Sunshine, IKEA, Rats

Happy Sunday and welcome back to being six hours behind me again. We finally sprung forward an hour last night here in Germany, and I am excited to welcome in longer days. It's finally starting to warm up around here. When the sun is out and it is not raining, it is really nice. I'm really looking forward to days without any coat at all, but it might take another month until we get there.

The last week was quick and busy, which seems to be the status quo for how time works abroad. My time here is constantly filled up with being stuck in the classroom 30 hours per week, the regular trips to Kaufland and Ghetto Netto for groceries, and getting enough sleep to make it through. Getting enough sleep to actually function is one of my favorite parts of being in Germany as opposed to being at Transy. At home, I am used to having to get through everyday on 5-6 hours a night, whereas I almost always get 7-9 everynight here. I think this is a concept I will attempt to take back to Transy, although I think it would fail immensely.

Monday morning our morning professor, Bianca, told us we would be having a test on Friday. Luckily I took this to mean that I should wait until Thursday night to study, so the good news is that I didn't let a silly thing such as a test worth a quarter of my grade get in the way of my good time. The bad was that I had to study all day Thursday and might have made a few silly mistakes for that reason, but I'm sure I will survive. Other than not studying for my test all week, my friends and I took a much-needed trip to IKEA to pick up some treats for our room. I've only been to IKEA once before when I was in Finland, but I still marvel at what a wonderful place it is. Not only do they have everything you would ever need to have a cool house, but they have delicious hot dogs (1 euro for a hot dog+drink!) and free cinnamon rolls. The cinammon rolls might have been intended to be samples, but we helped ourselves to at least 7 throughout our two hours at the store. In the end, I bought new bedding, a mirror, and two stuffed rats. I would tell you more about the rats, but my friends would make fun of me.

For some reason I am halfway blanking out as to what I did the rest of the week. School takes up so much of the day that most of the time there is really not much else that can be packed into the day. I will be so relieved when this Sprachkurs will be over (only 14 more days!) and I can have a much less intense schedule. I have definitely enjoyed being here at the University and meeting other program participants, but I am pretty critical of the class. I might be used to the luxury of having classes that are regularly less than 15 people at Transy, but I find it idiotic to place 25 people in one language course and expect that anything will get done. That takes me to my next complaint, which is that I have learned absolutely nothing thus far from the class. The course gives us extremely limited opportunities to speak or write. We spend most of our time going over the useless workbook homework or doing absolutely nothing. I actually think my German abilities have decreased since getting here. I would be much better off spending the six hours of my day that are currently being wasted being out and about in the town actually communicating with people, not starting at a textbook.

My University... or as we know it "Concrete Central"

But anyways, enough complaining, I'm in Germany! I've really enjoyed getting to know all of the new people. Friday night a lot of us went out again and it is so nice to hang out with everyone NOT at school. We met up at one of the bars in town for awhile and then I stayed up until 5:30am watching UK beat Ohio State. Go Cats! Tonight I get to watch them beat up on UNC (I hope Rudy reads this!) and then start another week at school. I am currently making my spring break plans (Mid-April through the third of May) so if anyone has any great ideas, let me know! So far we are thinking Prague, but not sure otherwise. I'd really like to go to Greece.

Auf Wiedersehen,

Ashley