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Sunday, the 21st: Arrival Day (& Steffi's birthday!)

Well our trip to Dortmund was scarily uneventful. My regional train to Stuttgart was only about 10 minutes late (practically punctual :P ) and Steffi (that's of course Stefka for all you FSU people) and I met about 45 minutes before our train left, so we had breakfast at McDonalds (the first step to make this skating trip a Steffi-and-Kerstin-skating-trip-TM). The train drive was boring and long, I don't remember anything special. The only horror was getting my suitcase everywhere, I bet it weighed more than Qing Pang or Galit Chait :P and would have been big enough to get both of them inside it, at the same time. Poor me. I actually was not able to lift it higher up from the ground than 10 centimeters or something. Seriously. (Thank god it was a trolley). My dad drove me to the train station and both times he had to lift it somewhere he said "Oh my god, is that heavy!". So the trip to Dortmund with it was the pure horror, especially getting from the train station in Dortmund to our hotel (of course we made quite a detour too, not finding the most direct way to the hotel and walking around nearly the whole thing when we finally were there, in search for the entrance). The travel home with the suitcase was a lot easier for me by the way, because I must have looked truely helpless (no wonder, since on the way back I swear I hardly got the damn thing from the ground anymore at all, which I guess shows that the week was a bit exhausting, LOL, even though I'm feeling quite fit) and so I had 3 different guys carry it down steps or lift it into the train for me. When I unpacked my clothes I noticed that I didn't wear about 50% of them. Steffi had a slighter slimmer suitcase that did not look as bad as mine (but actually didn't weigh much less, according to her), so she had to carry the thing on her own. But then she probably deserves it for once, for today's sentence: "There really are an awful lot of dreadful photos of you from this event!" alone ;) And no, THOSE won't see the light of day anywhere in public.

So after unpacking (despite hardly having any space in our hotel room) we met our friends Katja, Susanne and Petra and made our way to the rink. Walking into it, I thought "Wow is that small", well it was a rather small rink, but not quite THAT small, I just somehow managed to overlook that there is an upper bowl for at least 15 minutes or so. But one of the others did the saem. Then we put up our banners and had the first drama moment of the week, we realized that there is no way to get close enough to the ice to throw our stuffed animals even NEAR the ice, PML. At least not for us with our throwing abilities. You couldn't get REAL close to the ice anyway and you hardly even could get closer than our own seats, because you would have had to climb over seats and everything...this realization later on the day resulted in us doing some stuffed animal throwing tests in our hotel room, ahem :D We saw some men's practices, but I have to admit I didn't pay all that much attention since I was busy spotting ice dancers in the audience, there really were a lot of them who seemed to be interested in seeing the men practice, we spotted Denkova, Navka, Sakhnovsky, Shae Lynn, ... and of course Tarasova and Usova at the rink border, coaching Takahashi and Griazev. Shae Lynn must be the easiest to spot person in the whole rink (well except for the Canadian maple leaf lady with the Maple Leaf coffee cosy hat on her head probably :P ), since her hair is just that flashy. Only problem is that half of the times we spotted Shae-Lynn, it actually probably was Kristin Fraser :D In terms of the men's practice, I paid the most attention to Johnny Weir and Plushenko, who both looked very good, the only other thing that we really noticed was that Stephane Lambiel was really struggling on that day.

Here are some small and not-that-small pictures from the practice:

Favorite coaching team
Ion Garcia (at least I think that's him)
Andrei Griazev
Andrei Griazev
Andrei Griazev
Kevin van der Perren
Sergei Kotov (he has such cute hair btw)
Stephane Lambiel (he really could have been a BIT less untiffed at least ;) )
Stephane Lambiel
First Plushenko sighting
Aidas Reklys
Yamato Tamura (best hair)
Johnny Weir
Johnny Weir
Johnny Weir

After the practices were over, we went back to our hotel and first celebrated Steffi's birthday a little, with champagne and a self-baked birthday cake from Katja (with only 14 candles on it, but then that fits our mental age quite well probably ;) ), we looked at my gift for Steffi, she'll probably have some pictures from it within her own report. Afterwards we went to the restaurant across the street and ate what would be our last good meal for a lot of days (unfortunately I was not hungry at all and didn't even manage to finish my Gnocchi). Uhm on that day we all actually went to bed at 10pm, because we were just sooooo tired. Actually I never was as tired again during the whole next week as on the day of our arrival. Must have been the suitcase. And of course this was the only time we went to bed that early...