i've got this domestic thing down...

Tonight is the evening of our Christmas Dinner here with the International Office, and while they are providing the main course, they asked us students to bring something that might be a traditional dish from home, or just something we especially like. My very favorite part of both Thanksgiving and Christmas is pumpkin pie, and I was quite said to miss out on the Thanksgiving edition pumpkin pie, so I decided to not miss out on Christmas by making my own. However, I had no idea what this entailed....

Thankfully my friend Stacy from Ohio State who lives on the floor below me has a recipe from her mom who has made homemade pumpkin pie practically every year of her life. How awesome? (No comparison here, Mom, I swear, I love Mrs. Smiths. Heck, before Stacy told me, I wasn't even aware you COULD make pumpkin pie with an actual pumpkin.) But that is just what we did.

So we bought an actual pumpkin. (No idea that pumpkins had other uses after Halloween, however thankfully there's a store nearby that sells every vegetable under the sun...including pumpkins.) Well, we actually bought half of a pumpkin. While standing in line at the store, Stacy commented that the one and only large size of pumpkin they had would be enough that we'd be eating pumpkin for weeks. So the guy at the register offered to cut it in half for us and only sell us half the pumpkin for half the price. Sweet deal.

The pumpkin has to bake for an hour or more in the oven to soften it up enough to scrape out the insides. This was the boring sit and wait part. Then you scrape the meaty part of the pumpkin (as Stacy called it, I found nothing meaty about it) into a bowl and puree it with this fun pureeing stick thing. I kind of made a mess with that, splattering both me and Stacy with pumpkin bits. (It washes out I swear...) To the now liquid-y pudding like pumpkin we added evaporated milk, sugar, cinnamon and other spices, and eggs. Then we got to further beat it into submission until it was entirely a liquid.

The crust was more difficult that I had imagined. We were originally going to make that as well, but we had conflicting class schedules and some last minute engagements that came up, and we didn't have time. I thought surely one could buy a premade crust here...but not so much. The best we could find was sheets of crust-dough. So we molded them into our form and used water to make it glue itself all together (hopefully we don't find any leaks...). That done, we poured our pie mixture into it and set it in the oven to bake. It smelled delicious.

So now I am on my way in the next hour or so to my last class of the evening which we are getting out of early in time to make it to our Dinner at 7pm. I have to carry the pie with me to class, so I'm crossing my fingers it survives the trip okay. And sitting next to me smelling all pumpkin-y good for 2 hours...

a week and counting

In just about a week from today I will be flying home to Tampa for Christmas break, something I can say I am quite excited about. The last struggle between me and total relaxation over the holidays is finishing a paper and submitting the last of my materials for my graduate school applications. I am hoping to have all of the aforementioned completed by Monday. So we'll see how that goes.

Last week Wednesday we had a trip to Heidelberg that I have yet to talk about! It was actually a lot of fun and felt very Christmas-y. Heidelberg is about a 2 hour drive from Bonn, although with the double decker bus we take on trips with the International Office it took closer to 3 hours. And once again we left quite early, 7:45am. But it was all well worth it. When we arrived, we were split into three groups of 20 and were assigned tour guides who took us on a walking tour of the castle and the city, which is beautiful by the way. You'll have to see pictures for the testament to this. The river is very picturesque, and so is the old bridge over it. (It's actually called The Old Bridge btw.) The ruins of the castle are the largest along the Rhine and possibly in Germany if I understood the tour guide correctly. You'll have to consult wikipedia for the history lesson. But large parts of it are still intact. You can see where one whole side of a tower fell away into the ground below because of a massive explosion of the gunpowder stored there. There was even a garden around the castle dedicated to an Elizabeth! So that was fun. :) Although it wasn't the prettiest garden, but that simply could have been that we went in the one month that Heidelberg is visited least, December, and so that's when they do all their renovation work. So there were construction guys all over the place fixing things and making it all look pretty again. They were entirely re-cobbling (or however you say that) one walkway up to the castle, but they were doing it in exactly the same way they used to do it back when the walkway was originally made, so it was relatively interesting to watch. Heidelberg also has the largest cask in the world. They have a huge wine cellar and really huge wooden casks to hold the wine in for the population of the castle, and their biggest one is something like 45,000+ gallons. (I think...I might have done the math wrong on that one.) There's a picture of me standing in front of it so you can see just how ridiculously huge this thing is. You can actually climb up stairs built along the side of it and have a look from the top to see where they filled it up.

After the tour of the castle, we wandered into town. Their Christmas market had started the weekend before and it was really cute. It's similar to the one we have going on here in Bonn, but there were more artists in Heidelberg crafting things like jewelry and ornaments right there in their little log cabin hut things. We had a lot of fun drinking Gluehwein and eating roasted almonds covered in all sorts of delicious things and walking through the markets. It was really pretty lit up at night too. They have one Gluehwein stand that looks like the candelabra thing Mom and Dad have, where it has candle holders on the bottom and when you light the candles, somehow that makes the little propeller like things at the top start moving so that the scenes carved in wood in the middle of the thing spin around. What do you call this thing?? Anyway, they have a huge replica of one and it was cool looking. I bought lots of Christmas presents here so be excited! :)

Other than that trip to Heidelberg, I've pretty much been hanging around Bonn the last couple of weeks. I went to go see the Golden Compass movie, which sadly wasn't nearly as good as the book, particularly considering they cut out the ending completely. Oh well. This past Wednesday my friend Caitlin who is studying in Koblenz came to Bonn with a friend of hers who is actually a German girl currently studying at UCF. So I had fun wandering around our own Christmas market with them. I believe I am going Saturday (tomorrow) to Cologne with Caitlin as well. And if I can swing it, I'm looking into going to Koblenz the beginning of the week.

Also this Sunday there's a concert at the Beethovenhalle of the winner of the piano competition Bonn hosts every year. It has been going on for weeks, and they finally narrow it down to one winner who is supposedly the best pianist of them all, and that person puts on a concert. So I'm hoping it's going to be good.

Thursday of next week the International Office is hosting a Weihnachtsdinner (Christmas dinner). They are providing the main part of the meal, I think there's a goose and pork chops or something, and a couple of side dishes, and everyone else has to bring either a side dish or a dessert with them. Stacy and I are signed up to bring pumpkin pie, something no one here has particularly heard of. But we're going to have to make it from scratch. Sadly no Mrs. Smith's around here :) So that should be fun.

All right well I'm back to work on my paper. Go look at my pictures of Heidelberg, and I will be home in a week to celebrate Christmas with some of you, and will certainly be telephoning with others once I'm in the states. Much love to all.

PARIS!

Hi Everyone, well it seems I've had zero time to update, so I think I'll do two separate posts, one explaining Paris and the next recapping the last week or so. So Paris....

We got up ridiculously early last Friday morning so that we could catch the bus at 5:30 to catch the 5:45 train to Cologne so we could catch out 7am train from Cologne to Paris. We ended up sitting in a coffee shop for an hour at the train station in Cologne because we were just way to ahead of schedule, but we didn't want to take any chances with our trains being delayed between Bonn and Cologne (which happens frequently) and possibly miss our Paris train. Once we were aboard our Thalys train to Paris, we all fell immediately back asleep. However the train stopped 3-4 different times between Cologne and Paris, and every time someone would come over the announcements to say we were approaching a stop, and then to say we were pretty much there, and then to thanks passengers who were exiting the train for riding with Thalys, and then to greet new passengers who'd just boarded. And they do this announcement in 4 different languages, Flemmish, German, French, and English. So it takes about half an hour to get each one of these announcements made in all 4 languages, and it kept us from sleeping.

But we finally arrived in Paris! And we headed straight for our hotel to check in and drop off our luggage. I'm quite glad we ended up staying in a hotel in the Republique district instead of a hostel in Monmartre. Excellent decision. The people at our hotel were very nice, and it was little so they remembered who we were all the time, and even gave us some tips when it came to walking around or the order in which we should go see some things. Breakfast was made in their little kitchen and served by the same nice woman every morning. It was croissants and other pastries and breads with butter, some cheese spread stuff that was really good, jelly, and coffee. The coffee was the best part of the hotel. Seriously. This coffee was amazing.

Friday afternoon after we dumped out stuff at the hotel, we set out to see the Champs Elysees and the Arch de Triumph and then the Eiffel Tower. We took tons of pictures. Sadly, I must admit I forgot my camera. Yes, I know. It was sitting on my desk next to all the other things I couldn't forget like my cell phone and medications. However I somehow managed to not forget everything except my camera. I think Mom jinxed me for telling me a million times not to forget it. But that's another story. So Stacy and Sophie, the two friends I went with, made sure to take lots of extra pictures, and any photos I wanted to take I borrowed Stacy's second camera which she had with her. She has a nice film camera and a little digital one. So as soon as my two friends upload their pictures online, I will post the links here. And Stacy said she's making an extra set of her film photos for me, so I will be bringing those home with me over Christmas, and possibly seeing if I can get them put on a CD as well.

At 6pm Friday evenings the Louvre opens for free to students between the ages of 18 and 26, so we took advantage of that. It was awesome to stand in front of the Mona Lisa and all of Da Vinci's other works of art. It was really cool. The building itself was just gorgeous as well. But there was just sooo much to soak up, it was hard to take it all in in one night.

Saturday we got up early and went to the Eiffel Tower again so that we could go up it. The lines were pretty long, but it had been too windy the previous afternoon and they'd shut down the upper deck. But it was gloriously sunny that day, and we didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see the awesome view from the tower without clouds blocking it. So we waited for maybe an hour, but we got to go to the very top deck! It was kinda scary and windy haha, but it was gorgeous. (See pictures for reference)

After the Eiffel Tower we went to the Musee D'Orsay which was also an awesome museum. The building was really cool. It's an old train station I believe, and there's this huge clock on the wall made out of what looks like gold. My favorite artists in this museum were Monet and Van Gogh. It was so cool to see Van Gogh's Starry Night in person. I have a poster of that painting in my room here because I really like it, but it's nothing compared to the real thing. And to see Monet's work in person was equally breathtaking. It's so cool to stand in front of this stuff and think about the artists who did them and know that at one point in time they stood in front of these works of art just this way too.

The sun was setting by then, but we wanted to fit in Notre Dame, and so while we only got to see this church at night, it was beautifully lit up, and I'm glad that if we had to choose between seeing it at night or day, we saw the night version. There was also a huge Christmas tree lit up out front of the church. And as we got there, there was a service just starting and two girls were singing, and their voices were just amazing. I think they were singing in Latin, so I had no idea what they were saying, but the music was a great background to wander around Notre Dame in. Sadly, they started shaking incense around shortly thereafter and I was forced to retreat or succumb to loud frequent coughing. I hate that I'm allergic to that stuff. It sets that whole church-y mood sometimes I think. Anyway. We spent a good deal of time taking pictures from the outside of Notre Dame from just about every angle possible. I don't have many of these from the digital camera, but Stacy has a bunch on her film camera so I will try to get those scanned, or you'll just have to come see me to see the pics!! :)

That night we went to a restaurant near our hotel on the Place de Republique, and the waiters there thought we were cute girls from Germany. We spoke German actually almost the whole time we were in Paris, unless we had to communicate with other people and couldn't manage in French, then we switched to English because everyone speaks that and no one speaks German. But otherwise we didn't like looking like American tourists. You don't get looked at funny when you speak German on the subway. You get weird looks if you speak English like an American.

Sunday it was rainy again, but the first Sunday of every month Versailles has free entry, so we definitely wanted to check that out. We were hoping that maybe since it was raining, five million other people wouldn't have the same idea, but sadly no such luck. However, most of them did not go inside. There was a silver collection exhibition thing going on in the King and Queen's Apartments, which was pretty much the whole display of rooms inside Versailles that you get to see, and so we still had to pay for that. Stacy and Sophie opted out, and instead explored the gardens despite the rain. I on the other hand was content to enjoy the view of the pouring down rain and the gardens from the windows in the Hall of Mirrors (gorgeous by the way, sadly no pictures allowed in the building). I've never seen rooms so decorated in my life before. And I thought the silver pieces incorporated into the rooms were beautiful. Apparently the American funded group Friends of Versailles is working on tracking down all the original furniture that was in the palace and putting it back in the rooms it was supposedly known to have been in. After I was done with my tour, we headed back to the hotel to take hot showers and naps because it was just so terribly cold and rainy. Thankfully the rain let up later because we wanted to go back down to the Champs Elysees and take pictures at night of all the Christmas lights they have set up on the trees lining the street. Then we decided, since the weather was still good we really wanted to see the Eiffel Tower at night too. However, as we were getting out of the metro at the Eiffel Tower, it started raining again. We figured we'd brave it, but as we're dashing across the street to the bridge, the skies literally opened up and dumped rain like you've never seen before. And with the wind, I thought for sure I was back in Florida in a hurricane, only colder. Thankfully, the pictures were beautiful. I did get sick though :( so that was no fun. But I'm feeling better now and it was totally worth it.

Monday we got up and it was thankfully sunny again. So it was perfect to go see Sacre Coeur, which in my opinion might have been better than Notre Dame. The inside was beautiful, the dome in the center was painted with this brilliant blue color I loved. And the church is up on this huge hill, and so the view of the city from there is just amazing. You can see pretty much everything. From there we went on an awesome walking tour (involving the eating of crepes which were delicious. Granted, they tasted a lot like the ones you can buy from street vendors here in Bonn, but the point was we were in France and ate French crepes, so they tasted better). Then we wandered through Monmartre, past the Moulin Rouge, which wasn't quite as exciting looking as I thought it would be. Then we went down towards the Opera and the big department stores Printemp and Lafayette. The inside of Lafayette has this big dome that's decorated for Christmas. This big Christmas tree starts on the ground floor and goes up to the top of it. It was really cool looking. We walked around the opera which was really cool looking, then went in search of this bakery at the Place de la Vendome. However, all we found was the richie rich part of town. I did find a jewelry store named after my father, but there were security guards maintaining some kind of perimeter around it and they scowled at us for taking pictures. We finally made our way to the Toulleries gardens and the Louvre again where we stopped for an afternoon snack/lunch. After that we had to head back to our hotel to get our bags and catch our train. So all in all, it was a lovely weekend.

home from berlin and on to paris!

Well I've been quite behind in posting. The week of my last post was filled with massive amounts of prepping to go to Berlin, last minute homework assignments and grad school stuff. And then there was the actual trip:

Let's see, we left at the CRACK of dawn on Tuesday. Well actually, we left by 7am and the sun didn't rise for at least another hour, so I guess technically we left before dawn. The bus ride was about 8 hours long with a couple of stops in between for lunch and snacks. When we got in Tuesday night to our hostel I was more than ready to get out of our double decker bus and wander around town a bit. We made it to the Sony Center and Potsdamer Platz which was only a 15 minute walk from the hostel, we drank some coffee, and headed back to go to bed.

Wednesday we got up dark and early to get back on our bus for a driving tour of Berlin. We saw a lot of cool things, but after awhile the bus was very warm and had that nice rocking sensation, so it was very tempting to fall asleep. Luckily we got out at several locations and were able to walk around. This is when we got to see the Victory Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial, and Checkpoint Charlie. Don't worry, I took tons of pictures and I'll post the links to those! Later that afternoon we had a guided tour of the Reichstag which is the Parliament building. We got to see the huge room where they actually sit in session, and then walk up the huge glass dome that's at the top of the building where we got an awesome view of the city. We went out later for coffee at the same little shop we were for the first night just because it was so darn good. Luckily both breakfast and dinner were supplied by the hostel like a mini cafeteria, so we only had to worry about feeding ourselves lunch. And if you ate a lot for breakfast and dinner, sometimes you could just skate right on through :) (I know my mother is cringing.)

Thursday we had the option of seeing one of three museums, the Pergamon, the Jewish History, or the National History Museum, courtesy of the international office. I opted for the Deutsche Historische Museum, i.e. the German History one. It was actually very cool. I started from the beginning settlements of this region of Europe and stretched through WWII. It was actually really hard to make it all the way through in the 2 hours we were allotted. In fact, we ended up waiting around on a couple of people for another hour, ensuring that none of us really got a lunch break. (Several people in our group of 68 thought they were the only ones there in Berlin, and didn't realize that 67 other people were waiting on their butts. Needless to say, it was frustrating, but by Friday I decided not to care anymore what other people did and just enjoy myself.)
Thursday evening we went to the Normannenstrasse Museum which is the old headquarters of the Stadtsicherheit or State Security, better known as the Stasi, seers of everything in Eastern Germany after WWII. There's now a museum funded by a private group of investors who have taken control of sorting through the hundreds of tons of paperwork that the Stasi collected during their reign of peeping. Our tour guide said that something like 50% of all the intelligence collected has still yet to be gone through, simply because of the size of it all. Apparently one guy who was a state supporter but later spoke out against the regime, had one of the largest files. If all his paperwork, videos, etc. had been lined up back to back, it would have stretched 18 kilometers!!! That's so ridiculous!

Friday we went to another museum that is at the House of the Wannsee Conference. This is the place where the Nazis held a secret meeting to discuss the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question." Many people think this is where they actually made the decision to kill off the Jews, but Hitler had already made that decision and it was being carried out in various formats all over the country. Unfortunately none of them were entirely successful. They originally wanted to ship all the Jews off to Madagascar thinking they would eventually just all die out. But they didn't have the Naval power to do so. Then they wanted to ship them all to Siberia, where again, they would all die, but Russia probably wouldn't have been a big fan of that one. And mass executions like the Massacre of 300,000 men, women, and children, was bad for troop morale. So they discussed other options here, and Hitler's right hand man filled in all the other big hancho's right hand men.

After that we had free time, so Sophie, Stacy, and I and a couple of other girls wandered around downtown. We went to this famous store for the Ampelmaennchen in Berlin. That's the little light up guys in the cross walk signals on the streets. In old Eastern Berlin the men in the crosswalk signal look entirely different than the normal, everyday kind of looking men in the Western side of Berlin. Hence, it's easy to tell where in the city you are based on what the crosswalk signal looks like.

Saturday we drove out to Potsdam which is a city outside of Berlin. This is where Frederick the Great built his summer residence palace. He preferred living here as opposed to anywhere else, apparently, and was eventually buried here as well. It was a gorgeous place and I took a thousand pictures. I couldn't take pics from the inside because they were forbidden, but they have all the original furniture, paintings, etc. inside the house. It was really pretty. Thankfully we also had some sun that afternoon as we took a guided tour through the gardens of the property.

All in all it was a really fun trip. I think one of the coolest things about it was seeing how much history is incorporated into every day life in the city. There's a brick line that runs on the ground, through sidewalks, streets, etc. wherever the Wall used to stand. I think it's cool to see where the city used to be divided. And I think today people find it sooooo easy to cross over where the wall once stood, that they don't realize not even 20 yrs ago thousands of people gave their lives trying to do the exact same thing. In some places, people refuse to build on the ground where the wall used to be. In parts of it there were wide open spaces of lawn between each side of the wall that was patrolled by soldiers and dogs, and these places are mostly still empty because no one wants to build there.

Okay well check out the pictures. I'll try to update more frequently. I'm headed to Paris this weekend with Sophie and Stacy so I'll be sure to post again along with even more pictures after that event! Love you all.

cream cheese on subway sandwiches

So I put Jon on the plane back home yesterday morning, which was sad, but the week he spent here was a lot of fun. We went to the museum Haus der Geschichte which is German history WWII and onward. They were setting up an exhibition about the movie Das Boot (pronounced like boat, not like a boot like a shoe). There was cubicle walling around it so you couldn't see anything yet, but it looks like they have a piece of the submarine on display which you can see because it stands so high. Jon and I tried peering in but received threatening looks from the security guard posted outside the display. It opens towards the end of the month and is there until the end of February, so I'll have to go check it out at some point.

We also went to Cologne and did a tour of the Middle Ages history of the city. Cologne was founded by the Romans as an outpost city where retired military officers could live. We walked around the city along what once used to be the wall of the original Roman city, because during the Middle Ages Cologne was actually the third largest city in Europe, even bigger than Paris. So it would have been too large to walk the perimeter of how huge the city had been during that time period. The guide was very cool, and since we were only a group of about 6, he was very interactive. We saw a lot of cool buildings that you don't see on the main tourist drag. Cologne sits kind of on a hill, and the way the guide described it was like an onion that has so many different layers. Anytime the city wants to undertake a project that requires digging into the ground, they find any number of Middle Ages, or Roman buildings, artifacts, etc. Since Cologne is right on the Rhine, during the middle ages, the city controlled all shipping traffic on the river, and basically had first dibs to anything they wanted off traveling merchants' ships, at whatever price they named. So they became very rich, very fast. Many buildings today are built on top of foundations and pre-existing walls of buildings from the Middle Ages. Sadly, I didn't take as many pictures as I should have because it was FREEZING cold and the wind was blowing so hard it almost knocked us over. Taking pictures would have required me to take my hands out of my pockets and remove my mittens.

Friday we went to an FC Koeln (stands for Football Club) soccer game in Cologne at the Rhein Energie Dome. It was very exciting. FC Koeln fans are some of the most loyal and craziest, even though their team hasn't won a title since 1983. The game was an impressive show of which team could make the most mistakes, allowing the other one to score. FC Koeln's first two goals were both scored in the first 8 minutes. The first one scored literally in the first minute. Jon and I both bought scarves in red and white to support our lovely billy goats, the mascot of FC Koeln. (Koeln being Cologne in German).

Saturday we went and saw the Beethoven House museum which was actually a lot cooler than I thought it was going to be. I had previously stood out front of this house where Beethoven was born and took my picture, but this was the first time I went into the actual museum. They had a lot of original scores that Beethoven wrote with his corrections and notes in the margins as well. Those were very cool to look at. Pictures were not allowed since the lighting had to be so low to preserve the really old documents. They also had 2 piano fortes which were given to Beethoven as gifts and which he used for most of his career. They had a bunch of other instruments which had belonged to him as well. It was all very cool.

Plans for the upcoming weeks include a trip to Berlin over Thanksgiving. We leave Tuesday the 20th and get back Sunday the 25th. It's an International Office trip, so I essentially only paid 150 Euro and that covers my trip there and back, the 5 night hostel stay, all museum entrances and other activities, and possibly some meals as well. (What a bargain!!!) I'm pretty excited about it because I've never been to Berlin before, and that will give me something to keep busy over Thanksgiving instead of being sad that I'm not spending it at home. (Save me some pumpkin pie!)

November 30th, Sophie and Stacy and I leave for Paris. We have tickets booked from Friday morning (REALLY) early through Monday evening. I'm SUPER excited about that trip. And Friday evenings the Louvre is open free to students so you can bet we'll be there!

Oh, and this Friday I have an appointment to get my hair cut. I'll definitely post pictures of that when it happens. Other than that, this week is just getting a lot of school work done. I have a presentation on Thursday (which I've pushed back from a week ago) on Who is at fault in WWI. Should be interesting. I also have to get to work on graduate school application stuff, they can't accept me if I don't apply! Okay well much love to everyone, I miss you all. More later!

Oh right, as the title to this post would suggest, one day Jon and I went to eat at Subway for lunch just because we thought it would be funny, and when they asked if we wanted cheese on our subs, the cheese they used was Philadelphia cream cheese! It was actually pretty tasty albeit unexpected.

a new month!

So it's now November! I've been in Germany today a whole two months. That's crazy. A little less than two more months to go before I'm home for Christmas, and then only a month after that before the end of the semester! Time is going by pretty fast I guess. And November should fly by pretty quick since the month is stocked full of plans! Jon gets here tomorrow and is visiting until Sunday of next week. So that'll be a lot fun. And then the week of the 19th is the Berlin trip that the International Office takes us on, which I'm hoping to be able to go on. And then on the 30th Sophie, Stacy, and I are leaving for Paris! So we be bringing December in in style haha.

This week was also the first time I've been sick in Germany, and the first time I visited a German doc. I have a sinus infection :( So that wasn't fun. But I've been on an antibiotic now for a few days and I'm feeling much better. But I think it did make it worse being pretty sick in a foreign country, because all the things I would normally do (like go home and complain to my mommy) weren't possible haha. But I have a good friend in Sophie because she took care of me. So now I'm almost all well again!

This week hasn't been particularly hard considering I dropped my two classes that were Monday and Tuesday and Thursday was a school holiday, so I only had one class on Wednesday. Although I did go to my class on Monday, I find it fun to still attend and just not have to do any of the work :) Besides it's not til noon anyway, so it's not like I have to get up early or anything for it.

Wednesday evening we celebrated Halloween by carving pumpkins. I got together with Sophie and Christina and Robert, three of the German students who work in the Intl Office, and then a couple of intl student friends including Stacy (Ohio), Alicia (Wisconsin), Rachel (Melbourne, AUS), and Mariel (Wisconsin). For Rachel and Christina it was the first time they'd ever carved pumpkins! We made a huge batch of chili together as well, which was really tasty. And we ate way too many sweets. Germany is horrible for having so many different kinds of chocolates and breads and all the Haribo gummybear products you can imagine... And we ate it all.... And since Tuesday I had gone to the Chocolate Museum in Cologne, I had lots of chocolate to share! THe museum was kind of small and the tour was quick, but there were free samples, so that kind of made up for it. The gift shop was also AMAZING. I'm totally going back there to do some Christmas shopping. So no one be surprised when chocolate is included in your Xmas gifts!

Okay well I have to finish up this week my recommendation letter stuff so my professors have plenty of time to get back to me on those. Next step is working on personal statements and creating my curriculum vitae (a word I learned just a few days ago surprisingly). Which I guess will just entail adding things to my work resume. Well that's all from me for now. Much love to all!

Concerts, Sangria, and German high schools

Well this week has been a decently eventful one even if my weekend has been quite boring. Tuesday was the concert with my guest family. It was actually really good. The middle son of my host family lives in a group home for mentally handicapped people where they have quite a big community and workplace. I guess this is based off a theory of an American psychologist who developed this group living.working community where the mentally handicapped could participate in a mini society more successfully and feel more productive. At any rate, they just celebrated their 10 yr anniversary of being open and Sparkasse (the bank I now don't hate as much since they finally gave me my money) sponsored a concert evening. The musicians were really good. The piano guy was actually the winner of Bonn's competition last year to find the most skilled pianist in the area or something. There was also a cellist, a flutist, and a clarinetist (sp?) if that's what you call them. The music was all classical and really well played. (And they even had snacks in intermission!) After talking with my guest mother, I discovered that she is quite possibly the Aunt Sue of Germany. She knows everybody everywhere and when I mentioned I was looking for a practicum/internship to possibly do to extend my stay here until the summer, she said she'd be sure to "network" that request amongst everyone she knows. I've also discovered she'll be quite handy to have since her husband was a diplomat, they have some buddies in the passport/visa office. The wife just left to go to India for three weeks and "expedited" her visa request by having her hubby put in a call to some buddies in the office.

Wednesday evening was filled with celebrating my friend Sophie's 23rd birthday. We went to a little local restaurant/bar called Take Two that has awesome nachos and Sangria. There was quite a good-sized group of us, I think between 15 and 20 people. And we ate plenty of nachos and drank plenty of Sangria to not want to go to class the next morning. (I did go by the way.)

Thursday was another eventful (looong) day. I went with another classmate of mine to my German teacher's high school classroom to talk with his kids (they're seniors) about 9/11 and U.S. involvement in the Middle East. It was actually really cool. The students were really interested in hearing what our perspective was since their high school is relatively small and in a rich part of town, so they've never had any real life experience. Many of them were just excited to meet some Americans haha. I gladly gave out my email address and have hopefully made a couple of friends. On the train ride back to Bonn, I was talking with my teacher about wanting to become a teacher myself one day. Well, he took that to heart and said he would shop around the English department in his school and see if anyone is interested in having some help from an American as like an intern or something. That would be REALLY cool if he could pull something like that together.

Other than that....I've been working on grad school stuff and hope to have my list narrowed down to maybe 3 or 4 programs that I'll be applying to. I also need to cut down my course list from the 6 courses I was looking to take this semester to only 3! The intro course counted for 4 credits, and I've just found out (finally!) about how credits transfer back home. And since I've paid for 12 hours already (and only 12 hours) I can only take 8 this semester (since the intro course was 4 already). So I'm cutting back to my German history class, Text Production, and American Poets of the 19th cent. I'm hoping to still be able to audit my Oscar Wilde class and my German Lit class. And then the Dialectology one is just out the window. It was also on Thursday with 2 other classes, and I think that was just too much for one day. Not to mention I had no lunch break :)

Okay well thanks to all my faithful readers! 55 days til I'm home for Christmas :) Send your gift wish lists soon haha. Much love to all...

Richtig Hiking...

Well here's my update for this weekend:

Friday evening I went to a basketball game in Cologne with some people from the International Office. We'd gotten free tickets (woo!) which made the game even more fun! Our seats were decently good, and we had a lot of fun cheering on the Cologne 99ers, as they are called. We heard lots of particularly familiar cheers such as "Let's go Cologne, let's go!" (In English of course.) There was a group of guys in the fans from each team who had drums and beat them along with the cheering. It almost felt like a high school basketball game or something. It did make me miss cheering for my Golden Knight basketball boys team. We won (of course) against the team from Goettingen, I think the score was something like 70-50 but I'm not positive. Friday was a long time ago :) Our colors are red and white, so should I go to another game, I will certainly come prepared. It was kind of funny though, the building they play in is called the "Energy Dome" but it's about the same size of my high school gymnasium with maybe a bit better seats instead of bleachers. The rules appeared to be the same though. I was surprised to see that the Cologne 99ers were actually the German National Champs last year, and have won their Regional Championships just about every year for the past 6 years. Impressive.

Saturday was spent on an outing with Sophie's family (she's the friend of mine who's German and works at the Intl Office here). Her parents are in town since her birthday is this coming Wednesday. We went with her parents and older brother to a nearby vineyard town called Dernau. It's quite close to Mayschoss, which is the place we had our Wine Tasting near the beginning of the Intro Course last month. In fact, we actually hiked through the Dernau vineyard through the large hills/small mountain sides on which all the grape plants are planted from Dernau to Mayschoss. I think there was a total of about 10 kilometers that we hiked. On the way there it was lots of up and down between the rows of grapes. At one point or another, we were cutting across mountain side with sheer drop offs to one side, or up and down stone steps cut into the mountain side that were quite difficult! However, we were rewarded by a lovely meal at an awesome restaurant in the middle of it all. I tried Federweisser for what I believe is the second time. I think I had some when I was at Claudia's that summer when I was 15. It's a wine that's made fresh (not aged) and is most popular (tastes best) in September and October, early fall, I'm guessing when the grapes are freshly picked. You can have it in either red (Federroter) or white (Federweisser). See, I'm becoming quite the wine connoisseur!

Sunday, today, I'm working on homework. I picked up my room this morning, and attempted to do laundry, but since there's only two washing machines for an entire building of probably about 130-140 students, and one is currently broken, it's always in use :( So I pulled out my homework for this week and am getting a head start. I already finished what I needed to do for tomorrow which is read The Importance of Being Earnest. For Tuesday I have to read some German lit article and do a worksheet on it (I hate worksheets), for Wednesday I have to read some Longfellow poetry (more likely to get done today than the german lit), and for Thursday I have to read an article on Otto von Bismark and answer some questions about him. So nothing too hard. I'm also still working on recommendation letter drafts to give to professors so they have good stuff to write about me to the grad programs to which I'm applying. I'm also working on "Personal Statements" to send to each school as well. Basically, it's just a statement saying why I think I'm qualified for graduate work, and what in my past history supports that claim.

Well I will try to keep you all better updated. This week I have a concert on Tuesday evening that I'm attending with my host family. Other than that I don't think there's a lot going on. Okay well, back to that homework.... Much love to all!

i'm a bad updater....

Okay well the semester has officially started! I have gone to all of my classes except two. One is later this evening, and one was canceled today because there was some ceremony thing going on. But so far I have had my Monday class on Oscar Wilde, which went really well. We're reading The Importance of Being Earnest first, and then An Ideal Husband, and then Picture of Dorian Gray, and a few shorter stories and pieces worked in there as well. The professor seems really nice, and the class is in English, which makes life easier. Tuesdays I have German LIterature of the 19th and 20th centuries. It's in German, but it's taught at the international office and only open to exchange students, so they at least recognize that German is not our first language...

Ok well I'm picking this post back up later to finish writing it...which means I've gone to my German history class now. It's actually looking like it might be one of my favorites. The teacher is guy with a lot of energy, and you can tell he's very knowledgeable about his subject, and excited to teach it. He actually invited a couple of us to come visit his class (roughly the equivalent of seniors) in the high school where he teachers to come talk about the impact of Sept. 11th on life in the U.S. They're talking about it in his classes right now, and he knows that it's had a much different impact on us than his students necessarily understand, having only seen it on TV and such. So he thought it would be a really good experience for them to hear it straight from the horse's mouth so to speak. And hey, I don't mind being a horse for a day. I look at it as an awesome learning experience, as well as something else to add to my grad school resume! :)

This coming weekend I have a few plans. Tomorrow (Friday) I'm going to a basketball game in Cologne. Saturday I was going to visit Caitlin in Koblenz, but it turns out that due to a serious mixup at Sparkasse....I currently have no money. They seem to have misplaced my $5,000 that I deposited there. So tomorrow I'm bringing a German friend of mine to the bank with me to make sure I know exactly what's happened to it. I got a notice in the mail today saying my rent hadn't been paid since I didn't have sufficient funds in my account. Yay. *sigh*

Other than that, though, I have some homework already that needs to get done before next week. I have an article I have to read for my German Lit class and a writing exercise to do for it. I have a few questions I have to answer for a short text I have to read for my German history class. I have to read The Importance of Being Earnest. I'm not sure how much of it we need to have done for the first class period, but I really enjoy it and it's short, so I figured I'd just have it all read by the next class on Monday. Then I have to read a handful of poems for my American Poets class. The only class I don't have to do anything for was my Text Production class since we wrote two things in class already. (I think I omitted talking about how this class went previously...but it went really well. The teacher was excited to hear that I enjoyed creative writing and was studying it in school, since a portion of what she wants to do with us in the course is a good amount of creative writing.)

I'm currently trying to solidify plans to go to London to hang out with Sarah for Thanksgiving, and then Paris the first weekend in December with a couple of the girls here. Then I want to head to Vienna in January hopefully to see the Spanish Riding School and the Lipizzaners! Okay well I'll try to stay better updated as the weeks go on. I only have another two months here! Weird, huh? Over a month is already gone by. Crazy! Much love to everyone!

Aachen

This past Friday, the 5th, we went to Aachen for the afternoon with the International Office. It was actually a pretty cool city. We got to tour through Charlemagne's church, which is the shape of an octagon (very scandalous), and has lots of art of how Karl der Grosse, otherwise known as Charlemagne, is bigger and better than the church. I took a lot of cool pictures. The inside of the place was beautiful. And there's a cool myth about where his throne comes from. They're theorizing that because it's so plain in comparison to everything else, that the material then must be what's important about it. They can't quite place it, but you can see on the side of the throne there's a sketch of what looks like a board game, something that might have been at one point in time carved into the ground somewhere. Hence, the material for the throne was dug up from somewhere inherently important. Through dating both the material and the particular game that was played with that sketched out board, they think it's from the time of Jesus Christ. And so the theory somehow is that Charlemagne imported the marble from the tomb of Christ or something like that. (I didn't quite get all of the German...)

At any rate, today I received my grade for the intro course. I got an A :) yay. Now I'm just waiting on them to open class registration online so that I can get into my classes for the semester!

trier

Well the weather yesterday definitely could have been better. It was freeeeeeezing cold (high was 58 F but I don't think it got there) and rainy. The day started out with us having to wait another hour for our buses to show up here in Bonn. Apparently one of the bus drivers had overslept. Wish I could have done that considering we all had to be up at 6am that morning! But it wasn't too bad because it gave us an excuse to go eat breakfast and drink some more coffee. The bus ride was almost three hours long which certainly was not my favorite part of the day, but I was able to sleep most of it, so that was good.

Once we actually got to Trier, we picked up a tour guide who rode along with us on our bus for a bit, we drove around to a really awesome lookout point overtop of the city at the top of this mountain with a vineyard growing down all sides of it. Sadly, there was fog and rain and not a whole heck of a lot to see... We drove by the old amphitheatre set into a hillside. All the stone for the seats and whatnot was long gone because monastaries had used it as a rock quarry. The amphitheater was actually lost for many years until it was rediscovered hundreds of years later. The Romans originally settled the area sometime around 18 B.C. The original Roman bridge pillars are still there, and still used. It's cool that one side of the pillars are rounded, and the side facing into the current is pointed to break the ice when the river (the Mosel or Moselle in English) froze over. The Porta Nigra is also still standing which is the entrance gate to the old wall of the city. The wall is long gone, having been used for building materials for the middle ages houses and cathedrals. But this gate still stands. It's called the Porta Nigra (or black gate) now because it was made of white sandstone back in the day which has weathered and turned black. No idea what they used to call it.

After the tour, we had a few hours to ourselves to explore the city. Stacy, my friend from Ohio who lives in my dorm, one of the German girls who works for the International Office who was one of our "chaperones," and myself went shopping. I'm hoping to be able to get back to Trier because it's right on the border of Luxembourg and my friends in Metz, France are also quite close. Stacy and I are thinking about making a trip to France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. You can get weekend passes to go through all of those countries on one ticket.

We also have a plan in the works to head to Spain week after next. Our intro course will be done this next week on Friday, and we don't start classes until the following week Monday. So Stacy, myself, and a girl in our class Alicia (who thankfully speaks Spanish...) are thinking about heading there for the week. Ryan Air has cheap tickets, or I'm thinking about buying a Eurail pass so I can go wherever I want within a few month span and just not worry about it. We'll see.

Well hey, look at that, two posts in one weekned! Look at me go haha. Love to all.

whoops...two weeks

Well, it seems that almost two weeks have gone by now and I haven't had a chance to update. (Or haven't gotten around to it... :) Last weekend I had a couple of friends from Cocoa Beach who are currently studying in Metz, France, come visit me. I met up with them for Cologne and we spent the day being touristy, taking pictures of everything and walking all over the city. We actually got our picture taken for one of the local newspapers while we were sitting on the grass by the Rhein eating ice cream. I was never able to figure out which newspaper it was, though...so let me know if you see a picture of me and an ice cream cone anywhere!

Last week Friday we went to an open air museum in a nearby city Kommern. It was a collection of old village houses and a replica of how life looked hundreds of years ago. I have pictures which I will post soon, I promise! (I'm not in any of them though, I don't think...)

This week classes got a bit harder...we had to do oral presentations and then write a short paper on genetic enginering (new vocab!). However, I enjoy my teacher a lot, she makes things interesting. I'm trying to get into a class with her at the university. As soon as I get a class schedule together I will post here what kinds of classes I'll be taking. At the moment I'm trying to figure out how many credits I'm earning back home from the classes here because it's not a similar system of credits and grading.

Tomorrow we're heading to Trier, oldest city in Germany, so that should be loads of fun. I'll be sure to get pictures from that uploaded shortly thereafter. Much love to all!

time flies by...

Well I've been here a second whole week now, and it's flown by. We went to Marksburg this past Friday which was a lot of fun. The Burg (fort/castle) was cool to see, it's the oldest origonal castle in Rheinland because it was never destroyed in bombing so the entire building is exactly as it was when it was built. After that trip we went to a Vineyard nearby called Mayschoss. This is apparently the largest vineyard in Germany, and while they're most famous for their white wines, they actually produce more red wine than anything else. Interesting. After seven or so glasses of wine, life was good haha. The wine wasn't all great, but we bought a bottle of the Mayschosser Riesling Spaetlese which was the first and best wine of the evening. Florian, a French guy in my class guided me through my first real wine tasting, instructing me on exactly how I was to swich my glass, sniff, taste, and either drink or toss out the rest of my wine glass, and which foods to eat with which wine. It was a lot of fun.

Last night I went to Cologne for dinner and hang around in the downtown Altstadt. It was a lot of fun, although sadly sleep was a mutually exclusive option. And I forgot to bring my camera! I'm bad at that I know.

I managed to get my laundry done today and do a little more exploring in my neighborhood here. This evening I think I'm headed in the city to watch a couple of American football games with some of the other exchange students and a couple of German students. We watched soccer games with them yesterday afternoon so fair's fair! haha. All is going well otherwise. I will try to keep you all better updated. Check out my pictures from Marksburg in the links to the right. Much love to all!

My first week in Bonn...

Well my first week has gone by pretty quickly, even if at moments it seemed to take forever. It has been a good week too, for the most part...minus some very aggravating moments where my bank locked my ATM card and I had no money, to the internet set-up guy in my building standing me up for our meeting to get my internet started.

Tuesday morning I reported to the International Office here at Bonn University where I had to check in. The people there were all very nice, and while they had a lot of information for me, they weren't great with letting me know where I should be and what I should be doing. There was a lot of standing around for a little while. I had to pay a course fee as well as a security deposit and my first month's rent for my dorm, so they sent me trotting off to the bank to withdraw the cash to do so. I was able to withdraw a whole 150 Euro before Bank of America locked up my ATM card. It wouldn't run as a credit either when I got to the Studentenwerk building where I had to pay my rent. Sadly, I had just transfered all the money that had been in my Suntrust bank account into my newer Bank of America account since supposedly BOA is supposed to have a partnership with Deutsche Bank so that I can use their services when abroad. Come to find out, the only thing it does for me is "supposedly" means I can use the Geldautomat (ATM) for free, although service charges for using it have shown up in my account. After running all over the city back and forth between the bank, the Studentenwerk, and the International Office, I was exhausted. But I finally got moved into my dorm that afternoon and promptly took a long nap.

The rest of the week has been easier, thank goodness. I'm all unpacked in my room, and I did a little grocery shopping so I have some stuff to eat. I still need to go to Ikea or some place so that I can get a few more things for my room, like hangers and a little rug (the floor is tile and COLD!).

Orientation classes start on Monday for real. We took a placement test and were separated into our groups by Friday, but all we did were introduction activities. There's about 100 international students here who have come to study at Bonn for either a year or a semester. There people from Japan, China, Taiwan, Turkey, Bulgaria, Norway, Australia, the US and I'm sure many more. I've gotten to know a good amount of people, mostly from the US. There's a group of people from the University of Kansas (I believe, whichever state uni is in/near Topeka?). There's another guy from University of Florida which is the school I'm technically from since I'm doing this program through UF, not UCF. And there's a couple of people in my dorm who I've gotten to know from Ohio State and Washington State.

This morning I went and opened a bank account at Sparkasse so that the Studentenwerk can deduct my monthly rent from that account. I think it will also make life easier if I transfer most of my money there so I can use ATMs anywhere. There's only one Deutsche Bank in the center of Bonn, but there's a Sparkasse on every street corner it seems. It was actually a pretty easy process.

I'm speaking quite a but of German these days, pretty much 24/7. A bunch of us here have made a pact to only speak German to each other since that's the only way we're going to get any better is if we speak it all the time. I'm usually great at understanding what everyone else is saying, and there's only been a few times where I just really had no idea how to say what I was thinking. I'm hoping my intensive language course, which is this orientation course, will help me with vocab and whatnot. Although I'm thinking that after meeting the other students in my class, I want to move up at least a level or two. I'm with a couple of people who can't string a whole correct sentence together 9 out of 10 times. And while I don't want to be snobby or anything, I'm not paying all this money so I can sit in a classroom and help other people. This course is supposed to be preparing me to take classes in the university, and if my German hasn't improved by the end of the month, I'm not going to do as well when I'm confronted with a whole classroom full of only German-speaking people.

Okay well I think that's it for me now. There's a carnival going on called Puetzchens Markt which is Bonn's mini Oktoberfest. (I like how Oktoberfest starts in September and lasts until the beginning of November...) I think I'm going to meet up with some of the people from my dorm and we're going to walk over there. More from me later. I miss you all!

P.S. After a conversation with a British Literature MA student here, I've decided to erradicate (or attempt to) the verb "get" from my vocabulary entirely. You should do the same.

INTERNET! how i've missed you

I didn't realize how attached I was to my internet connection until I was without it this week. I could have survived just fine if I was at home, but being here in Germany in a new place missing home, it's nice to feel connected somehow to my friends and family at home. And of course Skype requires internet to call my mommy and daddy :) I will update on all events this weekend when I have the time. For now I'm going to sleep. It's almost 1am here ah!

arrived in germany

Well I'm here. The process was not quite as painful as last summer, thankfully, although it did come with some trying moments like hauling my two extrememly large suitcases up two levels of the airport to find the currency exchange place closed. And then being unable to open the door to my hotel room. Apparently, German keys to doors escape me. Go figure. But I am now (somewhat) rested and showered and ready to tackle finding dinner. I hope to update regularly and post pictures of all future adventures here in Bonn, my new home for the next 6 months.