My First Few Crazy Days

So my life has definitely been a little crazy the last few days. I’ll try to give the brief version so this isn’t too long.

I’m in Germany now! I had some adventures getting here, that’s for sure. Everything went fine with the flights themselves. I watched a movie between Minneapolis and Iceland because that was a super nice plane with screens on every seat so every person could pick their own thing to watch. And then I mostly slept between Iceland and Frankfurt. Then, once I got to Frankfurt, it took freaking forever to get my bags. I’m not sure what the deal was, but it just took my second bag like 45 minutes to come out of the stupid carousel thing. So I missed the train I was hoping to catch and ended up being a little late into Freiburg, which is the city I’m staying in. Oh well, not a huge deal. Except I was the second to last one there in my program of 60 people.

So after I arrived in Freiburg and managed to find the IES center (IES is the program sponsor) on foot, I got some more info from the people that work there and then went out to dinner with the people from my program that live in the same dorm building as me, along with our “housing tutor.” Which is about 10 or 11 people. Oh, and don’t ask me what the frick a housing tutor is supposed to do, because I have no idea. Anyway, we went to this pizza place (I had Salami Pizza and a Dunkel Bier), and they seem to be pretty cool people for the most part.

Then we came back to our dorm, which I was just seeing for the first time since I had arrived late. A total of seven people live in my “flat,” (I’m not sure what the hell else to call it) five guys and two girls. Everyone has their own room to sleep in, except the girls share a room. And then there is a kitchen and two bathrooms. The girls are both Americans in the same program I’m in. But all four of the other guys are German. So I met all of them, and we kind of had a little shindig in our kitchen for a few hours. The guys invited some friends over, and we all had a few beers and lots of cake. Because apparently the first thing Germans do when they move into a new place is cook like 10 different cakes. Anyway, some guys from our program wanted to go out bar-hopping, but I was basically falling asleep standing up so I passed and went to bed.

I just thought of something totally random. The toilets in my dorm have two different flushes. They have like a little flush if you just took a piss, and they have a major flush if you dropped a huge deuce and need to get that shit outta there. I was so confused the first time I used it. K done with that randomness now.

Anyway, now it is five in the morning (German time), and I am absolutely wide awake because I went to bed at like 21:00 (yeah, get used to that). But there’s not really much else I can do right now except sit in my room because everyone else is sleeping. I tried going to get a glass of water, but I’m pretty sure I woke up everyone else in the process because the floors are super creaky. Oh, and I forgot an ethernet cable, so I don’t have internet access in my dorm room right now. So I’m writing this in a word document and will hopefully post it sometime today (Wednesday) if I can find internet access somewhere.