Sunday

Tonight was an interesting one.  A girl I know from HWS, Emma, is studying in Germany on the Blocker Fellowship as well, and she is currently doing a 4-week language-intensive course in Dresden (only 2 hours from Berlin) before her semester starts.  So she came up to Berlin for the day to see the sites, and we met up for coffee this evening.  I hadn't gotten a chance to talk to her extensively at school, but we do have a lot in common.  Next thing we knew we'd been chatting over coffee for 2 hours!  We reflected on the american products (mainly food...) we miss, and she enjoyed finally having a conversation with someone in english (I do have to say, my English has gotten much better this past week, having Lucy here to talk to all the time).

As we got ready to leave the coffee shop, Emma noticed her wallet was missing, and it had been sitting on our small coffee table right between us the whole time... and neither one of us had left the table!  To her great advantage, Emma was raised bilingual, and has stellar German skills which were able to navigate her through this situation quite well.  Because of that, the people around us willingly looked through/around all of their things and helped us search high and low for the wallet (they definitely would not have done so if it were just non-German speakers with american accents).  Unfortunately, it was nowhere.  Crime/theft is exceedingly rare in Germany and Berlin, so it's very surprising that someone (most likely the child who came by asking us to sign a petition) stole it.

I felt so bad for her, but luckily she'd noticed this before we'd parted ways, so I was able to get her dinner, another train ticket back to Dresden, and give her some money to get her by the next few days.  Replacing things such as metro passes and house keys in Germany is really expensive, and she only got here a week ago.

It was a frustrating experience, and definitely reminded me of the need to keep watch of my things carefully(...especially if I'm sitting around speaking english). But as Emma said, "Nothing is lost in the Kingdom of God... everything has it's place!"  Even if our small and finite minds don't understand where that place is.