Well, I survived the month of September. Orientation was pretty intense, with 30 hours a week of language instruction and homework on top of that. I have a feeling that the only things I did during September were eat, sleep and learn. However, it proved to be very good for my German because I have found myself using a lot of the things that we learned in my course in the past month and a half since the course ended. We also had some interesting regional fieldtrips as part of the course, including a week-long stay at a study/retreat center in the Schwabian Alb (the local-range of flat-topped mountains), a trip to Lake Constance and climbing the highest church tower in the world in Ulm.

During August and September, I had been living in the center of old town, but it was only temporary rent until the beginning of the semester, when the room's normal inhabitant returned. It was an awesome experience to get to live there, right in the heart of everything, but then I had to move, an dhousing is unbelievably hard to find in this city. Every year at the start of the semester, the university has to set up emergency housing, which basically consists of hundreds of students sleeping on the ground in a gym, to accomodate all the homeless students in this city. It's such a university town that one out of five residents is a university student, and 40% of the permanent population is employed by the university. I never did find somewhere to live for October, so I slept on the floor in a friend's room and subsidized her rent for the privilege.

During the first two weeks of October, Erin and I did a lot of traveling around Germany. We of course went to Oktoberfest because you can't be an American studying in southern Germany and not at least wonder what all the fuss is about. So we went, but we have to be part of a very slim minority of Americans who have gone to Oktoberfest for less than an hour and come out completely and utterly sober. We weren't actually that impressed. But the city of Munich was beautiful (I thought, though a lot of people find everything there too big). A few days later, we left to go friend-hopping. We took an overnight train from Stuttgart to Leipzig (didn't sleep a wink; disaster) and wandered around Leipzig for the day. I really liked that city, and it was my first time in Eastern Germany, despite the fact that this is my fifth time in the country. In the afternoon, we went to Berlin to stay with Beth, a camp friend. It was really awesome to get to see her again. We stayed in Berlin a few days, saw the major attractions, and I convinced them to go see Les Miserables, even though it was the German version. It was absolutely incredible; something I've always wanted to see, and I have almost every word of the English broadway version memorized and listen to it on a regular basis. Berlin reminded me a lot of Russia, not the least because of the city having so many signs and ads in Russian all over the place because a good portion of the population still speaks Russian.

From Berlin, we took another night train (not quite as bad of a disaster) to Paris, where I stayed with a childhood friend from back in the days of southern California. Besides it being absolutely awesome to get to spend a whole week with her, Paris was really awesome. It was nice to get my French warmed up again because I decided to pick up French again this year after not having had a French class for very nearly 4 years now. I loved all the museums (especially the student discounts!), the parks, the cathedrals...I have really developed a habit of judging a city by its cathedrals and parks. For example, I think London is one of the greatest cities in the world because I love the parks. To be honest, I've been to London twice now, and the only things I've ever really seen are the parks. When Mike came to Europe, we met in London because the fare was much cheaper into London than the Continent, and we spent the whole day walking around the parks, which I still remembered from five years before. And Erin and I fell asleep on the grass in a park in Munich while listening to a street musician concert (Germany is the country of fantastic street musicians; in fact, anyone who's even slightly decent can earn 15-20 euros an hour during the summer). And Leipzig had an endless park, Berlin has the zoological gardens...Anyhow, I thought Paris was great, and it made me wish that I had time to study there as well, but there's only so much a girl can cram into her undergraduate education.

The semester started a couple days after we returned from our adventures. My classes are going pretty well. I have three French classes, only one of which is actually lectured solidly in French (and that only because it's taught by a Frenchman), intro to international relations seminar (taught in English and the fastest three hours a week), comparative economic systems (taught in German and leaves me utterly exhausted), and intro to the language and literature of the German Middle Ages (would be interesting but instead is incredibly boring because the professor easily loses his train of thought). I think one of the best aspects of the German university system is that the classes only meet once a week (average length of two hours), so if I don't like a class, I only have to suffer through it once a week (Middle Ages), and I have a week to get through my homework and studying for the next week instead of constantly feeling behind because I would have the class every other day in the US. Also, because the classes meet once a week, I tend to have a little more free time, to the point that I actually study voluntarily. Strangest thing of all, I am actually living up to the proscribed 2-3 hours of studying for every credit hour of the class, a formula I never lived up to (nor had the time to) in the US. Consequently, it's possible that I'm actually learning a fair amount here (besides the utter language immersion), more than I might learn in the US, where my goal is often just to get by.

At the beginning of November, I was finally able to move off of Erin's floor and into a room of my own in one of the 14-story university student housing buildings. It's in the 'student village', across from Erin's 14-story building. Approximately 1300 students live in the student village, so you can imagine that it can be rather loud at times, but the people on my floorare friendly, quiet and clean, so I have no complaints about them. I never have to ask them to turn down their stereos; instead, I have had to go down to the floor below me and ask someone there to turn down his stereo at midnight on a Monday night when it was so loud that I could hear every lyrik from my room, and my room wasn't even directly over his. Anyhow. It was nice to finally really unpack everything and not feel like I was just getting temporarily situated, as I had felt since May, with my longest stay anywhere being two months, which is never quite long enough to want to unpack everything because that would mean repacking everything thereafter. It was nice to be able to hang my pictures on the wall and put my books on the shelf and clothes in the closet. I have developed freakishly neat living habits in the last few months, perhaps because I have less stuff, perhaps because I have more time, perhaps for any other unknown reason. However, the fact is, I've been cleaning up after myself at an incredible rate, and everything gets put away at night, the floor gets swept, the sink cleaned...

I had my first birthday really away from home this year, and I survived being a teenager. Even my freshman year of college, I didn't feel so isolated because I had already formed some close friends, but with the semester here starting so late, having had several different living situations, and not having as many organized university activities as I have in Valpo, I haven't made any really close friends yet. However, my cousin came up from Freiburg for my birthday, and I finally got to talk to my friends and family during the course of the weekend for the first time in almost two months, which of course made me incredibly homesick at first but was still wonderful. Mike sent me flowers for my birthday, which was wonderful, and I cooked a dinner for 8 people. In fact, I've been eating the leftovers all week, and today is the first time I'll actually have to buy some groceries because I cooked for 13, but only 8 could come in the end. My friends here all seemed to pick up on the same idea for presents because everything was related to cooking or calendars. I received two very nice calendars (I love decorating my walls with cut-outs from previous years' calendars--cheapest posters ever!), two wonderful, full-color cookbooks, and a few packages of marzipan-containing foods. I am of course very happy with all of these things and will now have to subject all of my friends to recipes from my new cookbooks. To be honest, these are the first cookbooks I've ever owned, despite how much cooking I do.

It's snowing right now, the second time this month. The Germans said it doesn't usually snow here so early, and it's not so cold that it's sticking, but it makes me feel a little more like I'm back at Valpo because there's a bit of a brisk wind, and I love the feeling of being so alive when you walk quickly through air that's about freezing. I guess that says I've adapted to the Midwest pretty well.

I think this gives a very rough overview of most of my adventures for the last couple months, though I'm sure there's plenty I've forgotten. I'm settled in for the long-haul with my semester now (it goes through mid-February), though I am counting down the days until Christmas like I haven't counted down ever before because I'm spending Christmas with Mike and his family and will get to see my friends at Valpo again! Time is going much faster now that I finally have classes and homework and activities to distract me and keep me busy, and it's much easier to deal with being so far away now that I finally have internet access and a telephone.