ich studiere an universität. geil.

After months of bumming around Europe and listening to my friends back home complain about their homework, my semester has officially begun.  On Mondays from 10-12, I have class on Campus II, which is about a half mile away from the main buildings of Campus I.  That half mile, however, is traversed on top of a mini-mountain that’s covered in mud and has crazy freezing winds.

A view from the pathways looking onto Campus I (main campus).  It was really dreary and raining this morning (big surprise).  If you look really really close at where the skyline meets the mountains in the background you can make out the windmills that power the entire city.

A blurry photo looking out onto the Tarforst area.  I’ll try to get back up there on a nicer day to get some clearer shots of the vineyards and windmills.

The first class I had this morning was “Einführung in die Didaktik und Methodik,” which is actually an education course on how to teach German as a foreign language.  I only knew one other girl in it, whose German happens to be pretty bad, so we ended up helping each other out a lot.  After we were done she invited me over to her dorm so that she could cook me some authentic Korean food.  I don’t know if it was just her, or if it’s their culture in general, but she was incredibly courteous and friendly to me, far beyond what I’m used to.  Not only did she cook me lunch, which I’m proud to say is the first real spicy food I’ve had my entire life, but she also gave me these bangin’ socks from Korea as a gift for letting her borrow a bunch of my DVDs (for her to practice her English with).

Everything from Korea is cute.

After that I blew a few hours reading in the cafeteria and then headed off to my first Phonetics course.  It was like Hooked on Phonics for college students.  We basically learned how to pronounce words for two hours.  Maybe after four months of mind-numbing word repetition my accent will be less “American”.  As it is now, I’ll go into a store and try to talk with the shopkeepers in German and they’ll just respond to me in English because it’s obvious what my “Muttersprache” is.

Another cool thing today happened during my bus ride back down to the city.  I was minding my business like usual (reading a book) when I heard someone speaking English with an American accent (I can’t get over how something so familiar can become foreign to my ears in such a short time).  It turns out that this kid from Lancaster, Pennsylvania had been in Europe for eight years playing basketball on semi-pro teams, and had been living in Trier since September.  I talked to him for a while about Europe, how different it is, what we missed, and then for the second time in the past month (the first being in Amsterdam, where I met this awesome kid from Oregon…which I’ll go into more detail about (hopefully) in my next post), I said goodbye to him, knowing we’d never talk/see each other again.  It really made me miss the permanency and comfort of home.

To all Clarkies:  Have fun at Spree Day (drink one for me).  You can’t tell through the Internet, but that sentence is laced with bitterness and jealousy.

fotos - finally

After returning from my first class of the semester, I decided it was time to stop putting off uploading my photos. You’re welcome. Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, or you could just tell me how amazing of a photographer I am.

“Pictures are awesome!”

heisssss

I had never heard of this invention before. I pride myself for understanding, at least on a marginal level, modern electronics/gadgetry. But for some reason, I never knew such a simple appliance existed that would make my life infinitely easier.

The Electric Kettle. Der Wasserkocher. Or, as I keep accidentally calling it, the Watercooker. That picture looks nothing like the one I have, but you get the idea. For $20 American, I can now boil almost a gallon of water, in my room, in under 3 minutes. Amazing! I’ve gone through my entire life having to wait patiently over a pot of water on the stove while it slowly creeped to a boil. Now when I have to cook pasta, I boil my water in the WK first, and it saves me easily 10 minutes.

Entrepreneurial ideas:

1. Open an awesome greeting card company in Germany.

Trust me, it’s necessary. You should see the shit I’ve had to send to my brothers for their birthdays.

2. Flood American department stores with Electric Kettles in hopes of creating a new Tea fad.

Profit.

happy easterrr

This weekend I kick off the great “Washington D.C. Reunion 2008″. I’m meeting up with some friends (from Montana, Denmark, NYC, Germany) that were in my class last semester in the great city of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

I figure that I’m safe since it’s Easter weekend and most of you will be praying already. At least you should be. Easter is one out of the two times a year that Catholics attend Church.

Also, I accept free donations of Reese’s Peanut Butter products in honor of the Lord.

trier!

This is a short post as I only have 5 minutes left in this café. I won’t have Internet in my room for a few weeks, so don’t expect to hear much from me until then (I know, it’s really upsetting).

So far what I’ve seen of the city has been beautiful, although a bit boring and touristy in comparison to Bonn. I’ve started all over again, making new friends, finding the supermarket, familiarizing myself with everything around me.

My German is getting better, thank god, and on Wednesday I start my classes at the University. I’ve found myself immediately translating my thoughts into German, which is awesome…yet weird. Progress? Anyways, now I must go cook myself lunch. Like a big girl!

nach köln!…und koblenz..?

Friday was a loooong night of Stammtisch (see above picture, and below). Every week the Goethe-Institut kids go to a bar in Bonn Zentrum to chat (supposedly) in German, and just do what the Europeans do, meaning: drink a crapload of beer. The usual haunt is Salvator, a “München” bar that serves beer by the liter. I’ll let Pilar and her boyfriend demonstrate.

Afterwards a few of us decided we wanted to go out to the Diskos, but after being repeatedly rejected because they were “full” (meaning we had too many guys in our group, and not enough impressionable young girls), we just ended up walking around the city, making several stops at McDonalds for peeing/food/warmth/filet-o-fishes.

A lesson I learned after walking for three hours: my gray flats…not so good of an idea. Why?

Kaputt.

I fell out of bed around noon and decided it was time for my maiden voyage to Bonn’s sister city, Cologne (or Köln, as it’s called in German). We took the awesome regional train, for free, into the main train station. I was with my Swiss-Italian friend Andrea (pictured above), and a Croatian boy named Robert, who is a little crazy.

The Cologne Hauptbahnhof. The shadowy man in the foreground is Robert (making a typical Robert face

When we got to the city, the two guys were giving me shit about what we were going to do there. All I had wanted to see was the Dom, but they kept fighting me on it. These are the types of guys that would rather visit a mall than a museum. After fifteen minutes Andrea finally submitted, much to my surprise. We didn’t really know where we were heading to, but figured the train station was central, so we could just walk around the surrounding area and find stuff to see. When we walked out of the station door into the city, bam!, there it was in front of us. It seriously took my breath away. You always hear about European cathedrals, or see them depicted in action/romance movies, but unless you’ve been in the presence of one I don’t really think you can understand the sheer magnitude and beauty they possess.

The train station was built around it, so that when you exit your entire view is blocked by massive black stones. Apparently because of the industrial revolution and all the smog it caused in the city, the cathedral turned an odd black color.

We were able to walk inside it, and be all touristy. The architecture reminded me a lot of the National Cathedral that I lived across from in Washington D.C., except, you know, about 750 years older.

It has so much history, and for an American, it’s hard to grasp what these buildings have seen.

Here an American soldier reads a warning sign in front of a burnt out German tank on the steps in front of the Cathedral, where I sat only two days ago.

We walked around the rest of the city, which I can only describe as Newbury Street, x1000, and old as dirt. It was nice and all of that, but nothing in comparison to what I had just seen. The only interesting part was the massive mall (all designer clothing, mind you) that had a live DJ scratching in the Diesel Jeans section.

The three of us finally decided to leave around 4, and headed off again to the Hauptbahnhof. We went to the board to find our train, and I let Andrea take the lead. First mistake. We got on the train to “Bonn Beuel”, waited the normal 25 minutes expecting for our stop to come. Half an hour later, still nothing. Also fishy was the fact that we were following the Rhein River the entire time. We all swore that we didn’t see a river the entire ride there. But Andrea kept saying “Ich bin sicher, ich bin sicher. Kein Problem..” An hour later, no Bonn.

On the train, showing off the “trust me” face.

It became obvious that we were not heading towards Bonn, but instead, judging by the signs outside the train, towards a city called Koblenz. We had no map, and for all we knew, Koblenz was on the Swiss border. I painfully asked some women in German how far Koblenz was, only to have her answer me back in perfect English that we were about 4 stops away.

We arrive. I question how we ended up in some random city in Europe.

It was late, not even worth it to really look around, so we just hung there for about 15 minutes waiting for another train to come and bring us back home. On the way down, no one checked our ticket, which is common on trains in Europe, but as luck would have it that was not the case on the way back. The crazy conductor yelled at me in English, because obviously I was just a sleezy American trying to gank a free ride. She then charged me 15,00 Euros (the cost for my student train pass for all of Bonn and Cologne, for an entire year, by the way). As I watched the boys take down a few Berliners, I dreamt of strangling the Italian.

That old lady in the background was talking about me in German. She thought I couldn’t understand. Always hating on and underestimating the Americans.

Finally, 4 hours and 200 kilometers later, I was home. Well, in Bad-Godesberg. Good Enough.

krank and cranky

Sorry about the lack of posting during my time here in Bad-Godesberg, but I’ve been sick in bed for almost two days now. There’s nothing like having a cold in a foreign land where they don’t know what Sudephedrine is.

mein zimmer

I was so pumped when I got my room assignment upon arrival. After having lived in hell-holes for a few years, and especially after having had to share a room with two other people last semester in Washington, D.C, my standards were understandably lowered.

When I got there (after having taken a car, a plane, a bus, and walking), I did the whole check-in thing, until I realized that I had forgotten my huge bag with all my clothes on the airport bus. It was only the first day and I had already done something idiotic. The front desk had to call the bus company and find out when that specific one would return again. It turned out I only had a half hour, so I booked it back to the central station, ran outside of it, and the bus was just about to leave. When I went in to grab my suitcase, all the people were laughing at me.

After finally returning, bag in tow, they showed me around a bit and gave me my keys. The dorm building isn’t big, and there are only 10 rooms or so, which made me feel even worse when I got lost trying to find #26. Turns out that Germans number the ground floor (what would be our “first” floor) as 0, so if you’re looking for a room that begins with 1, e.g. 12, it would be on the second floor. So, in reality, I’m on the third and have to now haul ass up three flights of stairs a day. It’s good for my figure, I shouldn’t complain

Notice the box of smacks. That door leads to my little deck. That’s where I check the temperature every morning by walking outside because I’m too lazy to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit.

This is the view from my deck when I wake up. I love Europe.

wo bin ich?

I’m finally starting to get settled here, two days full of jet lag later. I have a long list of topics I plan on covering this week, but right now I’m just trying to learn enough German to feed myself.

I leave you with a picture of ducks outside of my dorm. This is one in a (pathetic) series.