Stadtrally

Our German teachers organized a scavenger hunt for levels one and three! Our class sort of got a reputation for doing fun things, like learning songs and games and having a teacher who was just really sweet and nice, and this was the most fun!

We divided into three groups, with an equal number of level ones and level threes (thank goodness, because we relied on the level threes a lot) and got to work!

We had a list of things to do, like go into the bank and ask for exchange rates for different currencies, go up to a stranger and ask for an idiom in German, ask another stranger for a poem in German (and we had to memorize the poem and recite it), ask for the name of different items in bakeries and restaurants, and all kinds of other things that were sometimes embarrassing and sometimes not. We also had a list of pictures we were supposed to get. I'll include just the pictures from my group, since there were a lot of the same. 

Picture with a panorama of Marburg 

Picture trying things on at a secondhand store

A picture of the whole group on the horse statues (the other groups all had one or two people NEXT to the horses)

A picture of someone from the group holding a waiter (yep, we don't know this guy!)

A picture with a dog on a leash. The man with the dog said we could keep it but we declined. 

One of the other groups had the funniest picture with a dog - their dog is trying desperately to back away from them and hide.

A picture in front of the restaurant "Die Pause"

Okay, this is apparently a thing - apple for an egg. I do not understand it, nor did I believe that it was a real thing. I think it's based on a poem or something and it has a name, but when spoken I couldn't really understand what that word was, so my google searches for this were fruitless. Basically it's a thing, either in Marburg or Germany (not sure, again couldn't confirm online), and people actually do it. Not everyone, but some people. 

So each group got either an apple or a raw egg at the beginning. We were supposed to take that and trade it for something else in the city. I know what you're thinking because I thought it too - you're thinking absolutely no one in their right mind would trade an egg for ANYTHING, right? Well, like me, you'd be wrong. You would NOT be wrong in assuming that asking to trade an egg for anything was a very embarrassing thing. The goal (at least for our game, not sure if it's this way in general) was to trade as many times as possible at as many places as possible and to trade up significantly.

Here's Julianne trading the egg for some gummy bears at a bakery. The lady behind the counter confirmed that it was raw before she took it. I wondered if they were planning to use our egg for something later.

Here's Julianne trading the gummy bears for a little bar of soap at a sponge shop. To me, getting soap out of the deal was as good as we were going to get. This seemed pretty good.

But Martin, the teacher for level three and our team leader, said we had to keep going because last year his team got a bottle of wine from an egg. So I traded the soap for three little lotions.

And Ivan traded those for this round cookie at a coffee shop.

Finally, we traded up significantly. We went in with our cookie (which was probably a downgrade), and traded at this store for a pair of earrings. We'd just go in to each place and ask if they had something to trade for whatever we had and they'd offer something and we'd take it... I have no idea how we got this from that. The earrings had a price tag of 16 Euro and came in a gift box. We were all impressed with Ivan's ability to do this. 

My pictures are a little out of order here, but I don't think it matters significantly. We traded as we went throughout the game, and all of these things are out of order. 

We had to take a picture in a shopping cart. I haven't stepped into a shopping cart in a long time but these were smaller than American ones and were certainly not made to hold the weight of two adults. We didn't break it or any bones getting out of it, so I'll call it a win. 

We had to take a picture with two group members kissing a stranger. We stopped this man playing his guitar on the street and asked for a photo. Another group has a picture with two of their group members kissing a stranger's hand. That I might have agreed to do.

A picture in front of a door.

A picture in a mirror. This is in the elevator going up to the Altstadt.

Another thing we had to do was ask a stranger to carry one of us across a street. We had two people refuse, understandably, but one (the man in the background) offered his friend as a substitute and he agreed. 

We had to get a picture of something that represented children and the YMCA, so we found a school group and had them do the YMCA. 

We also had to get a picture of the group blowing chewing gum bubbles. This was difficult for all groups and believe it or not, ours had the most success in this. I am laughing in this picture and not hiding, because every time I'd blow a bubble, mine would pop or get a hole. This is way funnier to orchestrate than you'd think. We couldn't stop laughing and we probably had like 16 mis-takes before we got this.

After the points were rounded up, our team tied for first!

We finished up with a game of Flunkyball. Our teacher had explained it a few weeks before and said she'd teach us how to play it at the end of class, so our reward was this game. My team lost both times but it was fun!