Always Something New

It is turning out that joining the fire department was an excellent decision. Training for the competition was on friday and that went fairly well.. however i cannot throw a fire straight yet or roll them up very quickly but after the third drill there was quite an improvement. what we have to do is a series of steps correctly like a relay almost and then take it all down and put it all away correctly all under 10 minutes..... the more mistakes you make the more points you lose..as well as the slower you are the more points you lose. the best departments get to move along to the next tiered division. and we have now started our training which will be almost every friday so i should get a hang of it soon!

Saturday i volunteers to be an injured person for a fire department practice. here is how it all went down

• do to this Scheiße language barrier i got myself into a practice that didnt end until 3:30 in the morning. 
• at 9 we (fire fighters from my surrounding villages and me and 2 ppl from mine) sit in a hockey arena and wait to be made up with fake blood and all sorts of different injurys from simple as a broken arm (me) to 17 deaths, people with major blood loss, broken limbs, amputated limbs.. pretty much anything you can think of.
• once everyone was all made up and giving there part to act out.. (the language barrier actually played out to my advantage at with me only having a broken arm)
• so after waiting  3 hours.. freezing might i add... we were all taken down to a train and loaded the car and got into position.paramedics then came in and added more fake blood and proper positions so it looked as realistic as it could. (because this practice the fire department actually dont know now that it is a practice till they get there... all that they new is there pagers went off at 12:30ish explaining an accident with a train and where it was.. so for all they knew it was real)
• they (about 80 fire men and women from Lüneburg (where the accident was) and surrounding towns) the start to rescue us as if it was real. 
• it was super cool to be a part of.. and not being able to fully understand just helped the practice be even more real.
• once i was rescued i was taken up by the fire department and handed over to paramedics where they had to practice there protocol too.  
• even though it was a very long and cold night. it was something super cool to be apart of a guaranteed i would have never done anything like that at home.   

Hopefully i havnt left anything out... but today i am running on very few hours of sleep due to this event.. and then had to be at a wedding anniversary party today. But i really cannot complain because live is so GREAT!

xo -B