germans in general love sausages of all kinds. After trying quite a few from street vendors here and there I can see why . In German a sausage is a "wurst". The currywurst is a particular kind of sausage which is deep fried and then smothered in a tomato sauce (like a sweet catchup) and then dusted with curry powder. It's pretty good. There are currywurst stands all over Berlin and near the famous Check Point Charlie I found this one.

Currywurst, I salute you.

The next day we took a walking Cold War tour of Berlin. It was pretty fun and I'm glad we did it. We learned all about the Stazi spies and the crazy files they had on people - at one point they were actually collecting people's smells! They would bring people into an interrogation room and make them sit on their hands, palms down. Then they would ask them all kinds of questions, and finally let them go. They would take the special cloth (that the person's hands had sweat all over) off of the chair, tag it and put it in a jar, presumably in case they ever needed to set the dogs after that person. Crazy. They also had all kinds of high tech spy gear and at the height of their power they had an estimated one spy for ever six citizens... Yikes!

At the end of the tour we got to go see the Berlin wall. It was different than I had ever pictured. I never understood how the wall had gone up overnight, but at first it was a wall of soldiers and barbed wire. Then gradually the first wall was built and then a second wall was built about 100 yards behind it. The area in between the two walls (called the death strip) had absolutely no cover and was patrolled constantly. The ground was raked sand or raked gravel so footprints stuck out like sore thumbs. Here's a picture of the main wall as it is now.



We also visited a section of the wall that has been restored and has the death strip and everything. It was chilling.

The history tour was definitely an eye opener, but not really very joyous. Then again, the history itself hasn't been very joyous either.

We went to some more monuments after the tour. We saw the holocaust memorial and the old Jewish cemetery. We also went to a super old Jewish synagogue. After that we saw a memorial dedicated to the victims of communism. The shattered man is gradually walking into the future and with each step he is becoming more and more whole.


After that we caught a train back to Frankfurt and then some assorted trams and buses back to the YFC guest house. We relaxed and worked and organized some photos the next day and then we hopped on a plane back to the States.

Prague

Ok, so a long time ago I promised I'd blog about Prague and Berlin. I've been back in the States for a few months and I've been running around like crazy, but that is really no excuse not to show you some cool photos from the end of our trip! Hehe

Before I start talking about those cities I wanted to show you some more pictures of the really cool castle that we ran like crazy to see (it was the castle that Walt Disney used as his inspiration for the sleeping beauty castle - look at the last blog for a description of that fun afternoon... ).

This is a picture of one of the sides of the castle. Believe it or not only a third of the original planned castle was built when the king died and it was never finished.


This is the front of the castle just a few steps after you go through the main gate.


Jason snapped this one just before the lady said that we were not allowed to take any pictures of the inside. Every single surface was painted, or carved, or decorated in some way.

We got to Prague in the late afternoon and went to our hostel to check in. We stayed in a really cool hostel with a nice kitchen. The first night we went to a grocery store and bought some food to make.



While we were cooking in the kitchen some girls came in and ate with us. One way from the US and had been backpacking around New Zealand before coming to Europe and the other was from Argentina. We decided to go up to Prague castle with them the next day. Prague castle in the biggest ancient castle in the world and it's history goes back to the 9^th century, so we were looking forward to it.


We stopped on the way to take a picture of the girls.

When we got there we found out that they only allow 5000 people a day to actually enter the castle itself and since it had been open for an hour and a half all of those tickets had been sold. We did get to buy tickets for the the other buildings that are part of the castle compound and they were really cool. They have a cathedral that was built over about 600 years starting around the 10^th century and that was definitely worth seeing.

This is the cathedral.


It was pretty dark inside the cathedral, so the pictures don't really do it justice.

We climbed up in a really tall tower (about a million steps in a tiny spiral staircase) and got to see sweeping views of Prague that were pretty cool.


In this picture you can see the building that makes up the castle wall and then the city beyond it. Most of the roofs in Prague were redish-orange.


Here you can see part of the cathedral and some more of the castle.

We went back down into the cathedral, poked around a little, and the looked at lots of the other buildings, a museum, and the castle gardens. It was pretty cool. One funny thing that we noticed was in the church the confession booths were roped off...


tisk tisk


I loved these trees! They were in the gardens just outside of the castle

We did some exploring of the city and we saw lots of beautiful old row houses


Most of you know I love to make jewelry. The Czech Republic produces lots of amazing fire polished glass and bohemian crystal beads, so I really wanted to buy some while we were there. We found lots of little boutique bean shops, but the beads were ridiculous (more than a dollar each...) I was starting to get pretty bummed out so I asked a girl who worked at our hostel if she knew of a good place to buy them. She told Jason and I about a little out of the way market, so we set out. We walked all around and at first we only saw stalls with fruit and trinkets, but deep in the center we found the beads. They were way cheaper than the stores and I bought quite a few of them. It was definitely the highlight of my time in Prague.


So many treasures, so little time...

Ok, I have a million things to do, so I'll blog about Berlin later. This week, I promise

Munich, Füssen, Salzburg, & Dresden

We have some train time from Prague to Berlin, so I though I would catch up with you guys a little.

Munich was cold (have you noticed a theme to my blogs about Europe?), but fun. We went to a sweet technology museum that has pretty much everything ever invented. Jason and I both thought that the coolest things were the first machines. Maybe we've been living in a land of limited electricity too long, but the stuff they could do using water pressure was amazing! I also really liked the glass blowing part. There was a guy sitting there making beautiful wine goblets with a big blowtorch.

While we were walking around we spotted this statue and I just couldn't resist... Those of you from AR know what I'm talking about!

Calling the Hogs!

I love bread, I always have. In Germany I have discovered a new love – the soft pretzel. In Munich I saw something that made my heart skip a beat – a GIANT soft pretzel . It was amazing :)

On our last day in Munich we went over to see a really cool castle around 11 in the morning. When we got there I realized that it was not the castle that I thought we were going to. (It was the Schloss Nymphenburg and the other one was the Schloss Neuschwanstein – an honest mistake...) The Schloss Nymphenburg was huge and beautiful, but it was just in the middle of the city. The one I had wanted to see was the one that Walt Disney patterned his castle after – on a big mountain with towering spires.

We were planning on traveling to Saltzberg that day and our tickets are only limited to 5 days of traveling, not five trips. We checked the guide book and the city with Schloss Neuschwanstein wasn't too far south of Munich, so we decided to go. We took a few quick pictures and went back to the train station. (I'll have Jason post some of the pictures because we didn't take them with my camera)

When we got to the station we found out that the next train to Füssen was leaving in about 11 minutes. We talked about it quickly and decided it would work, but then we remembered that our bags were still at the hostel. We tore out of the train station and ran to the hostel (a few blocks away) as fast as we could. We grabbed the bags and ran back to the train station only to arrive 3 minutes after the train left. The cold dry air was such a shock to my lungs that when we got to the platform I almost died from an asthma attack (or at least that's what it felt like... hehe).

We waited for the next train and got to Füssen a little after 4. We didn't get to the castle ticket office until 4:40 and she said that the only remaining castle tour in English was at 5:50. Perfect! The only problem was that the bus that would've taken us up to the castle wasn't working. Remember how I said the castle was on top of a huge hill... We busted it up the hill, running as much as we could, and it took us about 25 minutes to get to the top. Then we relaxed and took some pictures before the tour. When the tour started we found out that we couldn't take any pictures inside the castle at all, so Jason lugging his 15 pound backpack all the way up the hill might have been a mistake.

Jason took some really cool pictures of the outside, but I thought I would show you a few of mine just as a little preview.

This is the view from the castle. It was a pretty hazy day, so the picture's not awesome. I told you it was really high up!

This is part of the outside.

The marble on the castle was really beautiful.

The castle was definitely worth it. It was nice to walk around, take some pictures, and relax outside while we waited for the tour so that we could go in. The inside of the castle was amazing! I am still bummed that we didn't get to take any pictures! Every single surface of everything was painted or carved or somehow intricately designed. I can't even imagine how much work went into it.

Unfortunately the tour group ahead of us was a huge private group and they took a long time so our tour was slowed down a lot. Near the end Jason and I realized that we had less than half an hour before the bus that would take us to from the part of town the ticket office was in to the part of town our train was going to leave from. We tore out of the castle and ran back down that huge hill. We got to the bus station breathless and shaky-legged, but we beat the bus by about 3 minutes. We got to the train on time and we were on our way to Salzburg.

In the middle of the journey we had to change trains and while we were waiting I noticed some peanut M&M's in the vending machine. I marched over and deposited my 60 cents, but the candy got stuck. No problem I thought, I'll just buy another bag and the two will fall together. I counted up the rest of my change and it was only 58 cents . Jason banged on the machine to no avail. I was about to give up, but I decided to see if a gentle body slam might loosen my precious snack. Sure enough, it wiggled a little. I think I slammed into the machine about 15 times, but at last I was victorious!

Because of our detour we didn't get in to Salzburg until just before midnight. We had a hostel booked, so we went to the tram platform. Our hostel was on the other side town and at this point we discovered that all of the public transportation in Salzburg shuts down just before midnight... We lugged our bag around to about 7 hotels within walking distance of the train station and all of them were full, so at 2 am we just went back to the train station to wait until 5 when the trams started running again. That was literally the coldest three hours of my life!

We listened to some podcasts and we got to chat with some nice people at the station, but we didn't get any sleep. At 5 am we locked our bags in a locker and jumped on a bus to warm up and see some of the city. The warm bus made us very tired and we were both asleep when we got back to the train station. We tried another bus and we stayed awake for a little bit, but after a few minutes we dozed off again. When we got back to the train station the second time we found a bakery and got some food and coffee and then hit the town.

I am sure that our experience was slightly tainted by the freezing night at the train station, but Salzburg wasn't really that great. We didn't go on any tours or see any of the Mozart stuff, so I'm sure there were a lot of things that we missed out on. We really just ran around on the busses for the morning and took some pictures along the river that runs through town. By lunch time we were ready to get back to Germany. We took a train back to Munich and then on to Dresden. We slept a lot on that train, and it was lovely!

A few shots in Salzburg



The mountains were pretty amazing!

Dresden was awesome, probably my favorite city so far. Most of the time we were there it was cold and rainy, but it was still cool. There were lots of interesting old buildings, our hostel was nice, the transportation system was German (which is way better than anyone else's), but the highlight was the Hot Spoon. It was a soup restaurant close to our hostel and we shared several bowls there on different occasions.

Here is a picture of Jason in love :)

We used the all-you-can-ride day passes for the city public transportation systems in other cities, but we got the most use out of it in Dresden. Because it was raining we saw tons of the city from the trams. At 6 euro for the two of us for the day it was the cheapest tour ever. Sometimes I was not that great at reading the map, so we got lost several times which just meant that we saw even more of Dresden.

One place where we did hop off the tram and walk around was an old palace in the middle of town.



This is just one of the buidlings. There were several in this same style all in a big square.

I didn't take a lot of pictures of the places that we stayed, but this hostel room in Dresden was so cute I had to snap a few.

Here is our room. It was a six bed dorm. (I was sitting on the other pair of bunks)

And here is the view out the window. Pretty nice, huh?

All-in-all we are having a great time. I'll blog about Prague later, but right now I'm a little tired.

New Clothes

Written on Tuesday morning:

Right now we are riding on a super fast ICE train heading from Stuttgart to Munich. We are excited to see a new city, but also very sad to leave Anna. We had a really great time! We had dinner at her parents' house on Saturday and then we went to a concert. After breakfast we spent most of Sunday in Tübingen, which is a beautiful old German city.

Anna and I enjoying some hot cocoa in Tübingen

Then we had dinner with her parents again (so good!!!!!), and on Monday we spent the day shopping and hanging out in the town where she lives, Karlsruhe. She told us a little about Germany (including some tips about train travel) and she steered us toward some pretty excellent German food.

I think that I have mentioned that it's cold here... We didn't exactly have clothes fit for the blustery chill to bring with us, so yesterday we went clothes shopping with Anna. She took us to a second-hand shop and I got a sweet ski jacket for 8 euros! I am snuggled up in it as I'm typing this, and I love it. Jason got a jacket, a sweater, and a nice shirt (all for quite cheap), so he's feeling good too.

After that we got some wonderful German food and then we went to the one euro store (like the dollar store). I was looking for mittens, but they didn't have any. It was actually Jason who made the real discovery. The only shoes that he has here are his Chacos. They are perfect for Africa, but his feet have been chilly here in the land of winter so we were checking around to see if we could pick up some cheap shoes. In the one euro store he purchased, not shoes, but toe socks. That's right. Jason is now walking around Germany in Chacos and toe socks. He is in love with them and he thinks that they have the magic power to make the crosswalk lights turn green. It works about 50% of the time, so I guess the jury's still out on that one.

The three of us with our new clothes.

Water and Ice Cream

I forgot to include two pictures that I had wanted to put in my blog about the trip. The day before we left I did a little bit of laundry and Jason took a picture of me scrubbing on the wash board. Humerously, the girl who cleans the guest rooms saw me washing and told me to stop so that she could get more soap. Then when she came back with the soap she just took over washing. When I told her I could do it she just laughed and said that it would take me all morning so I washed up some other things while she worked the clothes over.


The sete-plus was so hot and all afternoon I was sitting in the sun. I already had a sunburn from sitting on the side of road, so I covered myself with some bags. They kept the sun off, but I was still baking. After we got to Gambia we stopped at a check point and some girls ran up with bags of cold water. It was probably the single most refreshing drink of my life. You just bite a little hole in the corner to get started. Jason took a picture so we could share the moment with you.


The whole time we were in the car I was thinking that I should be soaking up as much heat as I could before Germany, and I was right. It's really cold here. Today Jason and I went to an old town with our German friend, Anna. It was so beautiful! After a glass of hot chocolate and home hot spinach cake (more like quiche) we felt brave enough to try some ice cream. It was cold, but delicious!

(I borrowed the coat from Anna's sister. Definitely a good decision!)

The Trip

Ok, so I said that the trip up was a long story for a less tired day. I'm sitting on the train from Darmstadt to Stuttgart, so I have a little time.

We were planning on leaving on Monday, but so many last minute things kept coming up that we didn't get to leave until Tuesday. Our alarm didn't go off on Tuesday morning, so instead of leaving the Youth Center at 5 am like we were planning, we didn't get to leave until 7:30. So we got to the place were we could take a sete-plus, bought our tickets, bargained with the driver about the price for our luggage, and then hit the road.

We had some amazing luck on the first ferry. We got there right as it was loading and we were the second to last car on. We drove on and it took off. You can wait like three hours for that ferry, so we were pumped. We crossed into Senegal without incident and got to Ziguinchor in the late morning and then the fun began. There were no sete-plus drivers who wanted to drive from Ziguinchor to Senegal and they were trying to sell us tickets for a fairly convoluted route with several car changes. Finally after enough people were yelling loud enough they called a driver.

The driver came and we paid for a ticket. The guy gave us change, but no tickets and then disappeared. Luckily, our Creole is good enough that we could insist that we had paid and some other people who saw us joined in, so they gave us the tickets. Then they tried to charge us four times the normal amount for our bags, and we were not having that! For some reason Guineans love to yell when they are bargaining, so like 20 minutes of bargaining later we paid double the normal price and a bunch of guys gave the car a push start to hit the road.

When we had been on the road for about 45 minutes the sete-plus broke down. It was early afternoon and we waited for more than two hours while people were taking parts out of the engine and banging them with a hammer. Miraculously, they got the car working, but not before I had gotten a bit of a sunburn. They good thing was that we broke down close to a gas station that had cold coke. Fanta Fiesta never tasted so good!

We crossed the border into the Gambia without any problems, but they did make us pay a little over two bucks each to get in. Then we got to the fairy in Senegal and to our amazement it was just docking on the right side of the river. We ate some interesting sandwiches with meat, noodles, and salad all between bread and chatted with some of the vendors while the fairy was unloading. Right as it started to load an ambulance came roaring up so they pulled all of the cars on and took off across the river without even waiting for the fairy to fill up. I don't really know if I can call that good luck, but it did make the river crossing much quicker.

We didn't have any problems crossing the last border into Senegal again, but the Gambians did make us pay a little over two bucks each again to get out of the country. After that we drove, and drove, and drove. With aching butts and knees we pulled into Dakar at about one in the morning on Wednesday.

We found a taxi driver who spoke enough English to take us to the place that was supposed to be right by the WEC guest house. He dropped us off, but unfortunately, we couldn't find the guest house. We found another guy who spoke English at a restaurant and he knew exactly where the guest house was, or so he said. He took us to the world learning institute. It did have a "w" in the name, but that was about it. Then he said that he knew for sure where it was so we went with him again. This time he took us to a bilingual school. It was about 2:30 am and we were exhausted from the trip and from dragging our bags all over Senegal, so we asked him if he knew where a cheap hotel was. He took us to a little hotel and it was definitely cheap. Scary, but cheap.

We could stay in the room until noon, so we took a shower and went right to bed. Jason woke up around 10:30, went to a nearby gas station, and bought us a huge chocolate bar and some strawberry milk for breakfast. It was sugary and nice :)

We left the hotel at noon and went to a gas station that had a pizza restaurant and a chicken restaurant in it. We spent the rest of the day munching pizza and chips and chicken and french fries and finished it all off with a pound of coconut ice cream (which we split). It was our celebration of normal American food... hehe

From there we got a sweet price on a taxi to the airport. The ticket agents were helpful and knowledgeable, which we were not expecting, so that was a pleasant surprise. The flights to Brussels and then to Frankfurt were smooth and pleasant.

In Frankfurt we had a bit of a scare when only one of our bags came out on the belt. We waited for about 15 or 20 minutes after the belt stopped going (because the screen still said our flight on it) and sure enough it popped out with the luggage from the next flight. The lady from the German YFC guesthouse picked us up and we have been having a great time since then. The first real nights sleep in the YFC guesthouse was amazing and the second one was pretty nice as well :)

So, we are here and safe. On Monday when I realized that we were not going to have a chance to leave I decided that this trip was in God's hands. Every time I started to wonder if we were going to make it or worry about something I just prayed about it (so I was praying a lot, but not worrying at all) and it almost couldn't have gone better.

So, that's the trip in a nutshell. We have been having fun in Germany but the efficient and nice public transportation system has been quite confusing. I snapped a picture of Jason puzzling over the bus route.


Yesterday we went to the Mercedes-Benz Museum and Jason was quite giddy when he was preparing his camera gear.