the mediterranean... tomorrow!

i've been awful about posting lately. the weeks since i got back from sweden have been nuts. we've been so busy with projects and tests in every class. apologies to grandma and uncle chris, i read your e-mails, but i haven't had the time to sit down and write a proper response.

we're leaving for a bus to the airport to take a flight to thessalonika in about 20 minutes. i will be gone until november 2 in greece, italy, and southern france! i'm so excited, but really nervous at the moment. we have everything planned and two copies of all the confirmations and an itinerary sent to our parents, so i think we should be fine.

hope all is well in the states (and the other continents reading this (hi meg!)). i've heard gas prices are down, stocks are down, housing is down... yikes. i guess all isn't well, but i'm praying over here for it to get better. the exchange rate is beter because the euro is getting worse; that's about the only good thing coming out of it right now.

wish i could write more but my 20 minutes is now 17 and i still have to take my trash out. i'll write lots and lots when i'm back (because we don't have homework the second half of the semester!).

(megan, i hope your homestay and safari were great - i can't wait to hear all about them!)

a thank you note.

dearest madre,

those travel bags you found at walmart have saved my life. i fit the sweaters, scarves, and sweatshirt for a weekend in sweden into a school backpack with room for shoes and my blow-dryer. that's what i call success, and i owe it all to you.

(yes, it's 2:45 am.)

love your favorite oldest daughter,

kati

maybe it's the weather.

there are crows dive-bombing my window. i've seen over a hundred crows fly over the mountains and towards our part of Reutlingen in the last hour or so. they swoop down towards my window and land on the roof above. it's like The Birds. i'm not leaving my building tonight. if i could upload pictures, i would take a picture of the flock flying over the mountains. i'm scared.

mid-week post!

thought i'd write quickly between homework assignments (or postponing them).

the baths at Baden-Baden were AMAZING. the best and most relaxing three hours of my life. a great way to spend 15 euros, 3 hours, and the last punch left on our German rail pass. i definitely recommend it to anyone who visits Germany. spectacular. the weather was nice, too. about 60 degrees (Fahrenheit) and sunny outside, so the pools outside (heated) were very nice. it was just a relaxing afternoon.

this week we're all very busy. we have a debate, a state report and scrapbook, and an art report all due before we leave for our two week break (which begins two weeks from Thursday). i'm currently researching my debate topic, which is the negative side of "Priests should be allowed to marry." Catholics thinks some crazy things, that's all i'm saying.

i'm mostly worried about the debate; i think the state presentation/scrapbook will be a breeze, and i'm actually excited about my art project (duh). i'm doing a report on Liberty in the Barricades by Eugene Delacroix, which, in addition to being on display in the Louvre, is the cover of the new Coldplay album... i'm trying to find a connection.

this weekend Mackenzie and i are going to SWEDEN. we leave on Thursday, and we have to miss our German class. i decided to take German pass-fail because i know the teacher is going to hate us after we miss her class. oh well, going to Sweden to visit Nate was at the top of my list of things to do while in Europe, so i'm not overly concerned about it. Mackenzie is going to visit an exchange student who stayed with her in high school. incidentally, they both live in the same city (Göteburg), so it's really convenient for us to travel together. and i get to wash my jeans and DRY THEM at Nate's house. that's probably going to be the most exciting part of the trip. our jeans are getting all stretched out because we can't dry them here because the dryers just make your clothes hot, they don't actually get any drier when they're in there.

i started a new book today called "Three Cups of Tea". Charli read it, and she loved it, so i'm borrowing it. let's face it, we all knew i was never actually going to finish The Brothers Karamazov. it's way too huge to take with me anywhere anyway. i'm also reading Martin Marty's biography of Martin Luther. while i think it's extremely odd that Martin Marty just happens to be a Martin Luther scholar, i'm enjoy the book. he doesn't use any commas, though. i love commas, and his comma usage upsets me to the point where i have to read sentences five times before i understand them. when i can get past his "creative" disregard for the mid-sentence pause, however, i enjoy his writing and the story of Martin Luther.

i've been getting a decent amount of mail (just from Gavin and my mother, but i get something from Gavin once a week), and it has come to my attention that i'm on the the front of every Valpo brochure published so far this semester. that's all. i just think it's hilarious. Gavin pointed out that we (he's on there, too) get more zoomed in upon in every new version, and hopefully the brochure for the new union will be just our nostrils. i think that's gross, but funny. i hope it make it on the cover of that, too. maybe they will make a Valpo calendar of Gavin and me. at this rate, it doesn't seem to be that far in the future.

nothing that the road cannot heal.

things i've learned in Germany thus far:

1. dein hund ist hubshe: your dog is cute.

2. kleenex and hand soap is neither the best nor the worst way to wash a sink.

3. you can't buy music from iTunes if you're not in the US.

4. people don't say hi to each other on the street. smiling at a passerby warrants a very awkward look.

5. wattage matters, especially on small motorized appliances such as the hairdryer you brought from home.

6. public transportation is great.

7. German students eat horribly, smoke constantly, and take the elevator for three floors.

8. Germany is slightly larger than Montana.

9. hole-in-the-wall eateries and stands in squares are the best places to eat.

10. the customer is not always right in Germany.

11. make plans before you go, but be ready for anything. and bring a map.

oktoberfest was pretty incredible last week. the best way to describe it is like Warped Tour with beer instead of music. and far too many Australians. we also did an incredible amount of sightseeing while in Munich. we visited the 1972 Olympic Stadium to complete our tour of German Olympic stadiums. we went to Englischer Garten and made a nice promenade. then we got into the Deutches Museum for FREE. they had a huge ship exhibit there, so of course i took a million pictures of anchors and other ship-ly things. we also went on this ride outside the museum for 3 euro. it spun you around and you controlled your movements. i wish i had appreciated the physics of the ride, but i just thought it was fun to be up so high. then we walked around the marianplatz area of Munich and had ice cream.

this weekend Charli, Mackenzie, and i are going to Trier and Saarbrucken for my state project. the best part of the trip will be the way back, when we stop in Baden-Baden for the Roman baths.

if the internet worked at all here, i would post pictures. i'll keep trying, but for now, you will have to imagine what i'm up to.

the mountain out my window.

first of all, i apologize to all my faithful readers for not writing sooner. i didn't anticipate how busy we would be here. i wanted to sit down and write after my week in berlin and weimar, but then we were right off to salzburg three days later. now i'm back from salzburg, but leave for munich tomorrow afternoon!

today is exactly three weeks since we arrived in germany, but it has both gone so fast and feels like we've been here forever. in just three short weeks, however, we have self-titled this semester "disaster semester". on only our fifth day in Germany, Jenny left from Berlin to come back to Reutlingen and then go back to the States. i suppose she had pretty severe culture shock, and she never felt at ease anywhere we went. then over the weekend another girl found out she had a cyst, so she was in surgery on monday and will be in the hospital for a few more days. our professor was diagnosed with walking pneumonia (don't worry, i'm keeping my distance and spiking my juice with vitamin c packets (thanks uncle chris and jill)). and on monday, Kalyn fell and bit through her lip. she's been to the doctor and dentist and it sounds like she'll be ok, but it's still pretty awful that it happened. hopefully that will be the last injury of the semester (i'm also steering clear of volleyball courts).

Charli, Mackenzie, and i are going to hike up one of the mountains in Reutlingen today. Reutlingen is right in the middle of the Schwabische Alps, which is a nice little cluster of small mountains. there is a ruin of a tower at the top of one, and that is the one we are planning on conquering this afternoon.

i don't even know where to begin talking about everything. i could just make a list of what we've done so far, but i don't know how interesting that would be. i've done a lot of things: visited museums, palaces, gardens, monuments, churches. i've climbed a lot of stairs: two-hundred sixty in twenty-four hours while in Berlin, not to the mention the fact that i live on the eighth/top floor of my dorm. i've had a good amount of German beer: we're going to start the Reutlingen Bier- und Weinakademie Bierdiplom tonight.

i will write more tonight hopefully, but we want to get going on our mountain climbing adventure so that we are back by dinner time. i have a feeling i'm already late!

doing like the germans do.

i'm here! Reutlingen is a beautiful city; i'm so excited to be spending almost four months here.

the trip into germany was nothing short of awful. first we (Mackenzie, Charli, and i) missed out bus out of Portage and arrived at the airport an hour late. apparently the international terminal at o'hare doesn't believe in letting you eat once you go through security, so that was annoying, too.

i ended up in the middle of a four seat aisle in the center of the plane. then i switched seats with someone... for a seat in the middle of a four seat aisle in the middle of the plane. the only good thing about the flight was the tv screen in the back of the seat in front of you that played any movie you wanted and also had video games and other things to do. that made the heat and cramped nature of the plane not quite as unbearable. i didn't end up sleeping a wink during the nine hour flight. i spent the entire time checking my watch and converting the time to different time zones of interest (central, easten, and European).

we finally landed in Paris where we had an almost five-hour layover. some people slept in the seats in the terminal; i curled up on the floor. i actually slept for about 4 minutes. my biggest accomplishment at the Paris airport was asking what gate our next flight would board at... but they didn't know. i used the euros from Logan's dad to buy Mackenzie and i some apples and water.

i was asleep before the second flight got to the runway. not much to say about that one.

Stuttgart was rather uneventful. no one lost luggage, we managed not to lose each other, and we didn't even get our passports stamped.

we've spent the last few days in Reutlingen (RT for short) getting used to the bus system, walking around town, and trying out the local bars. our professor bought us beer yesterday! it's definitely very different from Valpo. i'm not going crazy, though.

it's a long walk from our dorms to the downtown area. there are lighted footpaths, and going this way takes about 20 minutes. riding the bus takes only five, but we really don't want to get fat.... so we walk. also, i live on the seventh floor of my building, so getting to my room is a workout in itself.

i think i'm settling in well. the culture shock is nothing like Haiti, Mexico, etc. i'm sure i will feel homesick later, but i don't think i will be as culture-shocked as some of the people in my group who have never been anywhere outside of the US. i'm just trying to listen to people, speak the German i can, and soak in as much of the culture as possible. while it's different than the US here, it's so much more like the US than Haiti. things close at weird times, and people walk really close to you and don't stop for pedestrians, but everyone has a house and food and a job. i haven't seen a "bad" area yet. those places exist, but it's nothing like the tin roofs and malnutrition we've experienced in Haiti.

tomorrow we go to Tubingen, which is a unversity city about 10 minutes on the train from here. monday, we go to Berlin! there are a few museums i really want to see in Berlin, and we have two free days, so i'm very excited about that trip. i'll update when i get back (and hopefully i can put pictures on by then).