One Month To Go

So of course it was another busy week. Monday was somewhat interesting though. A somewhat famous author came and visited our program. His name is Ernest Callenbach, and he wrote Ecotopia, a novel that was a large part of the foundation of modern environmental thought. So we planted a tree with him, and then he spoke to our environmental class for an hour. He's like eighty years old, but really cool.

The rest of the week was fairly uneventful. I did a lot of paper writing, textbook reading, and homework assignmenting. Not all that fun. Last night I went to the bar downstairs with a few friends. We just chilled for a while and had a few beers. But before going to the bar I had a phone interview for a summer internship position with STLF. It went fine I think. Although it was a little strange having an interview at 21.00.

So I think all of my travels outside of Freiburg are basically finished. I don't have any other trips planned or anything, though I might take a day trip sometime over Thanksgiving break. Not sure yet. Basically the next four weeks are classes, homework, readings, papers, and finals. Not really all that much to look forward to. I do hope to see a little bit more of Freiburg though actually. Hopefully that will happen over Thanksgiving break, where we get Thursday off (we already get Fridays off mostly).

I can't believe how much paper I have collected in less than three months. You should see my desk and the area around it. Seriously I don't know where all this paper comes from. Perhaps a little Zeitgeist? I definitely need to do some serious recycling before leaving in four weeks.

The weather here has stayed pretty nice actually. Not too much rain, and it gets up to around 55 or 60 F every day. And I don't think it's been below freezing yet. It usually only gets down to about 40 or 45 F at night. So not too bad at all. I really can't complain. I bought a winter jacket like a month or so ago, but I haven't really even had to use it yet. I've been getting by with long sleeved T-shirts and a sweatshirt.

I broke my glasses a few days ago. I went to put them on in the morning and basically the right side just broke off. Sucky. I tried taping them back together, but they're still really flimsy and easily breakable. And not very comfortable on my face. So that's super annoying. Luckily I don't rely on them too much. Although it is annoying when I want to wear them at night or in the morning and they are broken. Anyway, I think I'll just tough it out with broken glasses until I get back home and then try to figure it out.

So I got back a paper this week from one of my professors. It was for Regions in the EU, and it was just a draft version that he wanted us to complete before doing the final draft. He's a super nice professor, but he kind of annoyed me on this paper. He is a native German speaker, and his English is really good for being a non-native speaker. But he tried correcting my grammar a bunch of different times in my paper. Which would be fine if my grammar had been wrong. But my grammar was not wrong. He just thought it was wrong I guess. Don't get me wrong, I appreciated all of his other suggestions that were not grammar related. A lot of them were really helpful. But I'm not sure why he feels the need to correct grammar that does not need to be corrected. And I don't really want to tell him that he's flat out wrong, but he basically is. And if I don't fix my grammar "mistakes" for the final draft, he'll probably lower my grade for that. Stupid. Anyway, that was a random story that I thought I'd share to help you get a feeling for my general mood right now.