Travels in Hessen

I think spring is offically here in Marburg. The flowers have been blooming, the sun has been shining, and I have no motivation to do my homework. Yep, it's official. Unfortunatley, I still have another two months of schooling while I keep reading about friends who have only two weeks left. *large sigh*

But on the upside, I am seeing some really cool things. My friend Ruth and I go traveling together and a few weeks ago we went to another castle about an hour away from Marburg. I'm a little fuzzy on the history but basically this castle was built a long time ago with the latest addition added sometime in the mid-1800s. We had lunch in the courtyard and were able to see the postman deliver a package. Big deal, you might be thinking, BUT! after he rang the bell, a woman let down a basket on a cord from about the fourth story and then pulled the package up. How quaint. Of course, I wouldn't want to walk down all those stairs either. So, we paid our three Euros and got to tour the castle. The first room was full of armory including chain mail from the Crusades (sw) and a sword about 800 yrs old that a diver pulled from the Lahn River.

The remaining rooms had a lot of pictures of the family, biblical scences, furniture, the typical castle stuff. Of course, there was some royalty in the family, and St. Elizabeth's daughter was in the cloister there. If I haven't explained this before, St. Elizabeth is the patron saint of Marburg who made a big impact on her world, and she follows us around Europe. We have found her in many of the towns we visit and even in Vienna. I think one of the coolest things about the castle is that the family still lives there with their three children. Can you imagine a childhood of living in a castle?

Last week was the start of university classes. Wow. Long sigh. Three of my classes don't even start until this week, and I already am intimidated. On Mondays, I have a pronunciation class with which I hope to lose part of my American accept. The first period was spent going over long and short vowel sounds and a bit of the phonetic alphabet. A little langsam (boring) but alright. I understood what was going on, and that is a confidence booster. My BCA grammar and literature course start this week, so I had most of Tuesday off except for a British-German relationship from 1875-1945. Understood some of what occurred during class. Wednesday brought Ezra and Nehemiah and a developmental psych course. Didn't understand much in either of those two courses. Thursday was a fun day with a philosophy course that I won't be keeping, 17th century literature (in English tee hee), American travel writing (won't keep that either), and etwas anderes... That was about 28 credit hours worth. I am really appreciating the American education system right now after having to sit in classes for two hours at a time, not having the attention span to do that normally, and being forced to pay attention because I don't understand the language anyway.

It's been a rough week. I've spent a lot of time walking so I can work off the extra stress food I've been eating but this also gives me time for reflection. Believe you me, I've had a lot to think about. Sometimes I wish I someone was here to talk about these things with me, but the silence is also forcing me to minimize myself and push through to deeper things, move beyond myself and realize how small my place is in the world.

Every first weekend of the semester, the students of the university have a large party in the Hoersallgebaeude, which is the biggest campus building. Paula, a girlfriend of one of my housemates, invited me to go to this party with her, her bf, bf's brother, and another friend who I've seen around the house once or twice. I accepted this invitation not having anything else to do on a Friday night. After a couple of glasses of something akin to a white russian and Beck's (a german beer I don't really care for), our group set out with beers under their arms. Mind you, most of my mates are already a little betrunken (drunk) while I only had a small glass of the white russian. All three levels of the Hoersallgebaeude were filled with students; each level had a different type of music. The second level had a live band that wasn't very good, the first level had more American rock music, and the ground floor had techno. (Yes, I'm using the German version of stories). It was an interesting night. I saw a lot of marijuana being smoked and was informed that as long as you're carrying less than 6 g you won't be prosecuted and even if you are, it'll just be confiscated. I learned not to argue with drunks who will one moment tell you they're drunk and then defiantly declare they are not the next. And that Germans are interesting techno dancers. I was out until five in the morning before coming back, eating a bowl of cereal, showering, and then getting about an hour and half of sleep because we were going to Frankfurt the next day. It was an experience I probably won't repeat again but now I can say I have seen what German student life is about or at least one aspect. I need to get off now and go work on the student part as I have assignments that are going to take me awhile to complete.