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