Where has the time gone...

Well its Wednesday (Mitwoch in German) and i have had a crazy week so far. Tuesday night i got to go to the SC Freiburg vs Mainz soccer game. It was the semi-championships to go on for the German Cup. SC Freiburg is a 2nd division team but in the top three (along with Mainz). It was an interesting experience with what seemed like an excuse to get drunk and scream at the players. But it was very heated, packed, and exciting. The first team to score was Mainz, then right after a second goal was made, but no worries Freiburg fought back and scored- but eventually lost 3-1.
But no worries i left early since i had two tests the next day. My first German Test (scary!) and my EU intensive studies test. Now that both are over i feel fairly confident but who knows!

Now for the most exciting part of my week i'm off to Tallinn in Estonia! I leave tomorrow at 8 am and will arrive there at 6 pm. After staying there for 3 days i will fly to Berlin to stay for 2 days. Anyway i need to head off and pack!

FESTIVAL

This festival was like no other i've ever been too. With confeti as the main proponent. Most costumes were scary meant to frighten winter away, and every one represented each groups backgrounds. For instance the pumkin heads are from a local area nearby that is famous for its farms of pumpkins. The best part of the fesitval is the actors! EAch group has 3-4 men whose main job is to scare away guests on the street who are watching. For instance i got attacked by a actor who ran fast towards me and when he got to me slide on the ground and tried to tackle me.

Anyway if anyone wants some confeti no worries i was drenched in it and now have it ALL OVER my room.

Heidelberg...

Yesterday i got to go to Heidleberg for the day. Its about a 2.5 hours bus ride from Freiburg. I went with my German class, we got to tour the Castle, do a walking tour of the city, eat traditional Barvarian food, and shop in the cute little town of Freiburg.

We left Freiburg at 7 am and got there at 9:30-10:00ish. WE first hiked up to the castle, which is situated above the city. By hike i mean we literally went up a 90 degree hill for a good 10 minutes before being greeeted by a number of daunting stairs. The castle is more or less in ruins, having been heavily attacked during the 30 years war. But it still is home to a number of grand German events and still has the best view of heidelberg.

Next was lunch where everyone ate Bulvarian dishes, like liver dumplings (my personal favorite) to brautworst, to mashed pies, and flagueans. But it was delicious, next we geared up for the walking tour of the city. Heidelberg is a university town of 140,000 people and 30,000 students. We visited just about everything there is to see in the whole small city. Ending our tour on the "old bridge" with the most fantastic veiw...

Now it is 12:00 and i am off to Fasnet in Umkirch.

Fasnet is deeply rooted in German culture and is quite different from the carnival celebrated in Cologne. It was originally designed to scare away winter and developed into a celebration before six weeks of lent. Some of the carnival clubs are more than 500 years old.

Don't worry it wouldn't be a German festival without me dressing up and painting my face bright colors! I'll be sure to post pictures and write back soon!

German Bowling revisited!

So German Bowling was a lot different than expected. The source i had before German bowling was wrong on a couple of key issues. So here is how it really was...

It was indoors and looked almost identical to a bowling alley except it was in a resturant and people sit at their tables eating their dinner watching you. So needless to say it was pretty embarassing and nerve racking to play infront of about 50 German people eating their nightly dinner.

The second is that the lanes are long and skinny and not as slippery as American Bowling. The balls are the sizes of Cantalopes and weigh about 2-3 pounds. The balls also either have 2 holes for fingers (for the inexperienced AKA me) or not hole for the experts (AKA the Germans).

Also German bowling is made up of a number of games. My favorite is 3 numbers game. Each person gets three chance to bowl. The first bowl can be placed anywhere in three slots, so the ones place, tens place, or hundreds place. And its up to you to use logic to place the numbers accordingly to get the highest number possible. For instance i rolled a 6 my first time so i placed that in the hundreds spot, second i rolled a 5 i put that in the ones spot and my last roll was a 5 so i put that in the tens spot giving me a score of 655.

Anyway it was great fun!

German Bowling!

Tonight is the inaguration for most folks at home, don't get me wrong its huge here too! you think Europe had a hand in geting him elected, while every bar and resturant is having specials and veiwings of the inaguration. I however thought that i should pick up an activity to get my mind off the inaguration- so tonight i am going German Bowling.
Now its rather odd (and for those of you who know my pure talent at US bowling, i'm afraid my talent is not likely to transfer over) instead of an indoor ally its an outdoor feild thats not waxed hardwood but well i don't really know what the floor is made up of. Then instead of a large heavy bowling ball its a smaller lighter ball, thrown slanted so the ball will curve. Instead of 10 pins there are 9 smaller and more spread out pins.
O well i'll let you know how i do!

As for the inaguration don't worry my German flatmate (HUGE SUPPORTER OF OBAMA) said he would tape it for me so we can watch it together!
I told him great! I'm excited! and hurridly left to go experience some german bowling!

Here is the cute little town of Freiburg. Its basicaly a little a city centre ful of little shops like these.

i'll upload some photos later of Freiburg from the Black Forest Mountain!

All moved in :)

So the last past couple of days has been very interesting. My German is the equivilant to a new born baby (well at least thats what my teacher told me) so i figure that's not too bad the only place to go from here is up. So there we go! Today was suppose to be a nice day in the Black Forest sleding and snow shoeing but my blood sugars didn't allow for it but its okay because tomorrow i think we're trying to go to Munich for the day. Which will be wonderfully exciting.

Freiburg is a fantastic small town (with an IKEA) that has a bunch of small shops and little cafes. So i'm in heaven. Tonights adventure is to go out with some new kids we met on the program and share a meter of beer. A meter of beer is literally a meter long tray with about 11-13 mugs of beer on it. Aparently it's very German so we must try it.

other than that my room is officially moved into. I went to IKEA and bought some personalized items and now my room looks like it does in the states!! Except i have a poster on my wall that's in German, my goal is to translate it by the time i finish here!

We Are Here in Germany

Hallo... (thats German for Hello)
We are here in Germany...We visited the IES center today, and roamed around. We had lunch at a nice Middle Eastern resturant and had falafels. It is funny how we ended up in our Middle Eastern resturant, the story goes....
We went to 900000 resturants and looked at the menus and couldn't understand anything. So we finally stumbled across this resturant that had picture so we decided it looked like our best option. So we went in and pointed to the picture we wanted. And to our suprise she spoke english making our life much more easier. I am slowly wondering whats gonna happen with the whole language barrier here. But something tells me it will all work out.

We move in tomorrow and start orientation. The city we are in is rather small about 100000 people so we are looking forward to getting to know the city pretty well. Out of that population i would say three fourths is probably students who attend Freiburg University.
Another exciting part of our walk around town today was we located the 1 Euro store (the equivilent to our 1 dollar store) so thats were most of my shopping will be taking place!

anyway for now i'll just say Auf Wiedersehen (which is goodbye in German)

What were we thinking

Wow German is a hard language... We arrived in Basel Switzerland last night at around 9 PM. After hauling all our luggage out to the curb it then took us a mere 10 minutes to find someone who spoke english AND had a trunk big enough for all our suitecases. Finally we found one...

now today was our relaxing day, we chose to sleep in and just aimlessly roam around Basel (a population of 170,00). (the whole country of switzerland is about the size of 1.5 San Diego Counties)....We had a number of interesting conversations most ending with the question "Where you from" and us answering "California" all people responded the same way... "What the hell are you doing here!!!!" Haha it was shortly after that we were wondering the same thing. Our adventure to the train station was interesting. We managed to find a nice woman who spoke english and she managed to get us a ticket to Freiburg (or at least we think). After looking for lunch and buying some essential groceries i started to worry and wonder. What made me want to go to GERMANY and study? They can't understand me and i surely can't understand them. But after shopping around, roaming around, speaking my minimal german (very limited to hi, how are you, thank you) i started to feel more at ease. What i learned was Switzerland has 4 official languages and even though English wasn't one of them they know it and are more than wiling to help as they can.

Fun facts about our trip in Switzerland so far.

• The airport we landed in is on the border of France, Switzerland and Germany. By simply walking to three differnt corners of the airport we were in each of those three countries. Jessica and i had fun hopping the boarders. The train station as well as an exit to the left for France and to the right for Switzerland. Which was rather cool we thought!
• Second is that the keyboard here as all the letters mixed up. The Y is where the Z is on our keyboards at home. I don't know thought that was interesting...
• Thirdly Jessica and I are soaking up the prices in Switzerland, while a little more expensive, they use the Swiss Franc which is the frist time our US currency has been stronger and therefore we are able to not cringe at prices!!
• Fourthly (i think i'm making words us now!) the weather here is a chilling 14 F (which is i don't know how cold in C but definetly like negative 4 or so... oh we're going to have fun
  Lastly...We leave Switzerland tomorrow and travel onward to Freiburg Germany where we will finally move in on Wednesday.

P.S. I thought i would share with you some of my very poor German i've learned from the streets of Switzerland.

1. Hello...Hallo
2. Good day....Guten Tag / Morgen
3. Good evening....Guten Abend
4. Good night....Gute Nacht
5. Hi....Hi / Tag ( i opt for Hi its much easier and sounds much nicer)
6. Good bye... Auf Wiedersehen (they also say bye which is nice)
7. See you soon.... Bis bald (dones't sounds anything like it looks)

Change of plans...

This morning was a frantic rush as our alarm finally decided to go off at 6:50 am which was 15 mins after we were suppose to be at the tour company for our all day adventure up the coast of Ireland. But since that clearly wasn't happening we went back to bed. We resechduled for tomorrow hopefuly this go around we get it.
So instead we took a stroll through downtown and went on a three hour walking tour of the city. It was fantastic but our feet hurt. So then jessica and I were on our way to the famous Jameson Whiskey Distillary to relax... before we realized we hated all the other types of whiskey and we weren't sure if it was the best decision to try it for a third time so we opted for a lovely coastal trip for the afternoon.
We got on a bus and got to travel up to an ancient castle and then take a coastal bus trip around the ocean and see the bay of Dublin. It was georgous.
So now we are going to bed to ensure we wake up for our fun 12 hour tour tomorrow...

wish us luck!!

O the comedy!

So Jessica and i have had a very entertaining last few days...

On our way to the airport on the Edinburgh bus (infamously slow and late) we were comidically releieved when we saw two ducks in the pond. Allbeit they were frozen in the pond. The were apparently sleeping (according to a nice scotish woman behind me) and fell asleep and when they woke up- poof they were stuck in the pond which had frozen over.

But it was all good... We were told they would make it. The night before at a live music bar- where Steve n' Allen played the likes of John Mayer, Johnny Cash, and Elvis we met some Amerinan Boys from West Virgina ( I argueed the existance of their state). But before i was done arguing Johny alerted us he was from Carlsbad. Jessica and him at this in common (i did not) so i continued listening ot Steve n' Allen.

Our last day there we took the bus to Glasgow- just in time because it started snowing... ewe.
We got to Dublin and immediatly fell in love. So georgous, so fun, so young, so funny, so nice.

The first thing Jessica and I run into is a comedy club. We immediatly signed up- kinda nervous we wouldn't understand the UK humor. But don't worry. They immediatly spoted us as Americans and made it a point to not only remind the rest of the crowd that we were American but took time to explain every UK joke to the two "stupid Americans". IT was so much fun we decided to do it again!

Tonight (we just got back) we went to another comedy club where Amerinans were apparently normal. Expect for their expectation of John McCain getting elected (his words obviously not mine). Anywho it was fantastic. We are off too bed since tomorrow we have an early start at 6 am to visit the Cliff of Moher and Limerk and finally the Blarny Stone!

Glasgow then Dublin

We just arrived in Glasgow about 2 hours ago after a wonderfly short and pleseant train ride from Edinburgh. We got to our hostel and are heading out to go shopping (since i have so much extra room in my luggage)!

Tomorrow we leave for Dublin and will be going to the Guiness Factory and Jameson Distilary and Trinty College!

famous Scotsmen

So during our fabulous highlands tour we made friends with our tour guide, a dashing Scotsman who liked Whiskey and thats about it. He shocked us about the many famous Scots that have a part in our everyday life. His list went on but some include... All members of AC-DC were born in Scotland and later moved to (in his words) lesser Ireland. Snow Patrol and The Frey- both muscians that are becoming popular in the US. johnny cash is also scotish. He went on to make us feel better saying he loves some American muscians like Katy Perry, Beoncye, Britney Spears, and Avril Levigne (i didn't have the heat to tell him she was Canadian). But he went on to say he liked them un-musically because he fancied then for things other then their horrible music! To go on with the list... Fleming who discoverd penicilin, Alex Grahm Bell who invented the phone was also lucky enough (in his words) to be Scotish... and the one he is most proud of the chip from the I-pod was from a Scottish inventor until the Americans stole it and put an apple on it!

ok ok ok

So now that i've been in edinburgh for a good 4-5 days i think its time for an update. I have received some rather disgrunteled emails for a few people wanting an update (so here it is Mary Anne). The first night we got here we immediately went into the city and had so much fun we couldn't tear ourselves away from the downtown. but we did eventually the next day new years eve, we went to edinburgh castle which was fantastic! so beautiful there was even a bride getting married nad taking photos. Then that night was the official hogomany festival with concerts, bars, and a street party lasting till the wee hours of the mourning- geting home at 5 or 6. To say the least hte next day we took it easy and did some eating and shopping. Then the next day we managed to make it to the national heritage site for whiskey and managed to get a tour and sampling. Eww it was disgusting, but nonetheless it was very entertaining. We also found a free walking tour of the city that was about 3 hours long. it was fantastic a knowlegable tour guide with fantastic sights and such. Finally we get to yesterday- the most fabulous day of our trip so far. we went on a highlands tour visiting the ourlaying smaller towns and wonderful country side. We had a wonderful guide Kenny who make sure to keep us entertained and having fun. Jessica and i immediatly fell in love with Kenny and his good ol' Scottish humor. We once again visited a distilery for whiskey but i still thought it was gross. All in all it was a fantastic tour!
The we get to today. We were lucky enough to go to Saint Giles Cathedral in downtown edinburgh for mass this morning at 10 am. Then to increase our holiness we went ot Roslyn Chapel which was made famous through the Da Vinci Code. The tour was great- actually since we were the only ones to sign up it was a private tour in a private car that was catered to our interests. it was fantastic. now i must hurry off to go to a ghost tour of the old edinburgh with a free pint of beer (which is ok since i've been so holy today!)

ps: i promise i will write more frequently its just been hard getting internet (i promise Mary Anne!!)