Hi there,

I just received an email from our host explaining that they scheduled some maintenance work, which will result in about 5 minutes of downtime.

The time window is:

Quote:Maintenance start: 2015-09-01 02:00 UTC
Maintenance end: 2015-09-01 07:00 UTC

Heya,

for those of you who did not yet read the thread about the last meeting (Summer Meeting 2015 - What happened): The meeting we had was awesome, but rather short due to a lot of rain and therefore some very wet tents, even on the inside due to some leaking.

This is why we came up with the idea to have another meeting this year to make up for the very short duration of the summer meeting. This meeting is supposed to take place in winter (so we have like half a year between the 2 meetings, more or less) and it shall not be in tents but in a warm, nice and dry place where we dont have to fear the weather (especially in cold winter nights).

Some more info on this first winter meeting:

1. Its not only for TWC members, just like the other meetings friends and family etc. are welcome

2. It is going to be in Germany this time, in Berlin to be more specific. There are several reasons for using Berlin:
a) The city has a huge airport and is close for people from the north (estonia and the baltic states in general, maybe even finland) so it is cheaper and more likely that there will be some people from there at the meeting.
b) The city is huge, so there is a whole lot of things to do even in winter when u can barely spend more than a few hours outside at once (I will show u a list of some things to do later).
c) Because we do not want to go camping (lol, wintercamping), we would need some kind of hostel. There are several cheap ones in Berlin, but more than that we (Lig and I) live in Berlin and can host the meeting in our apartment if we are not too many people.
d) even for people from the netherlands it should not be too far, since Lig and I drove the same way (just other direction) in the past 2 meetings and it was fine
e) and ofc people from eastern europe (poland, czech, bulgaria ....) would have a good chance to come, since its not far

The date for this meeting is quite clear, since there are not a lot of things to choose from. Most students have holiday around the end of the year, but people who work usually dont. However, there is a certain period (between christmas and new years and the few days after) when the meeting could easily take place without people having to take a lot of days off:
New years eve is thursday the 31st, that means friday (the 1st) is a free day at least for the people in NL and Germany, and I guess aswell for other countries. The 2 days after that are weekend, so free for most people aswell.

This means, we could have the meeting for some days from the 31st till the 3rd, maybe even a few days before the 31st for those who have holiday either way (which would be awesome, cause the 29th is my own birthday and i would LOVE to spend that with some of you ppl )

Berlin offers so many things Im sure we could spend a month and do sth every day, even in winter. Some things are:

- Spending New years at the party @Brandenburger Tor (free entrance, but SUPER FULL)
- go shopping (Alexa, Mall of Berlin, das Schloss etc. -> huge shopping centres with awesome christmas decoration)
- Bowling at American Bowl (they also have a restaurant called Play off with american food and special days like Burger, Spaghetti, Pizza day etc.)
- going to some cheaper clubs on new years who do not sell super expensive sylvester-tickets in advance (like Golgata-Club with free entrance or Soda-Club with free for women and 8euro for men, little-miss-sunshine free bar or living-room free bar)
- watch all the fireworks on new years from one of berlins big bridges
- we can aswell go in the famous e-sports bar interface (fifa, dota, LoL, mariokart etc. tournaments for you to compete in)
- go free dart-playing, pub quizzing, playing pool etc.
- one of the berlin street food markets (really cool, unusual food for low costs)
- some bar with nice happy hours (NSTAGS with a free snack for every drink, cheap cocktails etc.)
- some special bar (middle age, turn around with chairs on the ceiling, all chemistry bar, gothic bar etc.)
- one of the berlin winter markets (some are really huge and more like a fair, e.g. the one at the Alexanderplatz, lots of them also have ice-skating, shooting and more)
- go having fun in the snow at some hill in berlin
- indoor-pools
- go-kart driving inddor
- huge sportsfields (indoor) with tennis, volleyball etc.
- visit an aqua-building like SeaLife, Aquadom etc. with fishies
- ofc lots of cool restaurants in general like spanish tapas, real bavarian/german food etc.
- have a cheap sightseeing tour with the Bus100 where u see almost every kind of berlin sightseeing thing for just the price of a normal bus ticket
- etc.etc., so many things to do

Money-wise it would be even less expensive than the last meetings (which always were like 6 euro a night + food money) because you could sleep for free at our apartment and would only need to spend money for food (which is also less since i have a kitchen and would say im pretty decent when it comes to baking and cooking :P)

So, what do you people think? Suggestions, remarks? Who is interested in coming?


Mimi

Helloooo ladies and gentleman whoi unfortunately couldnt join us at the meeting!

Since now we are all back home (or at another holiday *silencer, chrmchrm*), we thought why not provide y'all with some information (actually a looooot of information, like a diary ) about the days we spent at the camping.

As you know, it was in the Netherlands, in the province Zeeland near a small town called Hellevoetsluis. The campside itself is called Weergors, and its the same we were at last meeting.

Lig and I started driving at around 3am on Friday the 24th of July. It was a loooong drive from Berlin, like 5 and a half hours until we were at Schiphol (airport at Amsterdam). Lig was driving, and even though I really tried to stay awake and chat with him so he doesnt get all sleepy and crashes in a tree i.....failed. I slept a lot, apparently like 2/3 of the drive as Lig did not stop to remind me during the whole meeting >.<

Once at Schiphol we actually wanted to pick up Thor (from Estonia, coming by plane). Last year it took us like 4? hours to wait for his plane and even more find Thor at the airport, because smart as we were we said we would meet at the Starbucks in case we miss us at the gate - but unfortunately schiphol got 2 Starbucks and we spent hours missing each other on our travels from one Starbucks to the other.
Well, this time we only waited for about an hour - because by that time his plane was just arriving and we were bored and looked into the forum to check stuff....and there it was.
A
PM
FROM
THOR
He couldnt come. He missed his flight due to roadworks....oh well. A real shame, and he probably cried himself to sleep that night :O

So on we went, to the campside where we this time arrived at lunchtime as the FIRST. We already tried to set up the tents, but thats not too easy if youre just 1 and a half people (Lig fell asleep next to the car^^).
After some time Silencer and his wife joined us and we started to set up the tents. John arrived at the camping spot aswell and took the important job of running around and trying to fix some stuff we attached quite loosely to the tent xD

After both tents were up (including nice cozy cabins inside them for sleeping) facing each other we sat under the entrance-roofs and played a lot of cards while listening to music and waiting for more people to arrive.

Because we knew 2 more people (ETC Code Black and his friend) would join us later in the evening we were only waiting for one more person: Master (and ofc Rambo + Xatci and his friend but all three of them ddnt come nor did they sent us a message ).
Master did indeed let us wait for quite some time, we were all starving already waiting for the big BBQ. Once he arrived he unloaded his car...and there was a HUGE FRIDGE in his car. Which served a good purpopse cooling all the stuff like cheese and jam and ofc BEER

Once Master was there it did not take long for Code and his friend to arrive aswell. We then went to the supermarket and bought meat and breakfast things for the next day. Back at the tents we "tried" to have BBQ.
It ended in us eating more bread with butter than meat at first because Masters cute tiny BBQ did take quite some time to heat up

After sitting there like idiots for some hours we finally remembered we had huge, hot gas stoves from Master and a big pan from Lig and me, so THEN we finally had a lot of well-cooked/grilled, hot meat.

The group did play a lot of more card games at night, Im sure they can tell you a lot about is -Lig and I went to sleep because we were pretty tired (funny eh considering I slept almost the whole night in the car :P).

The night itself was, in one word, AWFUL.
We ALL woke up at around 3am with a huge thunderstorm and lots of rain going on. It was super loud, pretty cold but still funny in a very weird way, seeing all those people sticking their heads out of the cabins to look in each others sleepy faces and then getting phone messages from the other tent xD

The morning after the big storm was....interesting. Our tent grew a little pond overnight because we unfortunately did not attach a tiny bit of tent fabric at the top of the tent
Once the tent was cleaned (and our towels were soaking wet) and John attached the fabric while risking his life (kinda)

we had quite a good breakfast in the tent with easy stuff like cheese and chocolate spread etc.


Because it was really really bad weather (lots of rain and cold wind) we decided not to do the scavenger hunt this day, BUT go swimming. Ofc not at the beach, but in a nice indoor swimming pool in a nearby city.
The swimmingpool was small, but nice. It included a waterslide the boys loved because it measured the time you needed for the sliding + showed the highscore; a childrens pool none of us tried and a nice big "normal" pool with rows for swimming. And, thanks god, a whirpool with hot water!!!
We all sat in there a few times, especially after some people had their smoke break (after some cold drinks and fries) in the OUTSIDE area of the pool. In the cold.wet.rainy.weather XD so much dedication

The evening was nice because finally the sun came out. We were sitting outside, chatting, playing cards again and some guys rented tennis stuff and played at the tennis field (John owning all of us so hard that in the end Silencer hurt his ankle out of pure enthusiasm >.<)
Master did a great job again cooking the rest of the meat and Lig did heat up the Chili con carne (which we also did not manage to finish xD).

We were sitting there for quite some time, and right before John had to leave for work we managed to make some group pictures (with one real fail-pic because I kicked the camera aside when trying to join the group pic fast enough to be there before the countdown for the camera-flashing was done).

We also met a new hairy, cute friend - a puppy from our neighbours caravan who was in love with our food (meat ofc^^). He was clever aswell, he would jump up to us and let us pet him until we did not had a tight grip anymore on his little collar and then woooooooosh he was gone for the food


Once John left we replaced him with a box of cookies and had a great evening playing cards and eating unhealthy things. THe best (or worst, depends on how lucky u were) treat was the little jelly bean the loser of the cardgame had to eat - because we mixed good beans (cherry, lemon, blueberry n stuff) with reaaaaally bad beans from the harry potter franchise (earthworm, dirt, vomit, bogger....). Imo the rotten egg I had to try and of which Code took a bite off aswell (thaaaanks <3) was the absolute worst.

The night was rainy, but the sunday started nice and sunny. We had French Toast (kind of pancakes just with bread instead of flour) for breakfast together with whatever people wanted out of the fridge. After that Lig and I went to prepare the scavenger hunt and people kept themselves busy with different games (no tennis this time, but therefore with a game of boules, those little steel balls you have to throw close to another smaller wooden ball).

After our Sunday guest, Charmy, arrived we started the scavenger hunt with Silencer-Crew backing us up with the riddles we could not find anymore (we thought some kids stole them, and apparently they did bring the little shiny blue packets to their parents, who thought they belong to someone and brought them to the reception, who then met us on our scavenger hunt and gave us back the packets xD).
The scavenger hunt led all over the campside, and I have to admit the group did very good (almost toooo good, hmm :P) with the riddles. They solved them pretty easily, did not need the hints and gathered a looot of points so that in the end after the last riddle (which was btw the birthday song we sang for HenryC) everyone got a little medal

Because we were all really hungry after the hunt, we decided to get some PIZZA. The first restaurant we drove to was closed, and the Dominos we then went to was so full it was faster to order online and then drive to get the pizzas xD
The food itself was really yummie and everyone got a different kind of pizza (and OMG THEY HAD PIZZA WITH A HOTDOG IN THE CRUST!!!) Oh, and Master managed to drop like half of his pizza-stuff on the box xD


The evening was all cards and beans again because nobody wanted to move even an inch out of the tent (rainy, but mainly because we were so full with pizza that we would have rather rolled than walked :P).

Silencer and his wife left us after the big pizza feast and drove home/to their next holiday, but therefore John came back at around 10.30pm

Because we were only 5 people by then we did not want to have one person (Master) sleep alone in his cabin in the other tent. So we invited him over to share one of the 3 cabins we had with us. However, when we were carrying his stuff it showed that literally EVERYTHING was dripping wet. The tents could no longer withstand all the constant rain and humid, cold air. Everything was either wet or cold and damp. The tents were leaking, and the wind constantly blew under the tent-tarps and through every little slit and hole there was.

So we survived another night cuddled up in our cabins, but decided (with heavy hearts) to leave around lunchtime the next day. The people at the reception were very understanding and did not make us pay for the other reserved days.
Because it was still raining and cold wind blowing hard every few minutes, the packing was a game of rain: wait inside - rain stopped: run out and grab what you get and throw it in the car - rain: wait inside.....
And when I say rain I really mean it. Huge wind gusts, rain like someone is pouring buckets of cold water xD

But then, when Moanraker arrived (poor Moanie, joins the meeting right at the time we are leaving :/ ) the sun suddenly came out a bit and it stopped raining. We grabbed what was left to put in the cars and then took a daytrip to the city because none of us really wanted to go home yet in the middle of the day.

We were playing pool in a shady (yes, both meanings) building with hooooorrible toilets but good pool tables

and later ate some really nice doner-kebab-fast-food-stuff in a little hut at the market place.


Before it was time to say goodbye we even managed to find a nice supermarket and buy cool "dutch" souvenirs including speculoos (almond bisquit) spread, hagelslaag (yes dutch people put SPRINKLES on their breakfast toast) and all of the puffed rice (really sweet stuff my mom loves) the supermarket had in the aisle.

After a heartbreaking (and a bit bone-crushing from the hugs) goodbye lig and i drove Moanraker back home and then went on to LIGS parents house, slept there and then went to my parents house, spent a few days there and then, finally, arrived back in berlin in our own house .


PS: We will add all pictures of the meeting on the facebook page of the clan, because those shown here are just a few of them