Journey of an Undiscovered Superhero

I'm allergic to Germany...

2010-11-01T02:14:00.000-07:00

...or at least the water. I've been to a couple of doctors here now trying to sort it out, and it looks like my skin is super sensitive to the extra hard water here in this area of Germany. Even though I've been to D-land a ton before, this region I guess has harder water. I may have had an allergy attack in response to something in my room - this is quite an old building - but now it's made me super sensitive to anything. So I'm banned from using soap and I have to use special detergent. Go figure. But hopefully, finally!, I think I'm getting life here sorted out. Just wanted to update those of you who have been worrying about me.

In other news...I'm still not registered at a Uni, I didn't work much last week at school, and I still haven't organized any kind of volunteer work. So there isn't really much to report.

On the travel front...I am headed to Neuschwanstein on Friday with a small group. We're carpooling there and back (about a 4hr drive). I don't know what the weather will be like, but for the most part it's been mildly sunny, if a little cold.

Also, I'm officially flying home for Christmas break. I will be in Washington DC from Dec 21st through Jan 7th, so all those in the greater VA area, I'll be around! I'm quite looking forward to my future niece or nephew who is expected to arrive some time around the end of December!!!

Okay well that's all from me for now. As always, much love!

Some highs and lows

2010-10-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

Well, this hasn't been the best week of Germany so far, but thankfully it seems to be getting better. I started out the week feeling super accomplished because I'd gone running several days in a row, was cooking some fun and healthy dishes, and was getting to know my little town. Unfortunately that went quickly downhill when out of no where I woke up in the middle of the night Monday with hives. No idea where they came from or what I could have been allergic to. I spent the day Tuesday with one of my fellow teachers doing some language exchange and chatting about school. By the end of the day the hives had gotten worse. I tried everything from hydrocortisone cream to taking antihistamine to no avail.

After not sleeping well for the second night in a row, I finally broke down and decided to find a doctor. Unfortunately because it's school holidays at the moment, many doctors are on vacation. Go figure. Thankfully my teaching advisor was super nice and helpful in helping me call around to a ton of doctor's offices to find one that was both open and willing to see me. The doc also had no idea what in the world could be wrong with me, but prescribed me a cream with everything from steroids to anti-fungal stuff. So now I'm doped up on antihistamines and greased up in cream and feeling much better. After much discussion with both my mom and the doc, I think it was most likely my laundry detergent that's at fault here. So I've gone and purchased baby-safe anti-allergen detergent and wash all my clothes on an extra rinse cycle. All in all, aside from feeling like a leper, it could have been worse. I'm hoping this all clears up in a few days. If not, then I probably have the plague...

On the bright side, though, I finally nailed down someone at the International Office of the university in order to register as an official student there. I may or may not visit some seminars. Mostly, I'm in it for the free transportation pass. Fortunately, you don't have to register for specific classes here like you do in the US. You simply register for the semester, pay a very cheap (in comparison) semester fee, and have all the benefits of being a student without actually, technically, having to take classes. So that long-standing problem also has a solution in sight.

School starts back on Monday, and I'm actually looking forward to it. I've missed having a schedule. How sad. I'm such a school nerd.

In other news... I've been mentally planning an eastern European adventure of a trip for early spring: Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade, Zagreb...who knows where else. Anyone interested in tagging along is welcome! Also welcome are other suggestions for travel destinations.

Love and miss you all!

Herbstferien

2010-10-17T04:20:00.001-07:00

Well, I have failed in my efforts to update more frequently... But I'll cut to the chase:

Travel Plans...have mostly all fallen through for fall break. Unfortunately the state of Hessen chose to not pay us our whole paychecks for the month of September, and we don't get paid again until the end of October. So the new plan is "Frugal D-land" which so far has been going rather well!

School...has been going well. The last week went by quickly, and I'm almost at a loss for what to do without having to be there 4 days a week at 8am! Not really. It's a little nice. But it was surprising how quickly I fell into a routine in just 4 weeks. Time feels like it's flying by here. Only another couple weeks of October, and then I've got quite a few plans for November, so I'm pretty sure that month is going to fly by as well.

Other Plans...include meeting up with teachers from my school and getting involved in activities at TUD (Technische Universitaet Darmstadt). Tuesday of this week I'm headed to one of my teacher's houses to do a language exchange. We'll talk a couple of hours in English, have lunch, then do a couple of hours in German, each working to help the other one speak more correctly. I've been a bit disappointed with how little practice my German has been getting. I speak so much English as school, and then much of what I do at home on my own in my apartment is in English. Watching dubbed TV is frustrating, but I do read regularly in German.

Wednesday nights I've started going to a choir group hosted by TUD. It's not just students but also a lot of other people. Last week was my first time, and it was pretty cool. I haven't been in choir or anything like it since high school, so there was definitely some nostalgia attached. The music is okay, and it's nice to have a way to socialize with other people. The choir also does fun things like go on trips and take part in competitions, so hopefully that will be something!

I've also been a couple of times now to an international church in Frankfurt. I started going with one of the teachers from my school who is also American. There's a 20s/30s kind of young professionals group there that I've started getting involved with too. They're actually planning a trip to Neuschwanstein the first weekend in November that I'm going along on. It's a mini-retreat. For those not familiar, Neuschwanstein is a castle near Munich in southern Germany that Walt Disney used as the basis for the concept of the Cinderella castle. So that's exciting.

Also in November, my friend Megan from VTech is coming to visit! She'll be here for Thanksgiving which is super exciting. I'm thrilled to have someone to celebrate with. We'll probably try to get a big group together to have a proper Thanksgiving dinner.

Alright, well that's about it for this brief update. Love to everyone!

Massive Update

2010-09-28T09:09:00.000-07:00

Alright so I'm already bad at updating again... A lot has been going on the past couple of weeks. I'll try to recap all of it without writing a novel here.

School:
School has been going really well. I've been working with the same handful of teachers each week in grades 6-13. I'm working 2-3x a week with an 8th, 9th, and 10th grade class, and then I go once a week to a 6th, 11th, and 13th.

In the 8th grade the students have been working on a textbook unit about Florida, so I've given a number of presentations on things like Kennedy Space Center, Space Camp, and Cocoa Beach. That's been a lot of fun since I've brought in pictures of my friends and me doing all sorts of typical Florida things, such as hanging out at the beach, going out on boats on the river, surfing, and wakeboarding. Surprisingly a number of them actually knew what wakeboarding was!

In the 9th grade class I've been holding a number of writing workshops. This year of 9th graders (all across the state of Hessen) has to skip a grade next year, so they will be beginning the 11th grade next year. This is due to the fact that Hessen is decreasing their schooling from 13 grades to 12 in order to better match up internationally with other schools. Unfortunately, this means the 9th grade needs a lot of work, and there's just not a lot of resources available. What they really need is some kind of mass tutoring effort, but I don't think parents, teachers, or students are capable of it. However, this has been one area where my experience teaching composition has come in handy. I've been able to develop some more interesting activities with the students to get them practicing writing and thinking critically.

In the 10th grade we've been working on writing as well. Their vocabulary is a bit better and they have a better sense of the structure of an essay, so we're working on the argumentative part of their writing, i.e. constructing better arguments and providing effective evidence for those arguments. Again, it's great that I've spent the last two years developing assignments for this kind of thing. It takes some adaption to adjust assignments for foreign language instruction and lower grade levels, but it's not as difficult as I had feared.

In the 11th grade the English class I'm working with is examining how influential language is (or isn't), and if language can really incite change. We've been reading a number of commencement speeches from Obama to Jon Stewart and discussing the kinds of advice they give, and how idealistic versus realistic they are. I'm finding it totally fascinating, but the students are talking as much as the teacher (and I) had hoped. So we're still working on that one...

In the 12th grade I've been discussing slavery and the Civil War. The students have been reading an excerpt from Frederick Douglass's slave narrative, which has been somewhat difficult for them, but usually once we discuss what's going on, they do quite well with it. They just got done talking about the idea of the American Dream, so now we're talking about the ways that dream is sometimes limited or twisted to conform to the changing ideal of who is "American." Again, I'm totally into this kind of thing, and at the very least I think my enthusiasm has rubbed off (a very tiny bit) onto the students.

In the 13th grade they've been covering Australia and issues of division/racism/etc there. We watched a film called Rabbit Proof Fence about the "lost generation" of aboriginal kids who were taken from their homes and raised as "whites" in British camps. This has kind of stemmed into a larger discussion of how societies define rights and citizenship, as well as what is 'wrong' and 'right' or 'good' and bad' for society.

There's one more week of school before Fall Break, and I think after break I'll be switching up some of my classes, though not sure how many. There are still teachers who I haven't had the chance to visit their classes, so I need to find a way to visit some new ones.

Exploring:
I've also been traveling/exploring quite a bit in the past couple of weeks. Here's a brief recap of some of the places I've been going.

Last weekend I spent in Luxembourg, which by far has been one of my favorite European cities. It's definitely a rich place. I saw more than one Aston Martin on the street. I think those are issued with your Luxembourg passport. I was there Friday night for a Researcher's Night, a European-wide festival celebrating the scientific research going on in universities across the continent. The University of Luxembourg had a number of tents set up in one of the city's main squares and the various departments had booths displaying the kinds of research they were doing. Many of the booths were interactive, so you got to play around with programming robots, microwaving CD's to see them crackle, balancing bowling balls on robots, and mixing liquids like red cabbage juice, baking powder, and olive oil. In the right combination, it's mildly combustible! There was also a hue after party with lots of free champagne! Saturday I was able to see most of the downtown area of Luxembourg proper (it's both the name of the country and the capital city). The duke's palace is right downtown and quite cool looking. There's also a ton of ruins of the old forts and monasteries, as well as the ramparts and walls built by the various ruling kingdoms. Luxembourg had a period of rule by just about every major European power, and each one built it's own fortifications, but when Lux became it's own country, it was required to take down a number of them. Otherwise it would have been essentially impenetrable. Which is pretty cool. Also, there's free champagne just about every where.

I also spent this past weekend in Frankfurt. Friday evening I met up with a fellow Fulbrighter, my roommate from the orientation in Koeln. We cooked dinner and hung out, and then met up with another Fulbrighter from Ireland for drinks. It was nice to compare schools and living situations and make sure we were all on the same page. We also talked plans for the 2 week fall break coming up. Then Saturday Liz (my Frankfurt Fulbrighter friend) and I checked out some of the museums downtown. The Museum fuer Moderne Kunst (modern art museum), had an exhibit of photography taken by a number of famous fashion photographers. It wasn't their printed work, rather a lot of backstage or "off-camera" kinds of shots. There were photos of lives of models and photographers throughout the 90's (one showcase was about a photographer's circle of friends and their struggle with HIV). So that was kind of cool, for the most part, although I'm not totally a modern art kind of girl. Some of it I didn't quite get... But overall it was cool. Saturday evening we stumbled across a Federweisser festival where we ate dinner and sampled Federweisser, which is a kind of young wine made from grapes that aren't good enough to be really good wines. All of the wine festivals were this past month, and now there's basically the left over wine festival...? Anyway, it was pretty fun since there was live music and people dancing. There was also a ton of festival food like Flammkuchen (really thin pizza), Reibekuchen (potato pancakes with applesauce), and crepes!

Travel Plans:
So Fall Break starts at the end of this coming week, and we have just over 2 whole weeks off from school. Unfortunately Fulbright is being skimpy on paying us our whole paychecks, which has limited my traveling options. However, I've collaborated with Liz in Frankfurt and I think we're going to head to Belgium for a couple of days this upcoming weekend. After that I may go visit friends around Germany for a bit. Then the following weekend Liz and I are going to head to Freiburg potentially so that we can do some exploring on the border. I was sorely tempted to do some extreme traveling to Italy or southern France, but I figure I'll probably enjoy that more after I've had a couple paychecks and been doing some tutoring on the side to earn some spending money.

Other Misc.:
Overall life is going pretty well. I'm connecting with teachers at my school and with other Fulbrighters in the area, so I have something mildly resembling a social life! :) I'm feeling more settled into my town of Eberstadt, and have gotten more familiar with Darmstadt as well. I hope to have a way to post pictures to you all soon!!!

Lots of love to all of you!

First Week of School

2010-09-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

I've now completed my third official day at the Schuldorf Bergstrasse. I'm also officially moved into my apartment in Eberstadt. Pictures forthcoming. Of many things, not just my apartment.

But on to the first (half) week of school! I went Monday morning and joined in on the English Department meeting for the month. It was basically about me, which was a little weird. I'm apparently kind of a big deal? :) There are two Annette's in charge of me at the school, one teaches English full time from grades 8-13 (they have more grades here than in the US) and the other teaches part time in the high school and part time in the English-language international elementary school on the same huge school campus. The first Annette with whom I've had contact all summer via email introduced me to the crowd and handed me over to the second Annette. This second Annette did some training on how to best utilize teaching assistants in foreign language so she is in charge of helping me sort out a schedule. She asked around the room who would be interested in utilizing me in their classes, and just about everyone said "me, me, me" which was nice. So she created a sign up sheet for those who wanted time from me. After that I followed the first Annette off to sit in on her two afternoon classes. They were both younger kids, what we would call middle school-aged, but they were very enthusiastic and thought I was super cool :) As an exercise Annette had them break into groups and write down questions to ask me about where I'm from and what kinds of things I like to do. Then they did a large class interview with me, writing my answers down as I spoke. It was pretty fun.

On my second day I showed up for a tour of the school campus and to find out more about the State International School which is one of the two elementary schools on the campus. Unfortunately - and most embarrassingly! - I was late. This is a big no-no in Germany. But I discovered that morning that the street car that stops in front of my building does not run all the way to Seeheim-Jugenheim each time it passes. Apparently every other car in the mornings stops halfway to Seeheim. Funnily enough, that stop was called Frankenstein. There's actually an old Fort Frankenstein which is part of the forthcoming picture montage of my time thus far in Germany. Anyway, I was listening to my ipod just jamming along in the morning on what I thought was my way to school when all of a sudden the street car stopped and everyone got out. It took me a moment to look around and realize what was going on, so I had to hurriedly jump out. Then I had to wait another 15 minute on the next street car to come through that was headed in the direction of my school. :( My first major faux-paux of this German expedition, but fortunately it wasn't too bad. I got to school about 10 min late, and apologized profusely to the second Annette. She was extremely understanding and took me on my tour regardless.

The tour itself was really helpful. The whole school campus has over 40 buildings that belong to 6 different schools. I may have gone over this briefly before, but there's a kindergarten, a German elementary school, the state international elementary school (where the language of instruction is English), then the three German high schools: hauptschule, realschule, gymnasium. Because the gymnasium offers a curriculum that incorporates a significant amount of European issues (economics, government, etc), the gymnasium has the status "Europaschule" which means they get more money from the state and it also looks good for those students who take such courses. This is mildly equivalent to the IB program in the US, but not quite. At any rate, I was able to look at a map as the second Annette pointed out all the important buildings to me. There's quite a bit of construction going on there at the moment since the school is ever-expanding, which means some walkways are closed off and there's a lot of mud. However, overall I found it relatively easy to get around. Once I was able to look at a map and visualize in my head where things should be, it made it a lot easier.

After the tour, I walked through the international school with the second Annette and met some of the teachers there. Many of them are British or American since the language of instruction in this school is English. I went along to two of the classes for an hour each to see what it was like. Since it was elementary school I was completely unfamiliar with the kinds of things they generally learn. I was also out of my element in terms of trying to identify ages of small children. I thought they were all 7 when in fact the class I sat in on was mostly 11 and 12 year olds...go figure. I'm sure they would have all been offended had they known. But they're just so little! While it was interesting to see, I'm not sure how much of my time I want to spend there. With so many teachers whose native language is English, I'm not exactly as hot a commodity.

Today I worked with some of the older kids, which was so far the most enjoyable. In a couple of the 8th grade classes the theme of the moment is Florida. Today's classes did exercises related to Space Camp - and I proudly told them all my sister had attended for a number of years. I also described what it was like to see the shuttle launches, in addition to describing things I did that were specific to Florida or that kind of environment. They thought I was super cool after I described wakeboarding :)

So other than getting an inflated ego here, I've also been navigating German bureaucracy. I had to go register with the city this afternoon - on the one afternoon a week they are open later than noon. Now that I've completed this step, I need to go to the city's department for alien residents or something to that effect to obtain a residency permit to live and work here for the next year. Since I already have a contract with my school, I don't have an open-ended work visa of any kind, but I show my contract and am then allowed to live here and work this specific job for the dates specified in my work contract. Unfortunately this office has even more limited hours than most. They, too, have "extended" afternoon hours on Wednesday, however they apparently don't answer the phone during these hours since a recording told me I'd have to call back between their regular open hours (7:30-12:30). Man I want to work in bureaucracy some day. Seems sweet.

Alright well I'm off to bed for now. Another day at school tomorrow, and I'm not used to waking up this early! (6:30am...ugh)

Endlich eine WG!

2010-09-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

Well I just returned earlier today from Köln, from the Fulbright orientation there. It was a long three days with lots packed in that I will describe in a moment. But first I'd like to celebrate that I finally have an apartment!!!!! I confirmed the place on Monday as I was traveling to the orientation site, and am thrilled to be moving in this coming Saturday. The apartment is about halfway between Darmstadt and Seeheim-Jugenheim, in a town called Eberstadt. I'll be living with a girl my same age or a bit older who studies music part time, plays piano for several theater groups part time, and teaches music lessons part time. Needless to say, she's busy! We clicked immediately and I found her quite easy to understand and to talk with, so I'm looking forward to getting to know her better. I'll be posting the address as soon as I move in this weekend! Along with pictures, of course.

So, on to the orientation. I left Monday afternoon form Mainz to head to Köln (Cologne auf Englisch). The train ride was nice and quiet until we arrived in Bonn (nostalgia kicked in) and the train conductor announced that due to a serious accident of some kind on the tracks between Bonn and Köln, all trains between the two cities were canceled immediately and were being re-routed to their final destinations. Those of us who still needed to travel on to Köln would have to get off the train in Bonn and travel the rest of the trek on the subway. Fortunately for me, I know Bonn quite well, and I know the connections to Köln quite well. Unfortunately, the subway takes quite long to reach Köln (in comparison to the 30min the train takes), and it was going to put me at the main station after the time at which I was supposed to meet the Fulbright group in order to be bussed over to our lodging. All of the materials I received over the summer from Fulbright warned that we had to be on time to the meeting point in Köln because public transportation does not reach the Haus Altenberg where we were going to be lodged, and a taxi ride there from the city center costs about 50 Euro. Eek!

As I waited in the jam-packed subway station (with all the hundreds of people whose trains were canceled) I had to call Fulbright to let them know I wouldn't make the meeting point. Fortunately the lady who answered gave me alternate directions from the Köln main station with a train that ends quite close to Haus Altenberg, making the taxi ride a much more reasonable 16 Euro. Then, while in one of many jam-packed subway cars between Bonn and Köln, I happened to be standing next to a girl holding the same Fulbright leaflet in her hand, looking up the number to call. Again on the platform in the main station (after the 1:15min long subway ride in the most cramped subway car I've ever experienced) the two of us ran into another girl with Fulbright brochure in hand, looking a bit lost. I'm also quite familiar with Köln man station, so I sheparded both girls to the correct train connection, and we were able to split the taxi and paid only 6 Euro a piece! For an unfortunate afternoon of traveling, it turned out rather well. We arrived only shortly after the bus did from the main train station with all the other Fulbright students, just in time to hear the important parts of the welcome speech.

The place we stayed, Haus Altenberg, is a Catholic organization that caters to young people in conjunction with the huge, old cathedral it was built alongside. It was quite like a youth hostel, although with very sparse furnishings. All our meals were provided - reminiscent of high school cafeteria days - and the rooms we stayed in were doubles - reminiscent of college freshman dorm days. Quite smartly we were roomed with same gender students who had assignments in neighboring cities. My roommate was also named Liz. She's form Chicago, graduated from Colorado College, and will be spending the next year in Frankfurt (am Main), only 30min away from Darmstadt. We were also divided into groups for the various sessions we attended on German school systems and the roles of Fulbright Teaching Assistants. These groups included all the other students in each Bundesland. So my group was everyone assigned to Hessen. There are about 9 of us in total, and we made a plan to meet up once a month or so for dinner in each person's town. It'll give us all a chance to travel a bit and to keep up with each other.

Most of the sessions we attended were...mostly review for me? Is that diplomatic enough? Much of it covered methods of teaching that I've spent the last two years studying in much more depth than can be offered in two days worth of class time. However, I've never taught English as a foreign language, so there were still some helpful tidbits here and there. It was certainly useful to see for the first time what kind of material German high school students actually learn. The instructor assigned to our group is a teacher from Marbug, also in Hessen, who was able to speak at length about the ins and outs of Hessen's school system (since each Bundesland legislates its own education systems).

Overall it was a good few days chock full of Fulbright info. We learned how to get in touch with the network of Fulbright Alumni here in Germany. They had great tips on traveling, and since it's run by young people who have just returned from their various years abroad, it's quite in touch with what those of us currently abroad are in need of. There's even a message board for Fulbrighters who want to travel Germany. We simply email the local chapter and say we're planning on being in such and such a place at such and such a time, and they ask around to see if any local alum are interested in hosting us or touring us around the respective cities. (My response: sweeeeeet!)

Okay, well I should wrap up. I'll be moving in this weekend to my new place, and will be sure to update from there. Love to all!

Apartment Update

2010-09-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

Well the apartment hunt hasn't been as easy as I had hoped. I've viewed only one place so far and spoken with ten to fifteen people about places, and so far nothing has worked out. Luckily I have three appointments on Saturday to go look at places, so surely something good is on its way! Other than apartment hunting, I haven't been doing a whole heck of a lot. I was in Munich over the weekend with some friends from Florida. Any of you on Facebook can check out some pictures I'm tagged in there. I still haven't broken out my camera, so apologies on lack of picture updates!

Broadcasting from Germany

2010-08-29T10:42:00.000-07:00

Viele Grüsse aus Deutschland! Now that I'm in Germany for another year abroad, this time for a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship, I'm returning to more dedicated blogging in order to keep up to date with as many people as possible.

I arrived in Frankfurt last Tuesday and have been staying with friends in Frankfurt area. Over the weekend I went down to Munich to visit my friend Michala, my roommate from Orlando, who has been backpacking Europe with her sister and some mutual friends of ours. It was great to see a face from home so quickly. I've been to Munich a handful of times now and it was great to have the feeling that I knew my way around. However, my map reading skills apparently still leave something to be desired. I'm only about 85% accurate.

The past week I've also been doing some serious apartment hunting. So far I don't have a place of my own, but I think I'm close. I viewed a place last week Thursday, owned by a woman in her early thirties. She has a completely furnished room for rent in her apartment which is just a short walk from the city center. I'd have my own balcony, and while the apartment is a little small (I'd only have access to my room and a kitchen/dining room area), it's very well setup with new appliances, fresh paint, and nice furniture. The bedroom is a quite decent size as well. The meeting seemed to go well, so I'm waiting to hear back from her on her decision.

In the meantime I'm still searching for other places. I've traded what feels like hundreds of emails with potential roommates and apartments. Since Darmstadt is a university town, many of the places available are open only to enrolled students, which for the first time in my life I am not! I'll be sure to update with more news on this front as soon as I secure a place, including photos. I have this coming week to continue the search, and then Monday begins the Fulbright orientation in Köln (Cologne). That lasts through Thursday of that week, and then I believe I start work the following Monday, which would be September 13th. However, I still do not have exact details about my work situation since the Department Head of English at my new school is currently leading a student trip to Italy here this past week or so before the school year starts up. I'm hoping to hear tomorrow morning (Monday), if she is indeed back in the office then.

I'll work to update more regularly than I have in the past :) to keep all informed on how this year of adventure is playing out. Much love to all of you, in all the corners of the world that you live! Feel free to comment, email, etc. at will.

2nd year of grad school

2009-08-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

Not sure how many still follow me here. I'm chronically incapable of posting regularly, so I don't blame deserters :) However, it is the start of a new school year, so I will make a concerted effort to update more frequently.

I spent my second whole day in my new office today. I am now in Lane Hall. It is a much older building than Shanks, one of the original buildings when Tech was first built as a military academy. It used to be a barn apparently...which says nothing about the value of those banished to the office space now inside it. My two office-mates and I actually volunteered to be banished here so that we could have a larger office, our own printer, a window to the actual outdoors, and out own temperature control. Granted, temperature control is limited to opening the window or turning on the window AC unit...but we like the feeling of control regardless.

Classes start officially on the 24th of the month, but orientation events start happening the week prior. I find myself with a full plate even before the semester kicks off, though. I managed to get myself elected both English Graduate Student Organization President and the President of the German Language Club. As a result, I'm organizing much of the English Department's orientation activities, including a social get-together of some kind to welcome all the new students (all 35 of them!).

I'm also continuing to work on my syllabus and schedule of assignments for the two sections of Freshman Composition that I'll be teaching this semester. And my new favorite...my thesis! This is the year of the thesis.

It is also the year of season football tickets! The season kicks off with a Chik-fil-a sponsored game in Atlanta where Tech plays Alabama the first weekend in September. So I shall be traveling to Atlanta to attend the game with friends. After that we gear up to face Marshall the following weekend at home. As soon as I get my first paycheck, I'm going to have to run out and buy a ton of Tech gear to represent :)

So all in all, it's looking like life is about to get pretty crazy. On the horizon though sit a number of possibilities about what I'm doing with my future. At the moment, I'm considering three options. First, I'm applying for a Fulbright Scholarship to teach English at a German high school for next year (Sept.-June). I will also be submitting a small handful of PhD applications. I don't have the schools entirely narrowed down yet, but I'm thinking UNC-Greensboro and UC San Diego are on the list.

Okay well that's it from me for now. Lots of love from Blacksburg!

newness

2009-03-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

My apologies for being MIA these past few months. I've been horrible about keeping up to date with my blog. This semester has been really crazy for me. The workload is intense. The first semester lulled me into a false sense of security haha. Teaching has been a great learning experience, but it's been a ton of work too. I never believed the person who told me that I would potentially spend 4 hours planning for every 1 hour of class time. ...but sometimes I spend more than that. I had initially registered for 3 electives. I decided against an education course I originally pre-registered for and instead signed up for a literature of the absurd class. But I ended up having to drop that class because 3 electives, teaching 1 class, and meeting regularly for my teaching advising group takes up a heck of a lot of my time.

Right now I'm working hard to keep up with everything because I've been sick for going on 5 weeks now. I've been to 3 different doctors and on 2 different antibiotics but nothing seems to help for very long. I thought I had kicked it over the weekend, but for whatever reason Monday night I started getting worse again even though I hadn't finished my latest antibiotic. So who knows what's up. I'm calling yet a different doctor who was recommended to me by a woman in my program who's lived here with her family for a good number of years. Of the past 3 docs I've seen 2 were at the student health center here at Tech that's free for me, and 1 was a nurse practitioner whom I saw in a doctor's office that had late hours Wed night for walk-ins. So hopefully if I sit down with a real doc at a real doc's office and tell my whole sad story, someone will do something different. I'll certianly keep everyone updated.

Okay well I'm off to bed. Friday is finally here! I just have to teach which is a light day. Much love to everyone!

A New Semester!

2009-01-23T20:48:00.000-08:00

So I haven't updated since last year! (haha) Anyway...

It's a whole new semester, so here's what I'm taking:
Composition Pedagogy (learning theory and history of the teaching of writing)
Language and Gender (really interesting theory class)
Digital Humanities (first few classes have been painful...I may not survive, but I will be learning XML)
Literature of the Absurd and Grotesque (really cool class, so far we've read "The Overcoat" and "The Nose" by Gogol, next will be Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky)

I am also teaching for the very first time this semester. My class is Freshman Composition, the second course in a sequence of two, and this section is labeled Writing From Research. It is MWF 1:25-2:15. I've had my first two classes already, a first day of just introductions and reading through the syllabus, and a second day with an actual lesson plan! I'm really excited so far. I was tragically nervous my first day and talked too fast and didn't say everything I wanted to because I forgot a couple of things in my nervousness. However, it appears none of my students were the wiser. My second class earlier today went soooooo well. I have such a little motherly instinct towards my students; I want them all to do so well!! I'm working hard to be strict in terms of discipline but relaxed enough to foster open discussion, and so far it actually seems to be working! I've spent my Friday evening reading through the first short writing assignment I gave them which was just to tell me what their expectations for the course are and how I can best respond to their writing. I keep reading all these horror stories about indifferent professors or high school teachers that they've had previously, and all I keep thinking is, Oh you poor babies! I want them all to have a much better experience this semester in my English class. The majority of them are engineering majors or in the sciences, and they're all convinced they can't write well or that they won't be receiving A's in my class. I'm hoping to pick morale up a bit on Monday and go from there.

I'm currently undecided on the Education plans I had previously. I'm thrilled with the teaching experience I'll be receiving through my TAship, but I'm starting to think piling Education classes on top of English classes will have me rundown, exahusted, and useless in no time. It's only the end of the first week of class and already I have enough reading to fill my entire weekend, plus lesson planning. So I dropped the one Ed class I was enrolled in for this semester, and I may need to talk to the Ed people and give up the place they gave me in their program.

I can't seem to make up my mind from day to day. At the moment I'm thinking I'd really like to pursue my PhD after I graduate. Grad school is a pretty good place to be, and given the economy at the moment, a much more secure place to be than a public school teacher. Also, with budget cuts, TA's will probably be taking on more teaching responsibility since we're cheaper labor than adjunct faculty for courses like freshman comp or intro to writing. Although who knows, that could just be this month's decision...

You all have also probably heard about the horrible stabbing that took place this past Wednesday night. It's really quite sad, and a lot of people around here have been reminded of the violence of 4/16, but for the most part campus is pretty calm. I know I've made phone calls and emails to various family, but I'm just fine. I wasn't even on campus when it happened. Thoughts and prayers do go out to the familes of those involved and those who witnessed the tragedy. The incident occured between two individuals who knew each other, and it appears the intent was not just random violence. Authorities haven't released or don't yet know why it occured, but they do have the young man in custody who commited the crime. A lot of people are starting to question the safety of the Virginia Tech community, but I have to say that I still find this community much safer and much more close knit than any I've lived in recently (certainly more so than Orlando!!).

On a more positive note...I am going to start an application this weekend to work as an intern in the International Office of the University of Aachen in Germany. It's actually a paid internship which is awesome, and it's quite near Bonn! I would get to work with international students in the office there, organizing social and university events, assisting in acclimation to the university and the area, etc. I'm pretty excited about it. We'll see what happens. I don't have hard plans yet for the summer, all I know is I have to work somewhere to pay the bills haha. I'd love to go do something exotic like travel to Africa to visit Josh's (Sarah's finace) family in Tanzania and work in a village doin who knows what for a month. However, that kind of thing requires spending money, and I need to accomplish the opposite. So we'll see.

Alrighty, it's my bedtime. It's been a long first week of school. As I think I always say...I'll try harder to update more regularly! Much love to all of you!

time for an update

2008-11-11T16:33:00.000-08:00

Okay so it's been awhile since I updated last. I feel like I say that every time... But I have a lot to fill everyone in on. So I guess I'll just jump in.

-I applied to the English Education MAED program. I had several excellent recommendations from my professors that worked in my favor, and I received an invitation to come interview. The interview was last Thursday and it went really well. The two women interviewing me talked as if I was already accepted to the program. I just need to get back to the program director about some details I need to work out with my English MA advisor. Doing two Masters degrees at the same time will definitely up my classload, but I think it will still be manageable. Then, when I graduate, I'll have a Masters of Arts in English, a Masters of Arts in Curriculum and Instruction with a postgraduate professional license for English (grades 6-12). Not too shabby. We'll see how well the theory gets put into practice next semester!

-I've been playing some flag football with girls from Cru (Campus Crusade) and we ended our 'season' strong with 2 wins and 2 ties, so technically undefeated! We had our first playoffs game this past Sunday and we won 39-0! Our team name is the Punishers and it was defintely fitting :p We have our next game this coming Saturday, if we win that one we'll move to the championship game on Sunday. Pretty exciting. It's given me an opportunity to meet some girls outside of my program and grad school. Autumn, one of my friends from my program, and I both have enjoyed a respite from the same people we see all day every day in all of our classes.

-I'm helping out with the German Club here on campus. I think I'm officially the Publications Officer or something like that, but I'm not sure. We've been organizing an info session that will be tomorrow night on study abroad opportunities to Germany (sadly none of them apply to me). But it's been great to interact with some of the professors in the German department and other students with similar interests.

-I've also been volunteering to work with the Cranwell International Center on campus at Tech. They handle all incoming international students and have events like movie nights and a community outreach program that has families sponsoring students, showing them local traditions and just regular American family life. We just had an event the other week, a social where we invited international students and their community member sponsors to come to an evening of Appalachain specialties. There was a potluck of all kinds of chili, breads, pies, and sweet tea, and we even had a caller for some square and line dances, and a band to play music. It was a lot of fun. At the movie nights I've learned how to operate the big popcorn machine (reminiscent of the even bigger ones at the movie theaters with the red and white striped awnings/roof). I burned my first batch but after that I got the hang of it. This coming Friday we're putting on a Dance of Nations where representatives of a good number of countries are performing traditional dances and whatnot with traditional music. As always, there will be yummy food, a potluck I think with specialty dishes from all sorts of countries that we have students studying here from.

-I should be working on all sorts of papers as well. I have a draft of my 25 page research paper on German children's literature due next week (I have a total of 3 pages at the moment...). I think I'm in this phase of denial about it all, but I need to get in gear so I'm not spending my whole Thanksgiving break on papers. I'm finalizing my syllabus though, so I'm getting a good feel for the class of Freshman Composition that I'll be teaching next semester. I even have my time slot! Monday/Wednesday/Friday from 1:25 to 2:15 (sadly only 50 mintue class periods...so useless).

-Next semester's schedule is looking kind of busy thus far. Here's a run down of the tentative course list: Composition Pedagogy, Digital Humanities, Practicum (this is a once a week meeting with my teaching advisor about my comp class), Topics in Language: Language and Gender Constructions, Literature for Adolescents, and Psychological Foundations of Education. The first two are required for my English MA, the last two for the Education. And I'll be teaching one section of Composition.

Well I think that's all that is new with me. I'm headed up to DC over Thanksgiving to see my parents for the first time since August! I'm looking forward to that. I think I'll be working on Pumpkin Pie and Apple Pie recipes... Don't look now but occasionally I do have domestic tendencies.
Much love to all!!

up to my neck....

2008-10-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

Well...the semester is getting harder. I'm sitting at Panera trying to get through the massive load of reading I have for this week: 4 essays by Gretel Ehrlich (who I totally recommend reading, she's great), 8 more sources for my German Children's Lit paper so I can write up an annotated bibliography by Thursday (so far I've read 2 articles, I have 4 books and another article found, still need to find 3 more sources), and a hefty excerpt from Orientalism by theorist Edward Said.

I spent all day yesterday at a conference on the teaching of composition called the Spilman Symposium at VMI (Virginia Military Institute). It was actually a really great experience. The conference draws English faculty and administration from a lot of surrounding universities and public school systems. This year's topic focused on bridging the gap between expectations of students in high school versus college English classrooms. I got in contact with the English Dept Chair from Blacksburg High and I might look into doing an internship there next semester working in an English classroom. I'm excited by the possibility of getting experience in the classroom in general next semester. I begin teaching my first class, a section of ENG 1106 Writing From Research, the second half to the 2 course sequence most entering freshman are required to take at Tech. I've said for a really long time that I might want to end up teaching high school English, so this will be a great way to see if I really like it. It also turns out that several of the teaching practice and theory courses I'm taking for my GTA position also qualify for required courses needed to gain Virginia state teacher's licensure. So there's a good chance by the end of my Masters I might be able to get certified to teach 6-12th grades.

I'm also continually adding to my skills set. This past Thursday night I learned how to operate one of those big popcorn machines like they have at movie theaters with the red and white striped roof and popcord basket that all the popcorn springs from. I did manage to severly burn the first batch and bleed on a later batch after cutting my finger...but I have no blood-communicable diseases, so I think we're all safe. This was for a movie night hosted by the Cranwell International Center on campus. We watched Curse of the Golden Flower, a pretty big budget Chinese film that I really enjoyed (although it was soooooooo depressing). The scenery and costumes were extravagant and absolutley beautiful. It gets a bit bloody at points, but overall not bad if you don't mind subtitles.

This coming Thursday I'm helping to put on an Oktoberfest with the German Club. I'm in charge of baking something yummy and dessert-like (they obviously don't know me very well). I had originally wanted to do an Apfelstrudel but I've looked into multiple recipes and they seem pretty intricate. I might resort to cookies of some kind.

Friday I'm working for the international center again helping them with a Fall Social for the exchange student friendship program that Tech has. Tech draws a TON of international students, a large number of them for graduate study, and a large number of those students bring spouses and children. So Tech has a friendship program where Blacksburg residents and other Tech students can sign up to kind of sponsor an international student or their family. Basically they befriend them, show them around town, maybe invite them to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving which many international students have never done before. I briefly debated doing this but I just don't have the time.

I do have an English conversation partner though, young person from South Korea. I think we'll be meeting this coming week some time. This is another Int'l center program where Tech students sign up to meet once a week or so with international students to help them practice their English in a very informal, friendly environment. So who knows, I might learn a few words of Korean as well.

Well this has been a fun exercise in procrastination. I should get back to all my reading and subsequent responses to my reading. I can't wait to see family up in DC for Thanksgiving and then the other side of the fam over Christmas break. I miss Florida warm weather already! The high today was only 54F :(
Much love to you all!!

hip deep in it now

2008-09-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

Well, I forget what week this is, but the semester is well under way. Each week I start thinking earlier and earlier how long the week feels. Last week my first Monday class hadn't even started yet and already at 9am that morning I was thinking "Man, this feels like a long week." I've got quite a lot going on this week, a lot going on with life in general.

Tomorrow I have to meet with my Lit Research professor to discuss my research topic for the 25pg paper due at the end of the semester. I believe I want to do something with German Children's Literature with hopes that it will combine all of my interests. And with any luck I'll remember enough of my German so I'll be able to read some kids' books! Tomorrow I also have to turn in my paperwork in order to attend a symposium at VMI (Virginia Military Institute) on teaching composition. That will be the third weekend in October. I've also got football practice for the powder puff team that I joined through Campus Crusade. Our first match is Sunday some time, so I'll update on how that goes.

Tuesday I have my second meeting of the conference planning committee for the English conference we're putting on in the spring some time. I get to start observing a class of freshman composition this week as well. We enjoy being relieved of one class period of my practicum class in order to balance out the fact that we have to observe a class "preferably" three days a week (according to my practicum professor). I really see how that time comittment is evened out...

This past Saturday I attended a leadership seminar that really had nothing to do with leadership and more to do with how to get a job after you graduate with an English degree. But I received a lovely certificate of completion for this leadership seminar that will certainly go on my CV. It was sort of useful, though, at the very least a chance to network with some alum who also all graduated with English degrees. We even had a 'business etiquette' luncheon (at which I did fabulously, something I'm sure my grandmothers will be thrilled to hear).

To keep you all updated on the latest with my volunteering at the International Center: I signed up to be matched with a conversation partner. This is someone you take under your wing a bit and show around, teach the ways of US and Blacksburg to, along with practicing English conversational skills. There exists the option for me to hold a once weekly English conversation group which would be a much more formal time commitment. I would have to set up a specific time each week, an hour, and supply a mini-lesson plan on local culture or customs. I think I might wait til next semester to take that on, though, since I don't want to over-commit myself. I also signed up to help out with a bunch of events they have going on this semester, so I'll let you all know how those go.

I need to head to bed to rest up for the week. Love and hugs to all!

International students and German certificates

2008-09-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

Well it's almost the start of my fourth week of this grad school adventure and already I'm reorganizing life plans! I met with my advisor Thursday to discuss the possibility of adding a certificate in German to my degree. It would consist of two classes in German literature and history and then 3 credits of writing a paper that will be larger than an average class paper but much smaller than the scope of a thesis. I'm also trying to find a way to get back to Europe over the summer. The English Department hosts a short summer program in England which would be cool. It's a bit expensive, but you definitely get your money's worth out of it. I'm currently browsing ways to have a work permit for the UK to possible stay on in England and work for the rest of summer at some kind of PR or publishing place. Something to do with English that would earn me enough money to cover my expenses and maybe have a weekend or two to visit Germany! It's quite difficult to earn money in Germany as a non-EU citizen. There are internship opportunities but rarely paid since there are tons of laws against non-EU citizens taking potential jobs from EU citizens. Particularly US citizens. But I'm still on the look-out.

More immediately I'm saving my pennies to visit my friend Sophie in Bonn, Germany over New Years. I'm hoping the flight costs me less than $600. We'll see what I can save from TA paycheck and savings I have from graduation. However I'm not ashamed to solicit help for my travel expenses as Christmas presents!

Classes are going well. We're getting into actual assignment creation and teaching techniques in my Practicum class. We're designing lesson plans for certain chapters of our textbooks, etc. Literary Research has me researching topics for my project that will take the course of the semester for the class and be a large part of my grade. I'm thinking something to do with grammar, English, and German language history. Not sure what yet. My Library Research class has been a big assist to this end. Last week we worked with some software called EndNote. NEVER will I have to look up MLA citation again. Thank goodness!!! It's a program where you can save all your research data and citations, and it's interactive with Word and can automatically insert citations and works cited pages for you! I love it already. Many thanks to VTech for buying that software for us poor grad students.

I need to start drafting my first essay for my Genre Studies class (on the Essay). Our first workshop is the beginning of October and I'm anticipating some struggle with this genre. We'll see. My tenative subject matter is what has been infamously nicknamed "the German Stare." The theory is that eye contact in social contexts varies between cultures, and in Germany it is not uncommon to exchange eye contact (and plenty of it) in contexts like the bus or train. It can be disconcerting as an American to sit in the bus or train and have people staring at you. But you can feel free to stare right back. The people-watcher in me came out tenfold. :)

My apartment and roommate situation is working out wonderfully. It feels like home already. I put up some curtains yesterday which helped a lot too. Daisy, the puppy, and I get along quite well. I see Uncle Steve and Dusty quite frequently which is nice. He's always there to provide dinner to a poor grad student! I visited Sarah and Josh in DC last weekend. The drive back and forth was not as long and boring as I had anticipated. I think my tolerance for lengthy car trips is increasing.

Other news... My parents are wonderful and bought me a fancy new phone to go with our new Verizon cell plan. Any and all who have Verizon, feel free to call us now, it's free! And I was able to keep my same phone number which had been my only stipulation for changing cell providers. I have a horrible memory for remember phone numbers and after having the same number since I was 16, I have no clue how I would memorize a new one.

Okay well I have to get to some studying. I've procrastinated all weekend by playing around downtown yesterday during the gootball game, and going to the gym today. Sadly I worked out too long and now I'm tired and sore. I thought it would make up for the fact that I slept til noon...*sigh* oh well! Much love to all!

P.S. I published and noticed I failed to clarify the Intl Students bit of the title... I went Thursday night to the International Center to watch the movie Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). If you can stand to watch subtitles, this is an EXCELLENT movie and I recommend it to anyone. It's about the intertwining lives of a few members of the Stasi and East Berlin citizens in the years during the lovely DDR. I met a few international students there which was exciting. Some of them speak German yay! haha And I'm looking into signing up to take part in a conversation practice program for international students who want to practice their English with other students. Should be fun. The atmosphere at the intl center made me homesick for Bonn!

A long first week...and it's only Wednesday

2008-08-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

Well I've almost made it through my whole first week of graduate school. I only have one class tomorrow and then there's a lovely 3 day weekend. (Would be 4 day if schools in the state of Virginia recognized Labor Day as a holiday. I think they should considering the guys in Congress who are our neighbors in DC made it a national holiday. Go figure.) But I digress. Let me recap my first encounters of graduate class for you.

Monday began bright and early considering I left the house at 7am in search of parking. I was assuming the first day would be bustling with people who didn't quite know how everything worked (myself included) so I left plenty of time to make a few errors. (Me? Never!) I arrived at the English Department building by 8am after browsing two parking lots to finally find a space. I was able to get my keys for both my mailbox and office, as well as chat up our very nice English Dept secretary who I'm sure makes the world go round for us. I spent the next hour or so getting settled in my office and taking stock of what was provided for me: an iMac which I share with my officemate Melissa, a desk and chair - office furniture that must be more than 20 years old, two large bookcases which actually still contained some interesting books, two floor lamps - yay we don't have to use icky overhead lighting! - a minifridge, a very old and used coffe pot, and a mini-microwave. Melissa and I consider ourselves quite lucky that we have a minifridge and microwave considering no one else in our vicinity does. Our neighbors to one side do have a couch, but I think that would encourage me to relax and eventually nap. Which may or may not have positive results on my performance. I have recently purchased an air freshener and some clorox wipes which I feel will make all the difference in helping us to settle in.

I made it to my first class which began at 9:30, a class simply entitled Practicum. This is a pass/fail class that all first year Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are required to take. The goal of the course is to help us prepare our lesson plans and syllabus for teaching freshman composition in the spring. We had a reading and short response due that first class. Somehow (and I still haven't figured out how) I read the wrong book! I'd like to point out that I spend quite some time ensuring I read the assigned chapters quite thoroughly and writing a detailed response. I didn't want to start this program off with some of the reading (read: skimming) skills I had honed in the course of my undergraduate degree. Sadly, I discovered in the first few moments of class when everyone else pulled out a different text that I had been mistaken. Thus, I borrowed someone's copy and skimmed before I was able to participate in the discussion. I explained the mistake to the professor and she just smiled and said no worries. Thankfully! Although it was a rather upsetting start to the day, I took a deep breath and moved on.

On Mondays I have this horrendous 5 hour break between my first class of the morning and two later afternoon/evening courses. I decided to stay on campus during it (which I later regretted) in order to be productive rather than going home and napping (which is what I really should have done). I went and ate in the Squires Student Center which has a Sbarro pizza place and an Au Bon Pain (kinda like Panera Bread) place. It's crazy expensive though, so I foresee packing my lunch for the most part. I later wandered halls of my department building to get familiar. I discovered one staircase takes you directly to the 3rd floor, don't pass Go, don't collect $100. Since my office is on the 2nd floor, I shall stay away from this staircase. I even later felt super important as I directed a young freshman girl to a correct staircase which would take her to the 2nd floor and comforted her with the knowledge that even I had initially made that mistake.

I spent quite a bit of time goofing around on the internet and with my fellow students that afternoon. It was rather boring to spend so much time in my office. But my 4pm class finally rolled around. This one was Critical Theory. It's one of the handful required for first year English MA students. It seems like it will be a pretty decent course. Theory is always tough stuff to get through since so much of it is just this dense, complicated, stuff. But the professor is really laid back and he makes the class enjoyable. I had this class again today and we sat around talking about how to justify our existence in the field of English for most of the class. Why do people study English and why should they continue to? We tendered a few answers but didn't come up with anything we thought would convince the university to give us more funding.

My class after that at 6pm is one that is just Monday nights and it ran until 9pm. This course is called Contemporary Pedagody (pedagogy being the study of teaching and consequently learning). This is another one required for all English first year GTA students. It is also part of a certificate program we can earn in addition to our MA which is called "The Future Professoriate" certificate. This is my largest class since it has students from all disciplines (although the English dept is the only one that requires it of their GTAs, anyone else takes it just from interest). The professor to this class is a hoot. She was one of the presenters during the workshop last week and I loved her there. So I'm hoping our class is going to be good. Although by the end of class Monday I was already exhausted considering I left the house at 7am and did not return until 9:30pm that night. I ate dinner and did some reading and finally gave up and crawled into bed by 10:30pm, an early evening compared to the summer!

Tuesday was a lighter load of classes with only two, and the first doesn't start until 11am. Although I again arrived a good 2 hours ahead of time on campus. Thankfully so, since it took me nearly an hour to find a parking space. I spent the rest of the time doing some required reading for the class meetings I had that day as well as catching up on the reading I needed to do for the previous morning's Practicum class which I had done wrongly. The 11am course is Genre Studies, for this semester the subject is the Essay. This was the one and only elective course I was allowed to take this semester. Everything else is a requirement of one kind or another. The professor for this Essay class is the kind I enjoy the most. He's personable and he really cares about his students, but he sets the bar extremely high in terms of what he expects from us and the sheer workload we'll have going on. We have to write 2,000 words (at least) to bring to class each time it meets (thankfully just once a week) on the reading that we did for that day (usually about 50 pages). We'll be learning a bit of the history of the essay and how it has developed along with some contemporary essayists, and composing two of our own essays. It's sort of a creative writing class in the sense that there will be workshops for our essays in class. I'm excited about that portion of it. I'm a bit intimidated by the workload though, so we'll just have to see how it goes.

The second class on Tuesdays (and the only course I have Thursdays) is Literary Research. This course covers a history of English and American literature as well as works with ways of researching. We'll have to write a lengthy research paper for this course as well as do several projects on the research process, but the professor said he wants us to use this class to start work on our areas of interest for our thesis. Apparently most students end up using this preliminary research in their final project and thesis. This course goes hand in hand with another one we're enrolled in that I have on Wednesdays at 12:30, Library Research. The librarian who runs that is really nice and knows EVERYTHING about the library. This course is just for first year English graduate students. She'll be helping us conduct our research for the Literary Research class, as well as figure out how to navigate the library as a grad student, where to go, and how to get into our thesis topics.

So that's my six classes. Other than that, I've just been running around trying to get unpacked and organized. The weather has been dismal the past two days. It poured down rain all morning and is FREEZING! Granted, it's above 60 degrees outside, so it's just my thin Florida blood trying to cope. But I had a sweatshirt and a coat and was still cold. I also spent half the day soaking wet which didn't help. I did get the chance to sit in my office and put my shoes on my heater to try and dry them out in between classes. I was almost tempted to put my pants on there too, but didn't feel confident my officemate wasn't going to walk in and be weirded out. Besides, we have a window that looks out into the atrium of the building and people could see in if they really wanted to. I don't want to start a reputation as the GTA without pants on in her office.

Okay, well that's all I have the energy for tonight. Many thanks to those of you who stayed with me this long. This post turned out to be a novel in the making. Much love to you all!

a new adventure

2008-08-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

Well this one might not involve a foreign language, but I'm in a new place again and starting a new school again. It's kind of like being back in Bonn, but I understand everyone! :) I just finished up my Teaching Assistantship orientation workshop stuff for the week. It's been pretty boring, although there were some pretty good tips about teaching and how to connect with students. I never realized the syllabus was such an important piece of paper... I now have more respect for my professors, it's an intense job to get ready to teach a class. All I have to do as a student is show up. But I'm really excited about class starting. I've had the chance to socialize a bit, but this orientation had close to 600 people in it, so hard to make any lasting acquaintances. However, I did manage to sit down in the middle of a group of chemistry PhD students, and once they found out I was an English major they asked me what every other word in the presentation meant. (For example, pedagogy, and ombudsperson.)

Tomorrow I will be moving into my apartment in Foxridge. Well, my second apartment. The one I was originally going to move into turned out to be a dump. The place was pretty gross and there was an outstanding balance on the previous lease of the apartment, so I was unable to sign a new lease with the remaining girls living there. So that was sad. I moved all my furniture in only to move out a few days later. But now I've found an apartment with a fellow grad student, a 24yr old female, Becky, who is a vet student. We have a 2 bedroom place. I've already met her parents and they seem like really nice people. She seems to want the same exact stuff I do from a roommate, so I'm thinking it's going to work out great.

Friday I have my English Department orientation stuff, so I will be able to report on meeting my fellow English MA students and GTAs. That's the day I'm most looking forward to. We'll all have most of the same classes this first semester, so I'm thinking this will most likely be my core group of friends. I went today and filled out my tax paperwork and had my picture taken for the department website. The building just happens to be in the middle of the ROTC dorms and buildings, so as I was walking to and from, there were plenty of uniformed ROTC members marching drills on the lawn in all directions. We'll see how that goes!

I've quite enjoyed living with Uncle Steve, Tucker, and Dusty this past week or so. I got to send Dusty off to his first day of high school today. And we get to pack Tucker up and help him move into college this weekend. I'm pretty excited, I loved moving in as a college freshman. It's like the whole world is open to you and lying at your feet. And you get lots of free t-shirts.

Well I'm headed for bed. I've had to wake up at 6am for the past two days! And I'll do it again tomorrow to pack Dusty a lunch and send him off to school for his second day! :) I love school...

Update on Life

2008-06-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

Well....not sure if anyone ever checks this anymore, but here's the update on what I'm up to. I've been working at Victoria's Secret in Jacksonville ever since I got back from Germany (or around there). I found an apartment here through Craigslist with two nice girls. Michala and her roommates aren't all that far away, although our schedules tend to be so totally opposite that I haven't been able to see them as much as I had thought when I initially moved up here. And that's pretty much been life.

I graduated (well walked across the stage anyway) from UCF the first weekend in May. That was not quite as life-changing as I had thought it would be, but it feels good to be done. Not having to do homework is an odd feeling. I sit around every evening thinking, man did I get my homework done yet? The actual paper stating that I've earned my degree has been a whole other story. When my credits transferred back from Bonn to UF (since I did the semester exchange through them and not UCF) somehow my Poetic Identities class showed up as an Incomplete rather than an Audit. Turns out Germany records an Audit as a class with "No Grade" which somehow translated into Incomplete. Since the state cannot award a degree when the transcript reflects an incomplete anywhere, I've had to wait until Summer semester to have my degree awarded. Unfortunately I had to enroll in this pointless class simply to fulfill the requirement that a student has to be enrolled in credits in the term of graduation (stupid rule that gets them $100 in pointless credit fees). However, my transcript from UF was just updated today so I should be on my way to no longer having any issues with getting my degree. I'm skeptical though, there's always issues, especially when it comes to the bureaucracies of universities.

In other news, I decided to accept Virginia Tech's offer of a teaching assistantship that will pay for me to go there for my Masters degree. I move up there the beginning of August into a complex called Foxridge. I'm a little worried about the workload I might have because I have to take 18 credit hours my first semester. Apparently there's some rule that GTA's (Graduate Teaching Assistants) have to have taken 18 hours before they can teach, and in an effort to let us teach in our second semester rather than having to wait for our second year. I guess we'll just see how it goes.

So that's my life right now. I'm missing Germany, but I'm looking into options for teaching over there when I get done with my Masters or more immediately maybe an internship next summer.

Prague...an adventure

2008-02-16T10:29:00.000-08:00

So I went to Prague this past Sunday through Wednesday, and it's been one of my favorite cities so far! I love the streets and the buildings, and the castle is beautiful. Since it had minimal destruction during the World Wars, all of the original buildings are still standing and the streets are mostly still cobblestone, very cool. We got in Sunday afternoon and by the time we got checked into our hostel is was just about dinner time. We got directions to a good pizza place down the street from the guy at the hostel desk, but unfortunately never found it. However, we did find this amazing Tex Mex place called something like Billy Bob's. And they surprisingly had great food! So for all of use who hadn't seen American(ish) food in months, it was great. We also visited the Irish pub that is advertised all over the city, but it's not as great as you might think given all the hype.

The next day we walked EVERYWHERE. We went into this one natural history-type museum that I couldn't spell the name of much less pronounce. But they had an interesting exhibition about feet and shoes. They had shoes from first known civilizations to today, including a boot from Shaq. After they we wandered around the city, over to the Charles bridge, and then up the massive mountain that the castle stands on. Everyone else tried to convince me it was only a hill and that I had no room to talk because I was from Florida, but I swear it was a mountain.

That night we found a tasty Czech restaurant to eat at. I had some kind of bread dumpling things and pork steak with a creamy sauce that was delicious. They even put cranberries and whipped cream on it! We also sampled some Czech beer which I thought was good. I had no idea that Budweiser came from the Czech Republic! I looked at the sign and though, what are they doing importing American beer here when there's is so much better?? Silly me. Apparently there's a city called Budweis in the Czech Republic where it comes from. Go figure.

On our third day we visited a couple of other museums, one of them this kind of cool torture museum. Normally I'm a bit squeamish about that kind of thing, but this was more informative and interesting than about people getting mashed up. They had a decent amount of history along with it. Other exciting things included attempting to watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire the Czech version. Couldn't really understand it, but it was amusing. Also watched The X Factor which is like American Idol a bit. It made me feel better that people in other countries also look like idiots on their respective national televisions. It's not just Americans.

In other news, I packed one of my suitcases today. I have to be all packed up by Monday morning so I can have my room inspection, and then I leave first thing Tuesday morning. I can't believe almost six months has flown by!!!

Koelle Alaaaaf!

2008-02-05T14:46:00.000-08:00

Well this past weekend was the culmination of Karneval the peak of celebrating in the Rheinland, and it was a whole lot of fun! It kicked off Thursday with Weiberfastnacht where the tradition of women storming the city hall and cutting off all the men's ties was carried out. Then there was much partying in the streets (I was home doing homework). The celebrating carried on throughout the weekend. You couldn't go anywhere without seeing people dressed up in crazy costumes running around. I sat next to a guy dressed up like a huge chicken on the bus, felt like I was commuting with Big Bird.

Then Monday, which is called Rosenmontag, was the largest parade and party of all. I travelled to Cologne with a handful of friends to go watch the parade. We had to leave hours ahead of time to get a train there and waited an hour and a half or more in our spot before the parade started, but it was all necessary in order to be standing at the front of the crowds! We were all dressed up, of course. I took an 80s theme with leggings under a miniskirt, legwarmers, and the neck cut out of a sweatshirt, then topped it all off with a side ponytail. If nothing else, I looked quite silly which was all that was required to fit in! Some other great costumes displayed by my friends were Kermit the Frog, a giant flower complete with petals that detached via Velcro and said He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not on them (adorable!), a giant broccoli (my favorite), and a pair of Bavarian twins in appropriate Dirndl attire. The funniest part was that Sophie was one of the girls wearing a Dirndl, and she is actually a German girl from Bavaria...so it was fitting.

Sadly the weekend was not a respite from homework. I am currently working on two papers, one for an online class in Literature of the South examining the role of upper-class men in Kate Chopin's The Awakening and how they are incapable of fulfilling their women. Another is for my 19th Cent. American Poets class here in Germany comparing the styles of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

The fun part though, is that I'm going to Prague! Whoooo! I leave Sunday the 10th and return Wednesday the 13th. We found an incredible deal with Easy Jet airline and a cool looking hostel so that all travel and lodging expenses for the trip are only about 50 Euro.

Other than that, I took my first step in going home today. I had to fill out paperwork to un-register myself from the city of Bonn. (I swear unregister is a word in German, I have no clue what the English equivalent would be.) I figure I need to start packing by the end of the week since I need to have a room inspection only a day or two after I get home from Prague in order to fulfill move-out duties of my dorm. I leave on a Tuesday quite early so Monday is the last administrative day and my dorm admin don't like Mondays. Hence why I have to do the above on Thursday or Friday beforehand. I don't have to be entirely packed up, but they recommended I have all of my things off the walls and most of my things out of the desk/wardrobe. We'll see how that's going to work...

Okay much love to all! I'll be home just two weeks from today!

Check out the new picture album!

An Update on Life

2008-01-25T10:36:00.001-08:00

Well nothing too exciting has been going on here. In fact I spend a large majority of my time doing homework these days. No travel plans in the immediate future. I had been contemplating a trip to Scotland or London or both, but it's looking like that'll be a bit too expensive to handle for right now. My feeling at first was that I had to travel a million places before I went home, but now I'm thinking this isn't necessarily going to be my last time in Europe, so I don't need to cram it all in right now. All of the graduate programs I've applied to have graduate semester abroad opportunities in places like London for English study. And I'm still considering applying to grad school here in Bonn if grad school back home falls through. So we'll see. Just another 3 1/2 weeks before I'm home for good!

down to the wire

2008-01-09T10:39:00.000-08:00

Well Christmas break was lovely, I got to spend some time with my family and friends, and spend a whole two weeks not speaking German (for which I am paying now...haha). But I am now back in Bonn and set to get started on a new semester of classes online through UCF and finish up my classes here in Bonn. There's a good chance I've bitten off more than I can chew with being enrolled in 21 credit hours total with both the Bonn and UCF classes...but it's only for the next 6 weeks. So I'm hoping I can just knuckle down (or whatever it is that Dad always says) and get it done. I'm still working on adjusting to the time change. I slept too much yesterday and was up until 6am this morning, then finally fell asleep until almost 2pm this afternoon. Good thing my class at 10am was cancelled! But tomorrow morning classes resume as normal at 9am so I better be ready.

Travel interests for my last six weeks include Amsterdam, Vienna, London, Prague, and anywhere really in Italy. Not sure how much time and money I will have to devote towards these goals. I'm hoping to make 3 of them come true. Not sure which 3 yet, but I'll keep you all posted. Okay well I better start on the massive amounts of homework I need to get done by Friday... much love to all!

i've got this domestic thing down...

2007-12-20T05:55:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-14T06:20:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-12-07T02:12:00.001-08:00

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!

2007-11-27T11:24:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-11T12:13:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-11-04T06:11:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-28T06:22:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-10-21T04:50:00.000-07:00

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....

2007-10-18T06:05:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-08T03:17:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-30T02:41:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-09-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-09-08T04:03:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-06T15:15:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

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.