Portugal: A weekend in Carvoeiro

One of the last trips planned for the semester was to Portugal for a long weekend with some of the most awesome friends I've made here. The trip was really spontaneously planned during the coldest spring in Bonn in the last twenty years; we just wanted to see the sun and have it be warm so we planned to head to the coast at the end of June.
The trip started on Thursday night at midnight when I had to take a train with Tom and Mandy to Cologne where we were taking at 2:15 AM bus to Frankfurt Hahn Airport. The train was no problem but the hour between the train getting there and the bus leaving was killer because I was already dead tired. The first hour of the bus ride was also pretty peaceful and I was stretched out across the aisle sleeping comfortably (all things considered). Then the bus stopped to pick up some more people in Koblenz and a group of rowdy, drunk teenagers got on. They reeked of alcohol and decided to claim the seats directly behind me. I turned up my music, tried not to breathe through my nose, and tried to fall back asleep sitting up with my head bumping against the window. After about twenty minutes, the boy in the seat behind me starts breathing really heavily. I tried to shoot him some looks to keep quiet, I was in no mood to try and argue in German. He didn't stop. Instead, he started making dry heaving noises... so I got up and moved. Just in time. He started to throw up all over the floor. It was disgusting and his drunk friends were laughing and egging him on. I moved as far forward on the bus as I could and prayed I wouldn't get sick myself. What an awful bus ride. The driver must not have realized what was going on or couldn't stop because people needed to catch their flights, because he didn't do anything while we were on the bus.We arrived at Frankfurt Hahn at about 5 AM and our flight wasn't until 6:50... we had some time to kill. We got breakfast and met up with the others coming on the trip: Lee, Jeremy, and John. Mandy is the girl from Louisiana who lives in my building and she knows Lee from their home University of LSU. Jeremy and Tom met Lee here and John is a friend of Lee's from home who is visiting for an extended time (2 ish months I think).
We flew to Faro with no problems and found the driver of our hired van with minimal problems and drove an hour or so to Carvoeiro, a small resort town west on the coast of Faro. The skies were overcast at 10 AM when arrived and we had time to kill until 11:30 when we were to meet and get the key for the apartment we rented. We got some breakfast, wandered around the picturesque town and saw the beach for the first time. There was some confusion about the apartment and once we finally found it, we had to wait about an hour and a half until we got the key because the woman meeting us didn't realize she was meeting us at a certain time, we were apparently supposed to call when we got there. Good job, boys ha ha but we made it inside and I felt like I was on the Real World, exploring an awesome apartment and claiming a bed :) There were two bedrooms (one with a king bed, one with two twins), two bathrooms with showers, a living and dining room, a kitchen, and an awesome balcony where we spent most of our time when at the apartment. The view of the street was amazing. There were palm trees across from us, some orange trees, a hillside covered with spanish style architecture... and white walls with yellow trim. I loved it. Here's the view down the street:
The weather finally cleared up and became sunny after noon. We found a grocery store, got some num nums and then headed to the beach. It was beautiful!
There are lots of little beaches in coves of the rock faces so the beaches never get too crowded (because there's so many of them). The water was a blue I've never seen in water and so clear... the sand was so white and looked like little rocks up close. It was really soft (and super exfoliating ha ha) but started to hurt after a while because my feet weren't used to it.
We spent a while at the beach and then hung out at the apartment on the balcony. While at the beach, one of Lee and John's friends who was traveling in Europe alone made his way to Portugal to hang out with us. He was a pretty cool guy, Thomas Wren. Added an interesting dynamic to the group. We were pretty beat from being out in the sun all day and I headed to bed at a decent hour, all things considered.The next day, Saturday, I woke up to Tom cooking breakfast of eggs and bacon for everyone. It was fantastic :) so nice of him. I didn't know him too well before this trip but we had some chances to talk and get to know each other better and he's a genuinely great guy. His girlfriend is pretty lucky :) We all decided to wander a half hour away to a different beach near a resort instead of the small beach by us again. I didn't think it was possible but this beach was even more beautiful than the first.We stayed here for a while and headed home to shower before the USA soccer match against Ghana. We found an Irish pub where we were alone to watch the game and ordered some "Deep Fried Plate of Snacks" and other foods to munch on. Sadly, the US lost but we went out to celebrate Jeremy's 21st Birthday anyway. After the boys dominated some English men at Billiards at the first bar, we wandered to the second. At midnight, in transit, we stopped quickly for a birthday midnight shot :)

At the second bar, we got caught up in "the shot game" where you pay 7 euro ($10) for 12 shots of various assortments and spin a homemade spinner to see if you take a shot, take two, miss a turn, make someone else take one, etc. It was fun :) Some were tasty, some not so much... I didn't stay out too long (tired again from the sun all day, look how tan I am on only day two!) and got some sleep. Day three, the boys were pretty burned and sunned out so Mandy and I relaxed on the beach together (Jeremy did join us for a bit and tried to beat my tan... he's part mexican and it still didn't happen, I'm awesome :-p).
We took a break from the sun for the Germany v. England game which was SO amazing. This town is some sort of huge resort for British people so they were everywhere and it was awesome to have Germany beat them in their presence ha ha O:) We cheered fairly obnoxiously... it was amazing.
After dinner and showering, Mandy and I decided to walk up the cliffs (I had earlier with Jeremy and Tom but Mandy didn't) to see the end of the sunset.
It was really beautiful :) Then we walked around the beach after it got dark. It was really peaceful and a nice moment to share with Mandy. It's amazing how close we've become after only know each other for four months... I'm going to miss having her in the same building and calling her to chat about everything and nothing at the same time. It was a great memory to walk around the rocks in the low ride and compare our little foot prints ha ha :)
I was really sad to leave the next morning at 6 AM because I feel like this trip was the spring breaks I never had and I really took a step back, told myself to chill out, and I didn't freak out or get moody or testy or OCD about the apartment and I feel like I added to the group :) I had a great time for so many reasons... great people, scenic landscape, awesome adventures... definitely what the study abroad experience is all about. The only regret I have is that everyone else was too hung over after Jeremy's 21st bday to go on the boat tour of the caves, I guess I'll just have to come back later in life :)
That's all for now... I still owe you posts on Paris and Berlin...

Random Adventures: Drachenfels and Christopher Street Day

A couple weeks ago, since I don't have class on Fridays and the weather was beautiful, I decided to wander through Drachenfels with some awesome people. Drachenfels is a certain mountain in the Konigswinter area of outside of Bonn. It's across the Rhein and about a half hour on the U-Bahn south, not far at all, and is a really cute little town. Drachenfels is a really steep hill that you can spend an hour hiking up; on the way up there's a castle to tour inside of. The views from its terrace are awesome but the castle is underwhelming and looks a little hokey. This is probably because it's from the 18th Century and mainly aristocrats lived there. So it's not old or actually important but the people who lived there had too much money and wanted to show that off. It's still cool to see :) Pictures are on my fb page if you're curious. At the top of the mountain there are some castle ruins and some rocks that I remember from when I was a kid, so I took a picture with them :)
The view from the top was amazing and definitely worth the climb. Libby, Jon, Sam and I all hung out at the top for a bit and snacked on some stuff Jon had in his bag. We found a vending machine with ice cream for the trip down and continued the adventure on to the Birkenstock outlet :) I got a pair of sandals. I'm starting to come to terms with the disgusting extremities we call feet and have bought multiple pairs of sandals from H&M and some flats... I kinda like them.

Another adventure happened today and that was the Christopher Street Day in Cologne. Since it's the 4th of July, I couldn't miss out on a parade. This one didn't have children handing out candy though. Substitute some drunk, half naked, men... who were all celebrating gay pride :) It was still a parade though ha ha It was an interesting experience, there were SO many people. The floats were all a lot of fun and playing some awesome music ha ha so Sam and I had a dance party in the street. I'm not really pro-gay so much as pro-equality and it was really amazing to see so many people feeling liberated and able to be themselves in public and you could see the genuine happiness in every single person's face in that parade. It was incredible and I'm glad I got to see it.

I should get back to homework now... I come home in a month from tomorrow (what?! already?!), Mandy leaves in 20 days (NOOOOOOO!!!!) and I only have 19 days until the end of the semester and my college career... crazy. However, I need to finish my papers before then. Ew.

See you all soon :)
x

Expanding my comfort zone

While I'm in Bonn, I've been pushing myself to do things alone and to do things I may not do at home. A few of these experiences turned out to be a waste of time but most of them have been well worthwhile. Two of these in particular were really great: I attended a Sunday Concert alone and went to volunteer at the Bonn Triathlon.
Chronologically, the Bonn Triathlon was first. After coming back from Berlin, I had an email asking for volunteers but I had missed the deadline. I figured they couldn't use me anymore but I emailed back anyway. They said to show up on Sunday at 9 AM in the Rheinau park, about a half hour from me across the river. I showed up and was handed loads of stuff! I got a bright orange shirt that says "helfer" (helper, aka volunteer) on it, a navy blue baseball cap since I was in the sun all day, another grocery tote bag (awesome!) which was filled with an apple, some crackers, a liter of water, beef jerky, and some sweet thing also. It was fantastic. I headed with the group to the first station where we were to help the swimmers out of the water and up a ramp where they would continue with the cycling portion. The water was FREEZING but thankfully I didn't have to stand in it since I wasn't informed to bring extra clothes. It was amazing to see the swimmers appear though, it was like a flock of ducks swimming toward us. All of a sudden there were just hundreds of people emerging from the water and it lasted over an hour. After this was finished, I received a free lunch of chili con carne with a roll and since I had planned to spend all day there, not just two hours, I asked if I could help somewhere else. I was told to walk to the end of the 5 km loop where they were running and help guide the runners in the right path. This was boring. I almost fell asleep standing up... I think the runners got annoyed that I kept yawning ha ha but I was in the sun and it was so rhythmic hearing their feet... couldn't help it. I decided after the 1st loop that they knew the way and was told to relieve another girl who had to leave. I was then standing at the split of a footpath where bikers and pedestrians kept trying to walk in the same path where 1500 people were running... you'd think the herds of people with numbers on their chests and who look nearly dead from exhaustion would give it away that you 'can't go through this way' but it didn't. I was absolutely necessary. And let me tell you, it is a great test of one's language skills to scream commands loudly at bikers. It's hard to express "stop you can't go through there, this way is closed" quickly and in German. Though I have to admit German is a great language for disciplining... I believe that's why their dogs are all so well behaved but that's another story. After the first half hour of this, two girls my age approached on bikes and as I started to ask them to stop, they started laughing. Then I realized it was Sanja and one of her friends, they were cheering on her friend's dad (I believe) who was participating. So they helped me yell at bikers for a while ha ha. Good times... After a couple hours of this, I believe around 4 PM, I headed home. I did enjoy cheering on the last few runners though :) They were all amazing. Makes me hope I have the courage to attempt something like a triathlon someday.

A couple Sundays ago I also signed up to go to another concert at the Beethoven Halle, this one was a Charlie Chaplin silent film where the music was played live. It was amazing :) I went by myself and a few other study abroad students were seated in my row but I don't know them so no conversation ensued. The hall slowly went dark and the film started to roll, it was called "The Gold Rush" and was about Charlie as he headed west to strike gold and how he fared in the town. There's a love story, a bad guy, and lots of laughing. Some guy behind me was REALLY cracking up, I got a kick out of it and it made me get more into it :) All the things that seem cliche to me and would be in films now were so creative then and I can see how he captivated a generation of movie goers. I really enjoyed the experience and the hour and a half film passed quickly. The quality was also a lot better than I was expecting. It's definitely the way I think the film was meant to be enjoyed: with live music and in a crowd of people enjoying themselves as much as you are. It's definitely something I would do again in a heart beat.

Weltmeisterschaft 2010!

Wow... what an incredible time to be in Germany. I'm not sure if I can explain how intense the World Cup is here, but I'm going to try.
So the group stage is now over, after each country has played 3 games and tried its best to advance to the knock out stage and continue its hopes of World Cup Domination. Germany has made it through to the next round, thanks for a win tonight against Ghana (who the US now has to play on Saturday) and the celebration in the city is, literally, insane. In the best possible way.
The game ended in the open air plaza where I was watching with hundreds of other people, most of whom were dressed with German flags wrapped around themselves and with German flags painted on their faces.

This <--- is what the plaza looked like after Germany scored its goal. The arm in the picture is a man in a German flag waving a 2nd german flag and started some chants :) Fantastic. Everyone jumped up and was cheering like crazy, blowing their noise makers, high fiving, and screaming at the top of their lungs. Good things goals don't happen too often ha ha On my way to the Bus station to catch the bus back to my dorm, I cross a road the runs right along the area where the buses pick up and runs through the center of the city. This road was backed up beyond belief and police were standing everywhere, ready to break apart a riot or something. There were people all over in the roads, probably drunk, celebrating that Germany has won and moved on. These boys were making a canopy of German flag that cars had to drive under/through, it was hilarious. Most cars were pretty cool about it too, and the police officer who was standing about ten feet away.

As I was standing at the bus station, I had about ten to fifteen minutes to wait for the next bus, I was watching all the literally hundreds of people walking by to their trains or buses or next bar and not a single one wasn't wearing either black, red, gold, a german flag, a german colors flower necklace, or had a german flag painted on their faces (or other body parts). It's incredible how patriotic the Germans are when they're allowed to be. The World Cup gives them the chance to be proud of their country and to showcase that pride. Back to the bus station though: this road that runs right by the station was FULL of people, not kidding at all the street was literally almost invisible and the cars looked out of place. The people were standing and cheering as the cars drove by, innocently enough. When a car happened to be enthused though, the crowd became ridiculous. They would shake the car, cheer even louder, chant German soccer songs in the street, the car would honk its horn, people would be hanging out of the windows or sun roofs and screaming. Insane.



This is the amount of people lining the street. You can sort of see them shaking a car behind the bench also. Poor people in the car ha ha













This is all the people lining the street. Incredible...









The bus finally arrived and I got on. About 3 stops later, the bus was stuck at a stand still in traffic because of all the celebrating, so I got out and walked home the rest of the 20 minutes from there. As I walked down Bertha-von-Suttner Platz, a busy area where the street cars and buses have multiple stops outside the Beethoven house, the atmosphere was incredibly infectious. I found myself smiling non-stop and cheering along with the crowds. As I got to the end of the road, I noticed people were all looking behind me at something so I turned around. There was a man climbing on top of a bus stop shell to jump on the top of the halted bus, to start shaking it... all while cheering madly and being egged on by thousands of people around him in the street. The people inside the bus looked terrified but it was amazing to see. I kept walking and was honked at by many many cars and started cheering each time. (to the right is a pretty awful picture... thanks night time... of the incredibly crowded road on the way back, the street where the man was on the bus) On the way back, I encountered two German boys and I asked them if they had been here in 2006 (when Germany hosted the cup and took 3rd) and if it was always like this. They said it's always like this when Germany wins... so I can't wait for more wins and celebrations :)
It's now shortly after midnight and the game ended about two hours ago. I still here the sound of car horns and cheering out the window, less with each passing minute but they're still there.
I find it incredible the way the Germans channel their patriotism into the outlet of football and how deep their passion for their country runs. When it surfaces, it's phenomenal to witness. I doubt I'll ever see a frenzy like this in America, even Badger game days don't compare. There's something special about the world cup.
I hope I get a chance to see a game in Cologne and witness the insanity in an even bigger city.
Let's go, Deutschland! '54, '74, '90, 2010!!!!!

bee tee dubbs

Classes are going well, halfway through and I need to start thinking about the papers I'm going to be writing... ew. What's homework again? ha ha the course load is ridiculously simple compared to Madison. Great semester to have senioritis! ha ha
I won't be traveling for two weeks or so until June 25th when I'm headed to Portugal (Faro) for a long weekend with friends, should be amazing. I'm nervous because it'll be my first trip to a country where I can't speak the language... yea...
Then I need to decide where I want to travel the last week of July/first week of August while Lissi is on vacation and before I leave for the states again... God, less than two months... :( Don't want to think about that.

After being gone for two weeks, the kids were really excited to have me back on Tuesday. Some were being really naughty but others bombarded me with little hugs :) Made me feel really great that they missed me. I taught them Kickball yesterday which was so fun but hard because they don't understand baseball so I had nothing to base it off of. At first they didn't understand the idea of staying in the baseline, of having to touch each base and not just run a giant circle, of having to tag someone out and not throw the ball at the runner, of not skipping over a runner ahead of you because they're going too slowly ha ha It was great :) They thought it was complicated but they did a good job. Frau Schumacher also thought it was good practice for both me and the kids to give and understand instructions in a foreign language/by a non-native (ish) speaker... It's awkward saying things like "if you catch the ball in the air, the kicker is out"... Who has a vocabulary made for that? ha ha. Answer: not really me. I managed though :) I'm definitely getting attached to the kids and developing individual connections with many of them. I'm going to miss them... They're so incredible. About ten of them are from another country or have parents who are and are learning a 3rd language (beside German and English in school) already. It's amazing. I like having discussions with them about what America is like and how it's different and just spending time with them during the work times. They invited me on their field trip in July too so that will be fun.

Microwave update: it still sparks sometimes when it heats things up. I find this very dangerous, everyone else finds it normal and doesn't care enough to replace it. Fantastic: I may die in a mircowave fire.

Otherwise, life is good. The weather is starting to get nicer and I spent today wandering in the Drachenfels hills in Konigswinter to see a castle and some ruins.. then headed to the Birkenstock outlet for some 50% off sandals (yep, suck it :-p). First pair of legit sandals... we'll see how I like them.

Now it's time to catch up on sleep again.
miss and love you all
d

Hamburg: long overdue

I've been gone for the last nearly 3 weeks traveling and didn't have time to update the blog at all, sorry! This post is about the long weekend in Hamburg at the beginning of May and in the next few days I hope to write about the week in Paris and week in Berlin. Here goes: :)
I decided on Monday around 8:00 PM with Alyssa, while we were waiting for Aerobic Bodywork to start, that since we had Thursday off class and we have no class on Fridays that we should go to Hamburg for the long weekend. Why not? Couldn't think of a good reason since getting there cost less than 50 Euro ($70)... it did involve 5 different trains though ha ha
We traveled with Ben, a guy I know from Madison, and met up with Ben's cousin in Hamburg because he recently moved there. Ben's cousin met us at the train station, helped us buy our local train ticket pass for the next few days, took us on a short walk around a cute lake in Hamburg. Not much was open due to the holiday and it was "Father's Day" which in Germany means men get together and drink... without their families? A bit backwards ha ha. We headed to our first hostel shortly thereafter. Since we got our train tickets on Tuesday, we had to book a hostel on Wednesday for the following day. I didn't think this would be a problem considering it's Hamburg and not, say, Paris... false. There was something going on in Hamburg that weekend so I had to make about 20 calls to different hostels and finally found some decently priced ones. The first was a sort of hotel and was really nice. The second ended up being an international youth hostel association member so it was REALLY nice with a great breakfast spread ha ha. They were both located a short ways from the city center so lots of trains happened but it wasn't bad at all. I would definitely recommend both places without hesitation. That's a picture of the City Hall in Hamburg which is huge! It's important because it's the city-state's capitol and therefore city-state city hall also.
After settling into the hostel we decided to go wandering. We found some interesting places and then out of no where a red line... it looked promising. We decided to follow it and were led through a cute quarter of the city.
We found some interesting things like an Otto Von Bismarck monument, the Reeperbahn aka red light district of Hamburg and the best area to go out at night, an interesting restaurant for dinner where I had an awful Hamburger... sad face, but Ben had a great "lady steak" ha ha that's what they called the smaller steak. We were pretty beat from traveling and had a big day ahead of us so we didn't go out, just got some much needed sleep since the journey begin around 5 AM that day.
The next morning started early since we had to move our things from the first hostel to the second, on the opposite end of the city, before we had a walking tour at 11 AM. Our tour was extremely informative and made me realize a lot about Hamburg. I didn't realize the city had such a history and culture to it... I hadn't traveled much around Germany before this semester so I didn't know what to expect. It's a big city with a lot of history from WWII because it was bombed heavily and experienced a Great Fire in 1842 which allowed the city to rebuild itself in a way most European cities don't have the opportunity to. They have a lot of memorials for the war too, which is something I like about Germany.
An interesting part of the tour was seeing the opera house that's being built on the harbor, it's supposed to be as iconic as the Sydney opera house when it's finished. It looks like an iceberg in a way. It's supposed to be a wave on top of a warehouse building (there's a large warehouse district where the opera house is being built)... google a picture, it looks incredible.After the tour we went back to a memorial at the St Nikolai Church for WWII. The church was bombed to piece but the tower was reconstructed and memorials constructed where the church stood. It was bombed during the biggest air raid of WWII which destroyed a large portion of the city and left thousands of people homeless.
This is where the church's frame stood. There are memorials to victims of concentration camps, the entrance for the church archive through the mini pyramid, and other statues.
There was also a peaceful and asian inspired garden next to the tower... I liked it a lot.


This is the tower that still stands, we went up it and looked at all the pictures of what the city looked like after the bombings and how badly the church was burned down. It was incredible... it never ceases to amaze me how awful people can be and the kinds of things we do it war.

After the memorial, we headed to the hostel to check in and set up our rooms, took a short nap because we were exhausted, had some dinner and headed to a wax museum called the Panoptikum on the Reeperbahn before we went out. The Panoptikum is no Madame Tussau's but they definitely had some interesting figures. We got yelled at for sitting on a stone wall that was apparently also made out of wax ha ha but we got some interesting pictures with some 'famous people'. I have them all detailed in the Facebook album but here are some favorites:

The two Benedicts ha ha



The creepy Hilter wax figure that was made in like 1941... yea...


Apparently Harry Potter is famous enough to be a wax figure? ha ha

This is us being Beatles Groupies :)
After the museum we headed out on a Pub Crawl, where you pay 10 euro or so and get to be taken to 5 different bars and clubs and given drinks/drink specials, it's a good deal usually. We had a lot of fun, met some interesting people from England (a whole bachelor party) and some from places like New Zealand, Australian, North Dakota ha ha

The following day was spent at an interesting art exhibit (let's just say it was more sexually charged than we expected... because we apparently walked into the wrong art building and weren't at the photography exhibit like we thought). We also walked around HafenCity, the warehouse area, with Ben's cousin. We later in the evening went to Miniatur Wonderland, lots of models of things built in an intricate and amazing way (for pictures see the facebook album). We ended the night with dinner at 11 PM at an "american restaurant" and out at a disco with some of the guys from the night before.

Unfortunately we didn't have nice weather until the last day when we had only a few hours to enjoy it before taking the train back to Bonn. I really enjoyed Hamburg and had a rough week following it because we pulled two all-nighters and got little to no sleep for three days. There was so much to do and we were having such a great time that sleep just didn't matter. I'm really glad I went... before going, it didn't sound as exotic as some other places people were headed to for the long weekend but I had an amazing time with Alyssa and Ben, really enjoyed the city itself, and felt like I learned a lot about a city that plays an important role in Germany's history. I would recommend traveling there to anyone :) So many things to see and do for all types of travelers.

Alright: Paris and Berlin updates coming soon! Promise!

Post Modern Colonialization

Volunteering at the Elementary School has easily become one of my favorite, though most tiring, parts of the week and this week was especially fun because I was able to bring in some American candy for the kids to try.

They tried smarties which they thought were good but sour, tootsie rolls which they thought tasted like caramel more than chocolate ha ha, candy buttons which they loved but kept trying to get every bit of paper off the back of it, and some old time wafer things that one girl claimed smelled like smoke after you licked it ha ha









Frau Schumacher played a game with them after we handed out the candy and the winner got extra pieces so they liked that. This was called Jaeger/Hase or Hunter/Rabbit. When she said Rabbit, they ducked and Hunter, they jumped up. She would try to confuse them and any movement if you were supposed to stay down, like for more than one Rabbit in a row, resulted in disqualification! Intense...








They are cute little monsters though... :)

Lucas was a mess that day, he had chocolate on his face and ink on his nose ha ha :) But they had a math test that morning and I sat next to him to keep him focused, didn't tell him the answers though, and he did really well. He's smart, he just needs to focus... He apparently asks Frau Schumacher everyday now "Kommt die Debby heute?" "Is Debby coming today?" :) That made my day when she told me.



This is a group of children hyped up on foreign candy... good thing they had recess next ha ha :)




Felix was telling me how he knows the word for Frieden, Peace, in English and was giving the peace sign :) I couldn't help but laugh.

I know Frau Schumacher enjoys having the help and it has really become the most rewarding part of my experience here... it's definitely making me realize I would miss teaching and the classroom setting in my life, I want to pursue it back in Milwaukee.




Well that's all for now, I'm headed to Hamburg eeeeearly tomorrow morning for the long weekend with Alyssa, Ben, Kent, and Cassandra. Should be exciting, I've never been to Northern Germany :) I'll post on Monday for sure.
miss and love
d

Reflecting

For some reason, a strange mood has hit me and I've decided to reflect on a lot of things in a blog post... Maybe it'll help to get it all out in to words and I don't have a journal here with me, sadly. I should probably buy one.
Regardless, here goes.

This mood started a short while ago as I was looking at my old roommate's profile on facebook... it feels like forever ago that I was sharing a room with her but it was only a few months and just last semester. For some reason, the memories I have of that last apartment and semester are imprinted differently than previous years. It feels like a waking dream almost. It's as if I woke up from a really long dream and remember flashes of it, but no details. I can't recall what Meg and I talked about when we were going to sleep... but I do remember the sounds outside my window, like a comforting lullaby, comforting only because of its familiarity. I remember standing in front of the balcony door in the middle of the night, having gotten up for some reason, and without turning the lights on just watching the wind move the trees and the snow come down during the storm, but I can't tell you what side of the door the handle was on. It's all a vague blur for some reason, which is startling because I was trying so hard to remember every detail as it happened because I knew it was my last semester.
Then I started to think about how this, this semester in Bonn, is my final semester. I saw a picture of Madison earlier on newsfeed and it made me miss being there in the Spring semester very badly. I think the pain, the missing, isn't coming from literally wanting to be there right now... it's more like I'm trying to begin to part with that era of my life and realizing it did go by just as quickly as everyone said it would... and that I didn't listen. I didn't do enough, didn't take enough chances, didn't live enough adventures. I have great memories but, like most people, I wish I knew then what I know now... to stop worrying about the little things and maybe stay out later with friends instead of studying for a pop quiz.
I think I took things like spending the last semester on campus or walking at graduation with a grain of salt and I shouldn't have because I would have liked, very much, a picture of me in a cap and gown on Bascom Hill and, sadly, I will never have that. Conversely though, I want to preserve the memory of my Grandfather at Jenny's graduation and hope he would have looked as happy if he would have made it to mine. That was one of the last times I saw him and I don't think I could make it through a day that reminded me that much of him without being sad.

Maybe this is all coming from a place of fear too because now I need to "grow up", not that I haven't in the process of the last 5 years, and find a job, find a life... build a life rather. Scary. Where do I even start?
Maybe with finishing my homework and going to bed...

Spring is finally coming!

It seems the weather in Germany has decided to come late this year but spring is finally here. This weekend was beautiful and I had time to lay out in the sun on the Hofgarten (a giant lawn in front of the castle where my classes are) and to explore Dusseldorf with some friends on Saturday. I went with Katelynn and Mandy, the two girls from Louisiana, Zach (who I went to the UK with), Suzanne and Uliana, both girls from Madison. We explored the city, went to an aquatic zoo, and saw Konigsallee which is a really pretty boulevard to walk up and down. It was a perfect day so even I had ice cream. Mandy and I headed back pretty early, around 5 PM, to get to H&M and shop a little for the 80s party we were going to that night. I finally found some shorts that fit :) yay. They are plaid though so I can't wear them with everything. I also found some tank tops... which are striped. I have an unnatural obsession with stripes ha ha it's like the indecisive person's wardrobe solution though: can't decide what color to wear today? wear two at once! problem solved.

Sanja, my buddy, invited us to her friend Jacky's place to have some drinks before the 80s party at a bar. It was definitely fun to hang out with everyone and the weather held out so it wasn't freezing to wander around in. Didn't make it to the 80s part of the night though, I got tired around midnight and headed home around 1 130ish? The Germans start their nights later since they don't have a bar close and I'm still not used to that.

Today is 2 months that I've been here! Incredible... Time really is flying now. In 3 months and 10 days (I just counted quickly) I'll be heading home. I did plan my next trip though! In May for the Pentecost Break, Mandy and I are headed to Paris from the 22-27. This is the closest thing I have to a life long dream and I am beyond excited. I can't wait to see the Eifel Tower and the other buildings that make up the iconic skyline of Paris... It will be fantastic. The week after that I'll be headed to Berlin with the Junior Year Program. After that I need to take my finances into account and figure out if I can travel anymore. If I can, I want to make it to Poland for a weekend to see the concentration camp at Auschwitz... That's something that won't be a fun trip but it will be impacting and memorable. I also would love to see Italy or Greece, maybe head back to Amsterdam again for a night or two.
Maybe I can travel with Jenny if she makes it here this summer :)

Well now I should go do some homework... It's hard getting back in to the swing of things with school after being off for so long and not really having any assignments but it's nice having a routine again. I really am happy I came and I'm enjoying my time here, I know I'll be sad when I have to leave but at least I, unlike most of the people on the program, have the opportunity to live here again in life if I so choose... :)
love you all
xo
d

New Favorite Quote from class reading

"Oh, Edith, this is our golden time! Tarnish it not by any pensive shadow of the mind; for it may be, that nothing of futurity will be brighter than the mere remembrance of what is now passing."
Nathaniel Hawthorne "The May-Pole of Merry Mount"

Simultaneously brings to mind the notion of carpe diem and to love each moment as if it were your last while cynically assuming the future is probably downhill from moments of euphoric joy. I'm not sure which reading I want to win out... the poetic cynic in me likes having them both there.

One week down and a weekend in the Netherlands

Well, one week of school down :) exciting. I like all my classes so far though I may not keep them all for credit since I don't need them. The DSH (german language exam for university level study aka if i want to come back for my masters, i need to take this) prep course is going to be challenging but I'm looking forward to it. I really enjoy hearing the Germans speak in their english with their cute accents ha ha I knew they'd speak english in the literature classes but it didn't totally hit me until they opened their mouths. Makes it more fun for me :)

This weekend I was able to go visit Jenny in Utrecht before she moved out and it was a lot of fun. The trains there took about 6 hours, between transfers and everything, but I really enjoy the trains here. They're comfortable, I don't get motion sick on them (imagine that), and it's nice to zone out with my ipod in and watch the countryside pass by. On Friday when I got there we walked around Utrecht and saw the inner city. It's a beautiful place that looks like a mini Amsterdam because it has canals and buildings in a similar layout. The words in dutch everywhere are hilarious because they have extra vowels inserted in the words. If you understand German, it becomes even funnier because it almost seems like someone trying to speak German and failing. The amount of bikes in the city is also nearly unfathomable. To cross the street, you have to play frogger: get through the pedestrians, then watch out for bikes, the the traffic in each direction, and the bikes and people again! There's just so many... I almost got squished. We made dinner afterwards with Anoek, Jenny's awesome and tall dutch roommate. I made hamburgers!! With hamburger buns! Haven't had that in months and it makes me miss the beginning of my dad's grilling season, and baseball...
Saturday we had a picnic in the park on a beautiful sunny day and headed to Amsterdam for the afternoon. We walked around, saw a few interesting things took some awesome pictures, but didn't have enough time to go and do things. I might make it back to Amsterdam before the states to see the Anne Frank house or Red Light district but if I don't, at least I saw the beautiful canals and got to travel with Jenny a little. We went with Anoek to her hometown of Appledorn in the evening for her friend's birthday party and to the #1 Gay Club in the Netherlands until 4 AM; had a great time dancing :) Sunday I headed back to Bonn and ran into one of the girls from China in my class at the Train Station in Oberhausen. Turns out she'd been in the Netherlands all weekend too and rode her first bike- a tandem bike through flower fields. How awesome for her :)

This week I start a volunteering project at an elementary school in the Bonn area and work my way through homework for the first time in months. Hope you all have a great week :)
<3
d

Tomorrow is the first day of school!!

So, the day has finally arrived: tomorrow is my first day of school. I plan to wake up early, eat a good breakfast, go running, probably shower after that, run some errands, and go to class at 4 PM... Sort of annoying that class isn't until 4 but that's the way it works. I seem to have a very light course load, only four classes. I have one class for 2 or 3 hours each day, Monday through Thursday (Fridays are free except for a spin class I signed up for :-D). I'll be taking 9 hours worth of class, when they tell us to sign up for 12-18 hours... so I assume an hour transfers as a credit? Seems like it... and with the orientations course, adding another 3 credits, I'll be at 12 and a full time student. Wonderful... should be a nice, easy last semester. The only part that worries me about credits is my English credits... I need 4 credits between two classes to graduate with the requirements for the major and I'll be taking 3 classes for 6 hours worth of English, so I assume I'm covered but my advisor hasn't emailed me back. Awesome... hope it works out :-/

I'm excited to finally meet some new people tomorrow :) I've met some awesome people through out the orientations course, but I love meeting new people. There's something intoxicating about the potential of a new encounter that I find horribly intriguing. I think sometimes I (unfortunately) get bored with people after this wears off, not because they are uninteresting people but because I'm looking for the next intoxication, momentary high if you will, of potential and newness in a relationship. I think this is one instance where I wear rose colored glasses to view the world and set aside my cynicism: I can't wait to meet my classmates tomorrow :)

I'm also excited to meet my professors and see how the relationship here will differ with them. I'm the student who stays after to chat about interesting points in the reading with my professor, I'm the student who will walk 20 minutes out of my way if the professor and I are having a great conversation just so I can walk them where they're going and continue the conversation... I'm also the student who cries when the semester ends because I've become attached to the class (which sometimes prompts the professor to hug me out of pity, maybe sympathy). I hope my professors offer an inkling of the personal attention the professors at Madison offered and I assume they will since the classes I'm taking are upper level and smaller sizes. I'm also excited to be able to offer the English classes, especially American literature classes, an American and native English speaker's perspective on things.

Well, it's almost 11:30 so I should get to bed and be ready for the big day tomorrow :) I'll try to update tomorrow evening.
love you all
d

ps thought I'd leave you with one of my favorite pictures from Scotland: Gwen, Katelynn, Zach and I had just finished a 45 minute climb to the top of a mountain for a gorgeous scenic view of the Scottish landscape. We could see out to sea, the mountains in the opposite direction, all the buildings we saw on the tour earlier that morning, and the sun was shining through the clouds in the beautiful way that makes you hold your breath and almost forget that you aren't looking at a painting. It was a perfect moment and we were elated to experience it, so we captured that happiness in the "jump shot" :) It's a moment I'll never forget.

a stiff drink, to be shit faced drunk, and the graveyard shift

You must be thinking "what an interesting, albeit slightly inappropriate, title for a blog post, Debby. I wonder what this is about." Don't worry baby birds, I'll feed you.
This post is dedicated to three of the most interesting word origins I learned about on the trip to London and Edinburgh. The first happened in London while in Trafalgar Square, the place where people in London gather whenever anything important happens. This is also the square that at one point had 35,000 pigeons so now the birds are fed contraceptives in their feed...
Our tour guide, Coops, took us to the square and told us about Admiral Nelson, a fierce man who lost an arm and an eye in battle and lead the British fleet to many victories. During one such victory, he was fatally wounded and didn't make it through the fight. Being that he was a war hero, and not a common sailor, he was not given a burial at sea but taken back to England for a war hero's reception and burial. To preserve the body during the weeks of the homeward voyage, the body was folded in half and shoved into a barrel, then the barrel was filled with brandy. Strange, but effective. When they arrived at port and opened the barrel, it was found that the brandy was gone! The people were dumbfounded; how could a corpse drink all the brandy? Or maybe he absorbed it all... they were stumped until they took the body out and noticed the holes in the barrel. Sailors had been drilling small holes in the barrel and drinking the brandy, perhaps after a rough day on the boat, the entire time. So the origin of a drink to help people unwind after work, a stiff drink, comes from the stiff lifeless body that the brandy was preserving... disgusting, yet hilarious.

Secondly, we learned many things in Edinburgh about the dead and Scotland's awkward relationship with them. Edinburgh is a small place and for a while it was walled in, so land was precious. When the graveyard filled up with people buried at 6 feet deep, the were buried at 4. When that filled up, they were covered in a shroud and buried at 2 feet deep. When it rained, which it tends to do in Scotland, the top soil would wash away and so would some bones... Years later, when space needed to be made for other things, such as parking lots, the graveyards were relocated. Upon doing this, many coffins were opened and approximately 20% of these had scratch marks on the inside of the coffin... 1/5 of the people in the graveyard were buried alive because of poor medical science and the ability to tell if someone was unconscious or really dead. After this was discovered, for a while they tied strings attached to bells outside the graves to the person's fingers so if they woke up, they could be unearthed. Crazy... Now, once people were buried, it wasn't the end of things. Once you were dead, your body belonged to no one. As long as it was stripped of any possessions, it wasn't stealing, so body snatchers would dig up fresh graves (less than 2 weeks old) and sell the bodies to medical universities for a considerable amount of money. The first serial killers we learned of made a killing (pun intended) doing this. They would get people drunk, bring them back to their place, and then suffocate them in a way that it wasn't detectable that there was foul play. They were eventually caught when they did this during the day and left the body in a pile of kindling to come back for at night and it was discovered by someone. They killed between 17 and 35 people this way (large range since they couldn't detect foul play...). In order to protect your family and friends once they died, people would sit on their graves during the night for the first two weeks; this was called the graveyard shift.
Another great story we heard about grave robbing was about a woman who passed away, was buried, dug up the same night by some grave robbers, and they were intending to sell her body. Now, as I mentioned, the body couldn't have anything on it, or it was considered stealing and the fine was much higher than for just selling a body. Mary's, this woman, fingers were covered in rings and the fingers had swollen so much, that the robbers couldn't get them off no matter what they tried, be it spit, oil, brute force. Eventually, one realized that they didn't need extremities at the medical college and started to cut her fingers off one by one. He cut through one, took the ring off, and threw away the finger. Cut through the next one, no problem. Started to cut the third finger, and Mary woke up screaming at the top of her lungs. Apparently she was just in a coma and the agonizing pain of having her fingers sawed off one by one woke her from it. Wouldn't that be a fantastic wake up? Not so much...

The last word origin we learned in Edinburgh was what it means to be shit faced drunk. The buildings in Edinburgh are built very closely together and many of them are over 5 or 6 stories tall, this left for small alleyways between the buildings, some of which never saw daylight at the bottom. In these alleys, people would yell out the window and then dump their bed chamber pots out; the remains would then be washed to the lake with the next rainfall. To avoid dumping these on people constantly, it was mandated that pots be emptied twice a day, at 7 am and 10 PM. Around the corner from these alleys were the bars where men would gather after work to drink. In these days, wine and beer were more safe to consume than water, which was extremely contaminated (wonder why... waste running into the main source, perhaps?) so men would drink lots of it. At ten pm, when bars closed, they would walk home through these dark alleys and when they heard shouts from above them, they would look up... and get covered in shit because they were too drunk to get out of the way or avoid the alley at that time. Hilarious :) I never knew this phrase had an origin, but I love it.

Hope you all enjoyed this post as much as I did :)
d

First Day of School Eve Weekend

Hey Everyone :) I know it's been a while since I updated, but not much was going on... despite that, I never found time to write. So maybe a lot was going on...? Regardless, the last four weeks of my life were full of the orientations course (in which I received an A, woo!), some field trips to cities near Bonn and photos can be seen on my facebook profile, and exploring the city of Bonn while making some new friends. We finally start classes this coming week, a little later than American colleges... but I'm looking forward to it. I'll be taking a DSH prep course. The DSH is apparently a language test that foreigners need to take in order to study at a German University so if I take this test and pass it, I can come back to study at a German University again no problem. Or just put it on my resume... I'll also be taking four or so English classes at the University, ranging from the American short story to old and middle english incantations :) I'm excited to see the German perspective of the American literature, should be neat. To complete my weeks, I'm also signed up for an indoor cycling class and to volunteer at an elementary school one morning a week for four hours. Should be fantastic :)

We had a short break over Easter of about 6 days so I took a trip with some friends here to London and Edinburgh. We left Friday night and got to London around 9 PM, stayed in a hostel, and explored the city the next day. We did a tour around the important buildings and I enjoyed it a lot, learned a lot about the city, its lay out, and lots of buildings I would have over looked on my own. We also did a pub crawl through an organized company and got to see some of London's pubs, also pretty cool. I really enjoyed the Tube (the subway in London). It's so efficient and awesome... Also, very punctual. Then on Sunday we flew to Glasgow and took a bus across Scotland to Edinburgh. The countryside is so beautiful and green, it's hardly believable. Edinburgh is home to the castle that William Wallace (Braveheart... Mel Gibson) defended. It's also the most haunted city in Europe, or so they claim, so we did a free tour during the day and a ghost tour at night. All the stories about the city were incredible, including seeing the building where JK Rowling wrote the first two Harry Potter stories and the building that possibly inspired Hogwarts. One the tours we learned the origins of the phrases: a stiff drink, to be shit faced drunk, and the graveyard shift. I don't have time to post those today but I promise I will tomorrow since they're super interesting :)

Today I went to the Netherlands with some friends, so that's one more place to cross off the list :-D Going to visit Jenny next weekend hopefully.
miss and love you all
debby

People Watching

The first weekend is coming to a close and I've enjoyed it, though it's been leisurely. I spent Saturday running errands with Mandy and napping until I headed over to Lissi's for the night. I find it so awesome that I can just hop on a train and be there :) I don't have to plan for months ahead of time and buy a plane ticket, I can just decide to go and then take the bus, a short train ride, and walk to her door. Going there will probably be one of my favorite parts of this trip. When I got there, she had mini personal lasagnas made too, super awesome. Mine had little cheese on it and only one kind of cheese. Probably the first time in my life I've enjoyed lasagna, it was delicious. Watched "Where the Wild Things Are" in German, interesting... really cute movie though. Then hung out with Jonas and his friends as they played a poker tournament. I didn't want to pay the 3E entrance and they were half way through by the time I joined so I watched this time around.

Today we went to the Trudel Markt, a giant flee market with all sorts of useful and mostly useless things that one can barter for. I made off with a scarf and belt (since my pants are becoming loose) for 7,50E ($10). Not a bad deal. It was fun to walk around and look at things, see my facebook album for pictures. Lissi and Alfred let me take an entire kitchen's worth of stuff (awesome) back to the dorm so I can now cook :) Eating out isn't that expensive though when I do it with Mandy because we tend to split entrees. She doesn't eat much and I get bored eating only one thing so it totally works out and saves us both money ha ha. Like tonight: ordered a pizza that was 26 cm, 8 small slices. I ordered a salad also so I only ate two slices and saved two, Mandy got the other four. The pizza was 5E total so 2,50 each and for two meals, that's about as cheap as it gets. Awesome. We rock. Now I'm headed out to meet Gwen and others, should be the first time I'm wearing heels anywhere here :)

One of my favorite things about Germany is the public transportation and in general one of my favorite past times is people watching. Public transportation provides an endless stream of strangers to observe and make up stories about so I love taking the train. On the way to Lissi's yesterday I encountered a man on the 16 who was carrying a bouquet of flowers and was traveling alone. This man appeared older, possibly in his early 70's, about the age of retirement. I started to daydream about where he was going and who the flowers were for... Maybe he's a widower and he's off to visit his wife's grave. Maybe he's visiting his daughter for a Saturday evening dinner. Maybe he's recently retired and has been getting in his wife's way just sitting around the house, so he decided to go out for a stroll and is returning home for dinner with some flowers to say he's sorry but he loves her. Maybe he's brought her flowers every Saturday and it's become something lovely that she expects, a bright spot in her weekend, some springtime in her winter each week. I imagine he kisses her on the cheek as she takes them to put in the pot and then hugs her from behind, wrapping his arms around her waist as he's done for probably fifty years.
I hope he's gotten them to celebrate something.
One can only imagine...

One can also only hope that this man is happy. That everyone's story is a happy one. Though some are not.

The first week

I'm sure you're all wondering why I haven't posted and are anxiously awaiting hearing about my week. Well, I had a wonderful 3 day headache trying to get access to the internet and finally fixed it about 30 hours ago. Thank god, my room felt small and empty without internet connection... Oh what technology has done to me. After problems with the room number and then the network server, along with finally my computer needing to download and extra program since it's running an older version of XP, it was a huge nightmare. I'm still annoyed at the extremely closed network which isn't allowing me to purchase skype credit to call friends back home. I had to go to the cafe next door and use their 1 euro cent/minute computer to do it... fun stuff.

So this week was a long one but now it's the weekend. Things have finally settled a bit, into a routine of sorts. The public transportation is fantastic here; multiple buses pick up a half block from my dorm and bring me directly to the university main building. They come every ten minutes, without fail, and drive quickly and efficiently.
Tuesday, arrival day, I moved in after Lydia and Jonas brought me to the city. At first, I had no idea what to do with my time since there was nothing planned for the entire day besides moving in. I went exploring to find a grocery store, bought some things to make sandwiches and snack foods, and got settled in my dorm. Unfortunately, it was extremely dusty and dirty and I was told to clean it up myself... with an ancient vacuum that spit out more than it picked up.
Yea, looks fun, huh? So I cleaned a bit. Went out to dinner with more students from Madison and the entire international program here. My Bonn Buddy, Sanja, also came. She's very sweet, about my size, and we have similar taste in a lot of things like music, literature, bad television... I think we'll be great friends throughout this semester. Dinner was alright, Mexican food, and the service was... well, up to German standards. Going out to dinner here is an event because it takes a long time anywhere for the server to notice you, since they aren't making tips and have no incentive, and when you ask for something... like a refill (which you have to pay for) or condiments, don't except them any sooner than 5 minutes from then. I wasn't in the world's best mood at dinner because I was already feeling extremely homesick. After Lydia and Jonas left me, and I was left with nothing to do really, it felt like being away at college for the first time again. I didn't know what to do with my time. I felt very alone... I kept trying to tell myself that things would get better within the next few days but all I could feel was a gaping hole somewhere inside me, like everything I loved was missing and was going to stay out of reach for a long, long time. It's a painful and lonely feeling.
Wednesday was the Orientation day, which was spent watching a slideshow presentation that was presented in English and German and thus took two times as long as it should have, and then we were taken on a walking tour of the campus, though my group only saw the library really, and ate lunch at the Mensa (student cafeteria).
(The slide to the right is from the Orientation. It says: "German beer: *is probably the best in the world *contains a lot of alcohol". yep)
That afternoon, while still trying frantically to connect to the internet, I encountered a red haired american looking girl wearing both Uggs, a northface hoodie, and then an American Eagle sweatshirt underneath. She seemed lost and confused, so I offered her help. Her name is Mandy, she's from Louisiana, was also born here in Germany and moved away as a child, but she didn't have the benefit of a great college German program so her German speaking abilities are underdeveloped. Or so she thinks, I think she's doing just fine. She reminds me of Julia Roberts, both in appearance and in her voice, possibly the slight southern accent. It's cute. We started to hang out after she let me use her internet, seeing as I still didn't have any, and realized how lonely and homesick we both were. We've basically been inseparable since Wednesday afternoon and everyone else we hang out with seems to assume we've known each other for much longer. I think we're going to be great friends through out the whole semester and probably after... she's very low drama and the same sort of girl I fancy myself to be.
Thursday morning was the German placement test. Cue the dramatic music! We had an hour long test, consisting of six parts, which tested our ability to hear German, to pose questions, vocabulary, prepositions, article endings and cases, and a comprehension section where we filled in missing things in a paragraph. It was definitely interesting and I felt like I did pretty well on it leaving the test. Mandy and I then went to run errands, like registering for the City. They took my German passport and crossed out "brookfield, Wi USA" and stamped "Bonn" over it. Pretty hardcore... We also opened a bank account for her and took care of Lease contracts at the Studentenwerk Building. I continued to try to fix my internet there...
Thursday night we went to Sanja's house to watch the premiere of Germany's Next Top Model, which Heidi Klum hosts, and enjoyed a feast of German junk food. It was strange to hear Heidi speak in German and not in English with her cute accent... she was somehow less charming this way. Sanja claims if you listen closely, you can tell by Heidi's syntax that she is losing her German speaking abilities in lieu of her America lifestyle. Interesting...
Friday we received the results of the placement test. We sat in a room, all ~110 students, and were told to listen for our names. 11 teachers, forming 11 groups, called off their students. Slowly the Asians were called off... then american students... no one from Madison until group 6 or so... then I looked around and realized there were maybe 20 people left and I started to think I had done really well on this test. Then Mandy's name was called for group 10... and only 11 of us remained. We were the cream of the crop. 3 of us from Madison, 4 of us having German roots in the group, and 3 girls from China who have only studied German for 2 years apparently. I placed in the top group... wow. I couldn't stop smiling. It feels nice to have something acknowledge my German skill level I suppose, besides people telling me "aber du sprechst doch gut deutsch!"
We had a couple hours of introducing one another and getting to know the teacher, and picking a German workshop in the afternoon. I chose two: grammar for the upper level and modern short prose works. We'll see how interesting they are... There's another test on April 1st which should be difficult but hopefully I'm well prepared. I'm excited to have some sort of structure now, to be starting classes after 2 or 3 months of not being in class. Actual classes will start in April and that will also prove interesting I'm sure.
Last night we had a welcome kick off party with a free chinese buffet and some free beer and soda. It was an enjoyable time and I've been getting to know a lot of students from all over the States, China, and Germany. I'm excited to build these friendships and branch out from the people from Madison, though they are also pretty cool :)

Now we're off to buy Mandy a cell phone since we can't unlock the main doors to each others floors and we feel pretty ridiculous skyping together in the same building... or awesome. I mean whatever you want to call it. I definitely still miss home, miss my friends, my boyfriend? whatever you want to call him... not sure if he's reading this ha ha but things are getting better. I feel like I'm going to like the city, like five months will go by quickly, and like I will enjoy this experience. I'm starting to think in German too so my next post might not be intelligible...

Der Jersey Hills

One thing I credit american television with founding is the phenomenon known as reality television. Starting with MTVs the real world, nearly 25 seasons of television ago, the art of reality television grew to the heights of The Hills and Jersey Shore in a few short years. These shows, some artfully flimmed and others crudely captured, offer a 'real' look at the lives of controversial groups of young, usually rich, and beautiful people in America. Thankfully, this art form has thrived to the point of export all over the world... including Germany. While the drunken one night stand sort of antics reign supreme on MTV, VH1, and the likes, Germans prefer to show something more meaningful such as cultural clashes between immigrants and natives, and what it actually means to be a native or an immigrant.
This new found guilty pleasure is titled 'Its My Life' (not a translation, is just given as such on German TV) and is a reality show, filmed in a style that seems amateurish when compared to the Hills. The camera angles don't pan back and forth between characters, there are no close ups, it's more like it was filmed with only one camera man and no set up of the scene was given beforehand. Real reality in a way. Annoyingly real, as almost nothing goes on.
The characters of this show are 5 girls, all related as cousins, and all teenagers. They come from Turkish families, a large immigrant community within Germany. The Turkish people have been here so long though, 2 or more generations (after WWII), that the children are born here and raised as Germans. They retain a strong connection to their cultural roots, however, they feel like Auslaender (people from other lands) both in Germany where they live and in Turkey where they visit remaining family. They speak about the trials of belonging to two worlds, having a boyfriend with whom they can't go on dates with until they are engaged (um... what happens if the first date then goes badly?), about needing their male cousins' permission to go out with friends for the night, and how even though German law says 16 year olds may drink alcohol, they aren't allowed to by their cultural and family rules. While Heidi and Spencer may never understand the trials these girls go through, these girls don't understand how to be as entertaining as american reality stars. When two girls started to argue, one walked away to cool off after about 10 seconds of arguing... in case the police came, she didn't want to get in trouble seeing as she has ambitions to be a police officer herself. In the next scene, it was mentioned that she wasn't there because the argument hadn't been forgotten, then in the following scene the girls were sitting next to each other and laughing again. MTV would have dragged that arguement out into a 4 episode arc with lingering repercussions and maybe some boyfriend stealing thrown in for good measure. Jersey Shore would have fist pumped their way into jail over it. German TV however acted too adult about it to provide any entertainingly redeeming facet... The show provided some interesting insights but the teasers for what was going to happen didn't leave me wanting more. The portrayal of the male cousins leaves one feeling incredibly sorry for the girls who on one hand respect their culture and on the other, want to take part in the modern world. One girl was hit by her cousin when he saw her at a cafe with two girlfriends, having an alcoholic beverage, without permission. Lydia told me how their culture, along with other middle eastern cultures, still believe in honor killings and such sources of punishment. In an honorific society in the middle east, if a woman is raped, it is her fault. She has lost her virginity and dishonored her family. To regain honor, her brother or father must kill her. Amazing how in the year 2010 we live in a world still plagued by such horrors...

Another horror, for the record, is a German video store ha ha one must be 18 to enter, and for good reason. The ratio of new releases, classic films, and the like to porn is about 1:3... Along with giant cardboard cut outs of the 'film's' stars. Awesome. Note to self: keep your eyes on the ground and learn to read Braille to check out a movie.

Was able to run today, despite the weather being less beautiful than two days ago. Tried to buy a skype camera and mikrofon but the digital store is only open 4 days a week, today was not one of them. Headed to Bonn tomorrow! Dinner with Sanja, my Bonn Buddy, and others around 6, then who knows. Hopefully settling into a routine will make days pass more quickly. I'm excited to start my classes, it's been too long since I had a good discussion about English literature :) the nerd in me needs to come out...

Bloody Sunday

What's that? What goes on in Germany on a Sunday you ask? Well, allow me to enlighten you:

not much of anything besides an awesome breakfast.

One thing the Germans know how to do is provide an awesome array of food. For breakfast today I had Broetchen (delicious hard rolls) along with some other fine wheat and whole grain breads. Their 'american sandwich bread', as the package names it, is like our whole 12 multi grain extra fiber wheat bread. They call it white bread. Marginally slanted opinion of american sandwich bread. I wonder how a German would react upon encountering Wonder Bread...
I also had a soft boiled egg, which came from a free range local chicken. The chicken's owner brought the eggs to the door two days ago. That local.
Fresh squeezed orange juice, always delicious though I'm developing heartburn in my old age.
On the Broetchen I had nutella (wikipedia it, then buy it), turkey, and salami. Not on the same one obviously, but they are all incredible. For some reason, the meat here tastes much cleaner to me. I'm also trying to eat less of it in general so maybe it just tastes better having it so seldomly.

Lunch with my grandparents today was also an interesting experience. This was literally the first time that I can remember going to visit them without my mother there. I'm not afraid of them, the problem is though that they speak a very regionalized dialect of German which is nearly impossible to understand when you're used to classroom German. It's called Platt deutsch, low German, and more specified it's Koelsch Platt, or the Cologne regional speech. Considering the stereotypically harsh consonants and immaculate ennunciation of German, it shouldn't be too difficult to adjust to a dialect, or so one would think. Platt decides to throw most of what sounds German out the window. Like hard g sounds? Too bad, deal with a j. Like spread vowels? Too bad, it decides to round and front most of the vowels. It's become easier to listen to, especially thanks to German 650 (History of the German Language) last semester, but it's still a headache after 4 hours.

Hopefully today's rain lets up by tomorrow and I can go running again. I dont feel jetlagged but am still awake thanks to feeling entirely restless due to lack of exercise. The Germans are a low intensity but constant work out kind of people, I am not... I like my cardio quick and dirty, for a couple hours at a time. I dont mind the low intensity walking everywhere way of life, but I dont think its enough for my hectic american circadian rhythm.

Sorry about the hockey game btw, USA; sucks that Canada's men and women beat us on ice. At least we have sunshine sometimes... though our social healthcare is in shambles and the country is deeply divided on almost every main issue... is this the best time for a USA chant?