I hit a wall yesterday. I really, really would like to be at home right now. Everyone is getting done with their courses while I am only half way done with mine. And mine are a joke. I have classes two days a week with each class being an hour and a half. I'm sorry but I miss homework. I miss regularity. I miss having a schedule and something to do. Interesting fact: the average BA graduate from a German university is 28. Twenty-eight! No surprise. There is no motivation to get anything done. Their tuition is ridiculously low here and you can get financial aid similar to our FAFSA if you want it. I'm sure next year is going to kick my butt between Biochem and Anatomy and all the gen eds I've been saving to get done in Germany (ha!) and being a senior and applying for schools and just life in general. I miss my mom, my family, my friends, my dog, my bed, my pillow, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, my car, my school, and food with flavor. I'm tired of Germans smoking, feeling attacked because I'm American, people thinking I'm rich because I am American, not having baking soda on the store shelves, not being able to buy economy sized groceries, and not being able to speak the German language (well, my English is going out the window as well).

My life as far as I can tell: a couple of trips in May, one of which will be to Colleen (yea!), rushing to get hw, a referat, a hausarbeit, and then a couple of tests. Maybe a travel to England. Try to squeeze everything into two suticases, one of which the handle doesn't work on for some reason, and then a flight home. Oh, don't forget about studying for the DAT and the GREs and deciding if I should take a year off between graduation and further education. And if so, what to do. Do I know what I want to do with my life? Uh, not really at this point. *grumpy face*

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.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

Well, yesterday was St. Patrick's Day and being in Europe, we were able to locate an Irish pub called Molly Malone's that had a live band and a lot of people. It was wonderful. One of the guys in our group has family in Ireland, and he went decked out in a full leprechaun outfit complete with an Irish flag cape thingy. Most of our group doesn't drink but we tried Guiness beer which isn't too bad as far as beers go. Many of the songs played I recognized although much of the time you couldn't hear what was going on due to the volume level. Oh well.
I'm entering my final week of Sprachenzentrum classes with a test tomorrow that I should be studying for. Can you tell how worried I am? :) And then next week, we're off to Vienna for five days. But don't think that all life is fun and games. I still understand only about 50% of what is going on in me and sometimes can't tell if people are speaking to me in English and German. Oh well. Such is life in a foreign language.

Bis spaeter!

I am aware that it has been some time since my last post but I make no apologies for this. Life has been busy: new things are being discovered, new friends are being made, and new ideas are being explored. My mastery of the German language has been something of a slow uphill climb, everyday a little better but sometimes barely noticable. I feel as if I have exhausted all my German vocabulary and have nothing new to say, but as I keep meeting different people, I can fool them with my improving sentence structure. :)

My language intensive at the Sprachencentrum began about two weeks ago. My teacher is a very beautiful red-headed German who always looks like she stepped out of a magazine. But then again, many Germans do so I guess it's nothing too out of the ordinary. I tested into one of the middle levels of German, although I think I could have been placed a little higher. I'm learning things but don't feel it will be adequate to prepare me for university classes. A few other BCA students in my group and I are challenging ourselves with vocab lists and conversing in German as much as possible. Conversing in German is sometimes a tricky thing to maintain; they are a lot of Americans (Canadians and Staters) in Marburg and many of the Germans speak decent English so it is easy to want to switch to English instead of challenging myself with German. But I think I am keeping a decent balance between the two and will continue to improve in my German speaking abilities. On Wednesday night this past week, Josiah, another BCA student, and I entertained two Italians from our Sprachencentrum course and enjoyed a night of food, wine, and good conversation even if we didn't always understand each other. It has been also interesting to hear German spoken with Italian, French, and Spanish accents. In someways, though, it makes me feel behind the rest of the world as I am definitely not as fluent in multiple languages as some of my classmates are.

The weather here has been as varied as the people within it. Somedays will be absolutely beautiful with the sense of spring in the air. Others bring a cloud that rests upon the city all day. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it snows a little but never enough to cover the ground. Sometimes there will be blue skies with the sunshining but it will be raining. Go figure.

My tours of Europe began this weekend; a four hour train ride brought me to Strasbourg, France and one Colleen Hamilton. One of the first things to take me by surprise was the way men and women greet each other with a kiss on both cheeks. I can see why Colleen has gone through so many romances since getting here! ;-) The next may have been the differences in archtecture despite a lot of German influence in this town and being so close to the boarder. The history of Strasbourg in amazing! The catherdral here is bigger than Notre Dame and has a clock that has been working on its own since sometime in...well, a long time ago. John Calvin also had a church here. Where does BCA come up with these locations for us to study?! You read about these people and events in history books and then when you go back, you're like, "There? Oh, I've been there. It was just down the street from this little pub I would go to on Saturdays. No big deal."

My first week abroad

I've been in Marburg a little over a week now and things are slowly getting better. There's always that surreal element when you step into another culture but mine was doubly difficult having just studied in Nicaragua and replying to the Germans in Spanish. That was interesting, let me tell ya. I also caught a nasty cold somewhere between here and Chicago which has left me a little short of medicine and with a runny nose. The language has been a bit harder to understand than I was hoping but I am slowly easing into the culture and making myself understood. Fortunately, most of the Germans speak just enough English and I speak just enough German to be understood, I think.

I live in Forsthof Nebenhaus, which is in the Upper City. I have a surprising large room that I'm not entirely sure what to do with but hope to make it my own in the near future. I've located a few grocery stores and bakeries which keep my stomach happy although I am looking forward to eating in the Mensa once classes begin. Marburg is a beautifully, historical city. I believe someone told me that parts of the Schloss were laid in the 900s. Oh, if walls could talk. There is also a charming garden near the Schloss that has allowed me to spend many a happy hour reading or just enjoying the sunshine. The hike up the hillside is worth it. No, I haven't tried my first German beer yet but some people from my house and I are going out this Friday to a pub that plays Irish music. I think this is enough for my first posting. Until later!