Hiking around Opladen!

As Hilal kept showing interests, I let him organize yet another hike. I don’t really understand why, but he decided to organize one right next to where he organised his last three hikes. I was slightly upset, but ok it’s still an area I like, so what should I complain about.

There were somewhat less people this time again. I wonder whether the fact it was very close to the previous locations played a role.

I have hay fever around this time of the year every year. For this reason, I have to take cetirizine everyday, which affects me somewhat right now. In particular, I was feeling tipsy all the time, even though I was not drunk. I also didn’t really feel like talking to the other people. So great that I wasn’t the organizer XD

So in the first half, I was mostly listening to podcasts. I was actually particularly interested in it, because it looks like I’m going to go to Prague this September, and it’s been two years that I’m learning Czech, so I wanted to beef up my Czech knowledge a lot.

There was a small park at Opladen with a lot of monuments talking about climate change. Europe has been affected pretty badly these years, and here in Germany people are more and more interested, as if they hadn’t been enough interested before. This one shows the temperature change over the last decades. I don’t quite understand the stick on the left, but you can move it around and see how much the average temperature increased.

Opladen is not quite a kind of area that I choose for a hike, because it’s usually quite flat, but Hilal did a nice job to make a good trail. As a matter of fact, it didn’t really feel like it was totally flat today.

And there was also a lot of water along the way, pretty much like last week.

We had a really weird weather today. As far as I can remember, it was supposed to rain. In the end, we had a mixture of clouds and beautiful blue sky. It really felt like early summer, or late spring, where unstable weather is the norm.

We had a break somewhere in the middle of a forest. I don’t quite understand how the first guys decided to have a break there, but anyway we all stopped there. As it wasn’t a very comfortable area, we also did not stay for a very long time.

Right before we reached Opladen again, we found a restaurant, in front of which there was an open bar, called “Bratko’s”. As it kind of looked nice we decided to stop there to order a drink. The staff in the restaurant told us it was only opening from the beginning of May, but nevertheless took our order. This guy, a Croatian as we later found out, was more like a comedian than a waiter and frankly I didn’t know whether he was seriously working there or only joking around, until he brought all the drinks we ordered. Somehow we all had so much fun there. My gin tonic made me almost bankrupt, but still we really enjoyed it.