Hard to believe it's winter again already. The last seven months have been so busy that I haven't managed to update my site since...May.

In the past seven months, I had an awesome time finishing my last months in Germany. It is hard to believe that I'm not there anymore, in fact. I traveled straight from Germany to my brother's wedding at the end of July. The wedding was beautiful (pictures on my photo pages!). From there, I traveled to my parents' new house, where I enjoyed my two and a half weeks of vacation by getting my wisdom teeth removed and writing a term paper for a course in Tuebingen.

Before I knew what had happened, I was back at Valpo again. In fact, I think a little conversation from early December describes my feelings best. While serving as assisting minister at a Sunday service, the pastor leaned over to me and said, "Where were you a year ago?"

I thought for a moment and smiled as I replied, "I was in Germany." I realized how much I missed it.

He looked at me and said, "Seems a little surreal, doesn't it?"

I realized, no, being here is actually far more surreal. I miss Germany a lot at this time of the year, the quiet beauty of Advent, the wonderful Christmas markets and hot mulled wine.

This semester has shown me just how different my life is here compared to how it was in Germany. I was in and out of the hospital in October for illness, the first time in my life. I've been working about 17 hours a week, writing an honors thesis that's more work than a master's thesis, taking a graduate economics course and two senior colloquiums, and trying to reconnect with life here in the US.

I've applied for a Ph.D. in Great Britain for the next four years, and I should be finding out my results any day now. It's hard to believe how soon graduation is, but I feel ready to move on to the next stage of my life.

I wish you all a happy holiday season and hope you are well.

I hope you are all well and happy wherever you are and whatever you are doing. Take care and God bless!

Hello to all!

It has been a busy semester since I wrote my last update, which, as far as I can remember, was sometime in late April. At that time, I would have been in only the second or third week of classes in my summer semester here in Germany; now I am done. There is such finality in those words.

I leave on Thursday for the States, and it is a gross understatement to say that I'm not ready. Not only did the summer semester fly by much faster than the winter semester, it was amazing, and I'm not ready for it to end. While the winter semester started for me with my month-long orientation course at the beginning of September and continued through late February, the summer semester began mid-April and ended a couple days ago. The semester itself was three weeks shorter and had no long breaks, like Christmas. We had two four-day weekends in May, which I took good advantage of, and then it was time to buckle down for the whole rest of the semester, one long drive to the end.

The brief overview of what I have done travel-wise this semester:
5 days in Budapest in April
2 trips to the Stuttgart Opera
5 days in Prague
3 days for a scholarship conference in Mannheim and a visit to a friend in Heidelberg
9 days with Deb, a friend from VU who got a summer internship in Germany; we went to Ulm, Blaubeuren, Freiburg, saw Star Wars, went to the RitterSport chocolate factory and shopped out Stuttgart
3 days in Marburg to visit Deb
3 days of visit from a friend I met last summer at my program in Russia
weekend visit from Deb, Nick and Marc in Tuebingen
4 days with my cousins in Cologne
2 days in Heidelberg and Mannheim to visit friends

In between all that, I also took my full course-load and did pretty well in my classes this semester. I had my last exam in French ethnography on Thursday, and I have one term paper to write once I get home, during my 3 weeks before heading back to start a new semester at Valpo. After my exam ended on Friday, I just felt such an overflow of emotions and didn't know what to do with myself. I have cried every day except one since Monday, and I expect I'll continue the trend at least until I leave and probably after I get back. But the finality of being done with my last exam was heart-wrenching. I've gotten so settled here, have my friends, have found my way through the system, have survived both horrible times and great times. I've become even more confident in my ability to solve my problems and became very good at budgeting my money and my time to be able to travel so much this semester with the same amount of money as I had last semester.

At this point, I would gladly stay for another semester and only go back to Valpo for a last semester to graduate, but I can't do that. There are many things I could have had if I had stayed, but I can't stay. And while I spent so much of the year counting down to things, ever since arriving back this semester, I've been wishing time would stand a bit stiller. I think it's a law of my life, however, that as soon as I get settled somewhere, I have to leave. I've gotten very attached to my plain, little dorm room. It has really been my home, and now I have to leave it and will never return to it. Somehow, one tends to get more attached to a room here than a dorm in the States. I sat sadly in my room on Monday evening, looking at the rain through the setting sun and realizing how few nights I had left inside it.

Today I suddenly felt I was going to throw up after Mark and I had brunch together because all my emotions go to my stomach. So we sat out on the balcony, and I had my daily cry, and we talked and prayed together. (And I burned the tops of my feet.) But I realized what an amazing life I have, and I was half crying from pain and half from joy at how many blessings I have. I have found people here who really care about me and will continue to care about me in the future. I have found my way through some very difficult times, and I've become a better person. I've been able to trust in God a lot more, one of my worst weak points before. I really do feel that everything will turn out for the best in the end, even though my emotions and lack of ability to see the big picture make me desire to have the easy emotional solution right now instead of being content to wait and trust. But if I hadn't had such a wonderful four months here, I wouldn't find it so hard to let go of everything. I have a wonderful friend to drive me to the Munich airport, and possibly my other two closest friends will be able to come along. It is very comforting to know that I won't have to go to the airport alone.

I'll fly on Thursday to Chicago, where I'll spend the night, and then I'll continue on to Seattle the next morning, arriving in time for my brother's dress rehearsal. He gets married in less than a week now! I'll be a bridesmaid for his fiancee, Megan, which is very exciting, if not extremely overwhelming.

To be honest, the whole idea of going back to America is very overwhelming. I fit in with the lifestyle here wonderfully. I like the mentality, the pace of life, the opportunities. I like being able to speak multiple foreign languages comfortably and having the opportunity to do so. I'm not sure what to do with the idea of driving a car again, speaking English all the time and German far less, living with a faster pace of life and a different currency. I'm expecting a heap of reverse culture shock. I'm afraid it might be very hard for me to adjust back and, to be honest, I'm not sure that I really want to. After all, I'm intending to come back to Europe again after graduating at Valpo. I would really like to get into a Ph.D. program in transnational theory/international relations at the University of Bremen (northwestern Germany, not too far from the North Sea) or, as a second choice, a Master's in East-West (European) Studies in Regensburg (in southeastern Germany, Bavaria). I think I have a decent chance of getting into the Ph.D. program with doing my honors thesis next year at Valpo, but it means I have the next 6 months to write a doctorate proposal with a thesis topic I'd like to spend 3 years researching.

In the meantime, my parents moved to Truckee this month. We now live about 20 minutes from Lake Tahoe, and Reno is now the closest major city. I'm actually quite excited about the move because it's such a lovely area and doesn't have 110 degree summer heat. I'm excited to see the new house, though I won't get back for the first time until nearly a week after getting back to the States because we're driving back from Robert's wedding.

I'm afraid I've been so busy and happy here that I haven't updated my website since late April; I think the most recent pictures are from Budapest, though I've obviously had hundreds of other adventures. I am not sure when I'll have the time to get my pictures online because I don't know what kind of internet access or time I'll have when I get to my new home. I have to get my wisdom teeth pulled, which should knock me out for a few days, and I haven't got terribly much time to write my term paper and get ready to go back to school. I am hoping to get to Grass Valley to visit people, and people are more than welcome to visit me because I don't know how much I'll be able to drive after surgery and since I haven't driven in so long. I think I may simply be very, very tired.

I can only say that I used to be a much better correspondent but that the last two years seem to have gotten busier and busier, and when life's not busy, it's dramatic. Quite frankly, I'm not really a drama person, but I seem to get more than my share of it these last couple years, so I'll just stock all of it up as stories to tell when I'm old and gray to make me sound wise and understanding.

Anyhow, I believe the last time I actually sent out a mass update was...sometime around Thanksgiving. So I'll start there. Our international student colony organized our own Thanksgiving out here in Germany, and I made a "pumpkin" pie with a nutmeg squash, no pie pans, a fork as a pastry cutter/squash masher, and a paper towel to drain the squash after mashing. I hand-ground my cloves, at the expense of my poor finger-tips, and I came up with ingenious ways of actually getting the poor thing to look like a pie in the end (I cooked it in a deep-dish foil pizza pan).

A few weeks after Thanksgiving, I had my first trip back to the States since leaving for Russia at the end of May 2004. Between various delays and airport changes, it only took me 26 hours of traveling to get to Springfield, IL, where I spent the holidays with Mike and his family. My dad came out to the Midwest for New Year's, and my mom and I talked on the phone almost daily. Funny thing is that my brother didn't go home for Christmas this year either because he spent it with his finacee's family in Washington (he's getting married in July to a girl from his college; she graduates in May). I suffered a good deal of culture and language shock when I went back to the US after being away for so long, but I somehow semi-adjusted.

When I returned, my life became a mad dash towards cramming and finals. Because my economics professor was beginning a new job, we finished the course in double-time, which meant we had our last meetings the second week back from Christmas holidays (2 weeks), and our final exam was at the beginning of February, while my other exams were 2-3 weeks later. I read an entire 741-page textbook as well as studying 40-60 hours a week (and still going to my other classes!) for the last few weeks before my exam. I should probably mention that that got me a D+, which is not too bad, considering the average grade was a C, there were only 2 As in a class of 220, and 18% of the people failed the test with an F. However, my home university doesn't understand that I took this exam in German at the number 1 economics faculty in Germany...Anyhow, I then studied for and took all my other exams and proceeded to get incredibly and entirely sick.

In fact, I got so sick that I had to put off my meeting my dad in Europe by 2 days because I was too sick to get out of bed, so I missed getting to see London again and met him in Munich instead. This is probably when I should mention that this has been the coldest winter in Europe in 50 years, and it was an incredibly mild winter back at Valpo. Since I spent the summer in Russia, I haven't had a break from gray and cold rain or cold snow in nearly two years now, so I'm getting a good amount of experience with seasonal affective disorder, but as long as I keep up on my vitamins and sleep, I'm ok. Anyhow, it was about 12* F the whole week my dad and I traveled around, but at least I saw a bit of sun.

Traveling with my dad was neat. We went out to Nuremberg for a day. It was so strange to walk around the Nazi parade area because it now has trees all over it, and it's a kind of public park, with reminders here and there about the history of it. There were children sledding down the bunny hills, and others building snowmen in the flat areas. From Nuremberg, we spent a couple days in Regensburg, a gorgeous Bavarian city halfway between Munich and Nuremberg where I am hoping to do graduate studies to get a M.A. in East-West Studies, studying Eastern and Western Europe. With this program, I would finish with fluency in a Western and an Eastern European language (probably French and Russian) and probably chooose history, politics and law or economics as my areas of specialty for my studies and thesis. I am hoping I can win another fellowship from the German government that would cover the entire duration of my master's studies.

From Regensburg, my dad and I headed east by train over the Austrian Alps into Slovenia. We stayed a couple days in a town called Bled and went cross-country skiing in the Slovenian Alps. The best words I can use to describe the Slovenian Alps is lumpy. They certainly have a distinct look that is quite different from the Austrian or Swiss Alps, which are far pointier and more imposing. Anyhow, we enjoyed the beauty of the countryside before we headed into Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia) for the last couple days of our trip. We had a peek around the city ourselves, and we met up with an exchange student we hosted for a few weeks during high school whose family lives in Ljubljana. It was so unexpected for both of us to see each other again, much less in her home, but we had a nice time chatting a bit, now that we're both in university studies.

My dad and I spent one night in London, then he headed back to the States, and I flew to Barcelona to stay with a high school friend I had not seen since graduation. Bizarre that we never saw each other in California, but fly halfway around the world, and it's easier to meet up! Barcelona was a beautiful city, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Mediterranean and felt that 50* was so warm that I walked around without my jacket all week with a smile on my face. Of course, the smile got me into some troubles because I then looked friendly instead of glaring, as I usually do, so I spent 4 hours one afternoon trying to get rid of a Pakistani man from Paris who wouldn't leave me alone after I answered his inquiry about the time. Other than that, I had a great time chatting until the wee hours of the morning.

And then I headed back to Tuebingen again to finish off my term paper for politics. Whoever thought of making a term paper due in the middle of semester break must be quite familiar with human psychology: what student is actually going to start during the term if he can push it back to break? But then he spends his time cursing himself that he has to spend his break working on it...Anyhow, I finished it, and then I left for my 4 weeks in the States, back at my home university.

I don't think I've ever felt four weeks pass as quickly as they did while I was at Valpo. They were not easy weeks by far. Mike and I broke up, which will take me a very long time to heal from, considering it still hurts as much today as it did a month and a half ago. But I also had many blessings in my time at Valpo because some of my friendships were strengthened, and I was able to let go of others that I have lost. It has been hard to let go of how things were when I left last May because they are not the same a year later, as I would wish them to be. I do not adapt well to changes but wish that my friends and friendships would always stay the same. Unfortunately, that is not the way of life because, while I can control how much I change to a certain extent, I certainly cannot control them at all. I've been learning a lot about prayer and trying to let go.

Now I have been back in Germany for a couple weeks. I had my first week of classes, and then I skipped the second week to go to Budapest with the kids from the other program my home university has out here in Germany, about 10 km from Tuebingen. It was a fantastic week. I experienced my first spa: we went to the oldest spa in Budapest. I also went to a few museums and the zoo and had fun wandering around the city, learned to play rummy and spent many hours a day getting to know some people much better. One evening, I had one of those fantastic, intense conversations that ends with each person telling their whole life story and realizing that you have so much in common with this other person who was only a nodding acquaintance before. Even more fantastic is that this person is living in my building next year, so we'll have many, many more opportunities for such conversations. In fact, I'm not sure that I'm ever going to get anything done when I'm home next year because I'll have one of my best friends living in my suite and this girl down the hall...I think I will have to find someplace else on campus to study.

My classes this semester seem that they will be really good. The investment of time is a lot more evenly spread between my classes this semester, and I have more hours of German and (maybe?) less linguistic confusion. While I had classes in 3 languages last semester, I have managed to cut it down to 2 this semester, lol. I am continuing to study Russian on my own and meeting with two Russian girls during the week to practice and learn. I also learned this week that I have been officially approved to write an honors thesis next year in my major, so I am starting that work while I am over here as well because I am supposed to complete research the summer after my junior year. I am writing on immigration in Germany and France, comparing the historical backgrounds and then the current economic and political effects, finally turning to an evaluation of the EU and how much France and Germany's experiences are shaping European-wide law.

This semester is a short semester because we've only got three holiday weekends and no long breaks, but there's going to be a crazy lot of traveling ahead of me. Last weekend I was out in the countryside with Campus Crusade for a retreat, and I went to Stuttgart to see Mozart's "Magic Flute" yesterday for one of our May holidays (Ascension Day). I'll be going to Prague for a few days, and I have a conference for my fellowship in Mannheim. One of my best friends got a summer internship in Marburg, and she'll be arriving in late May and spending over a week with me. I'll go visit her at some point in Marburg, and I've also got friends who will be in Heidelberg, Goettingen and Mannheim during the summer, as well as my cousins in Cologne and Freiburg. In addition to all that, I have to take a big test of German as a Foreign Language for grad school while I'm still here, and then the usual supply of school work and term papers, presentations, homework, etc.

My parents are moving as soon as the house sells; we're heading for Truckee. I will still be down in Grass Valley a couple times when I finally get back to the States to visit and go to the doctor, dentist, etc. I will be flying at the end of July straight to my brother's wedding in Seattle, and after that, I'll be home (wherever home is) for about 3 weeks. I think I'll be heading back to Valpo around the 15th of August. All in all, I have only one month from when things finish in Germany and when classes begin again at Valpo, so it's not much of a break this summer. That's ok because I'll be very happy to be back at Valpo.

At some point, I will manage to update my website with pictures from my travels during semester break and Budapest, as well as all my upcoming travels, but considering it has taken me nearly 6 months to write an update, I don't have any guarantees about when that will happen. I will say it's more likely now than before because I finally have a stable internet connection, since the tech center finally did some repairs to the internet over semester break.

some days are easier than others.
some days are harder than others.

some days require a few extra tears
and a few extra deep breaths.
some days require a few extra smiles
and a few extra jumps for joy.
some days need a couple extra friends.
some days one special friend is enough.

some days are easier than others.
some days are harder than others.

some days are cloudier than others.
some days have an extra ray of sunshine.
some days are made just for me.
some days were made just to spite me.
some days fly on the wings of eagles.
some days crawl in the tracks of garden snails.

some days are easier than others.
some days are harder than others.

some nights i can't sleep.
some days i can't wake up.
some days i remember to pray.
some days i forget to be grateful.
some days i know who i am.
some days i lose touch with myself.

some days are easier than others.
some days are harder than others.

some days it's easier to love.
some days it's easier to hate.
some days it's easier to care.
some days it's easier to feel nothing.
some days it's easier to live.
some days it's harder to breathe.

some days are easier than others.
some days are harder than others.

and life goes on.

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.