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I am spending the summer in Brigden, Germany with my boyfriend Stephan. Brigden is a neighboring municipality of Gangelt and is located in western Germany on the Netherlands border.

Stephan is a German officer in the Air Force. He is assigned to the NATO Airbase and is a Tactical Director on the AWACS. You can see the runway for the NATO base in the satellite image above. Stephan and I met at the Miramar Air Show in 2008 but didn’t start dating until almost a year later when he randomly appeared on my Facebook chat.

Brigden is a German village with approximately 3,000 inhabitants. The village is surrounded by farmland. When I go for my morning walks I find myself in giant fields surrounded by tri-tipped windmills. The village of Brigden is in the background. It is really easy to get around by foot, bike, or car. The satellite image below shows the path of one of my walks.

When I arrived at the Düsseldorf airport I quickly realized that my luggage was not leaving with me. However, British Airways does compensate travelers by allowing them to buy a new outfit for a reasonable price. Reasonably priced clothes is almost impossible to find. My new jeans and shirt cost 85 euros but most of the jeans I tried on were over 100 euros! My new jeans went great with Stephan’s new motorcycle. The weather has been perfect for riding so off we went.

I came to Germany with the mindset that I would work out and eat sensible meals. That was until Stephan took me to an ice cream shop. OMG, I am in heaven and hell out the same time. Heaven because I love ice cream and hell because I actually have to choose something. I sit there for 20 minutes trying to decide what to get. I know whatever I choose will taste great and if it doesn’t, I can always eat Stephans!

It just happened to work out that I am in Germany for the World Cup Soccer Match. I told Stephan that I would root for Germany as long as they are not playing the U.S. However, I didn’t realize how much the Germans love soccer. There are flags everywhere and places for public viewing of the matches. Stephan made sure I had the right look for the game.

Drinking and Germany go hand-in-hand. For every goal that Germany scored we got a free beer. The final result of Germany vs. Australia was 4-0 in favor of Germany. I’m not a big drinker so I only had one beer, but we also biked the 5 miles from Stephan’s place to the public viewing of the game.