Another week

Hello once again from Ratisbon (Regensburg)

Today marks the day where I have exactly two months remaining of my time in Germany. Before I came here, I was convinced that there would never be a point in the trip where I would find myself not really wanting to be here. Whenever students getting ready to go abroad think about what their lives will be like when they are in a foreign place, it's almost impossible to imagine that every second of the experience won't just be the most amazing thing ever. However, this last week definitely proved my pre-Germany mindset wrong. Now that I've been here over three months, a lot of the novelty of European life has worn off and a lot of the disadvantages have started to weigh in. Constantly being at the mercy of public transportation, overpaying for EVERYTHING, language difficulties, and struggling to work with the terribly too-complicated German bureaucracy has started to get to me. Even more than all of this issues, I really miss a lot of my friends, family, and Rudy. It's kind of been frustrating this month to know that all of my other friends have returned home from their wonderful semesters abroad and now get to be at home for the summer. I've been trying to take it on a day by day basis, which has been working. I think it is just a fact of the experience that some days will be better than others.

This past week has not been particularly interesting. I had class Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. My Landeskunde class is easily the worst one, for boringness purposes. I also really have no idea what the professor is saying because she is so Bayerisch. I really like my Sprachkurs because we mostly just converse the entire class, which is both fun and beneficial. In the Sprechen class, we watch a lot of presentations that our classmates give. I will be giving mine in July on the Amanda Knox trial. There are students from a lot of different countries in each of the classes (In Sprechen there are students from Poland, Romania, South Korea, Czech Republic, Finland...) so it's really cool to watch all of the different things people come up with as topics. In June, there are a lot of various Catholic holidays which translates to a lot of days off school for us. We do not have classes this Thursday and also four days the rest of the month. I am also using the week Rudy is here in June as my class-missing occasion for our trip to Scotland so therefore June will not be particularly educational. Dult ends today so I will also not have that to enjoy on my free days and nights.

Tonight Liz and I are meeting once again with our host families for dinner. My family is going to be leaving for the US this week so they will be gone for the month of June. Hopefully I will see them a lot throughout July. Then I am ready for a short week of class (only one class each on Monday and Tuesday) and then a 5-day weekend of who knows what! I am really excited for Rudy to come for a week and to be able to travel.

I don't have anything else to say, so here is a cute cat video someone posted on my Facebook recently:

Love Ashley