It's back to the grindstone. I've finally gotten my pictures uploaded and will post some this weekend. I will also put them all on kodakgallery, so just let me know if you'd like to see all of them and I'll email you the link. I'll try to remember what all happened since I last wrote. We spent a couple days in London - doing "prairie dog" tours. You know, the ones where you pop up out of the tube to see something and then go back down and move onto the next thing. On Sunday it was rainy and cold so [View Full Entry]

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I've been having computer problems so I haven't updated this in several days. I'm writing this from an internet cafe in London. We're both exhausted as we only slept a few hours last night and spent the day in airports. We were scheduled to fly from Berlin to London last night (Saturday), but our flight was cancelled. That worked out really well because we got to go to the going away party with all of our new friends and stayed out way too late! We headed to Tegel Airport on Sunday morning to catch our 11:00 flight and found that it [View Full Entry]

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Okay, gotta tell you - I'm not so sure about these Germans. We've been trying to get internet (and a phone) hooked up in our apartment for a week. I've gone into the office every day to see if someone can make it work. We have the modem and phone and everything, but the phone does not have a dial tone. We decided to forget about it. The people working in the office have been very difficult. As a whole, people in Berlin have not been as friendly as people elsewhere. The German students tell us that they really resent all [View Full Entry]

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I was able to get some photos uploaded this afternoon, but I'll have to upload the rest later. So, I've posted some photos from Eger, Hungary, Slovakia, and Krakow, Poland. Last week's classes focused on negotiation, whereas this week's focus on mediation. We have a fact pattern that we're working with all week. We're broken up into groups of 7 or 8 and we each get an opportunity each day to play the role of mediator and work on each step of the mediation process - e.g., information gathering and creating solutions. There's much more pressure this week as others are [View Full Entry]

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We've had a great last few days. On Friday night, we attended a reception at the law firm Hogan & Hartson in Potsdamer Platz. As we stepped off the elevator there were waiters with juice and wine greeting us. It couldn't have been more different than reception we attended earlier in the week. They were gracious hosts and we visited with several of the attorneys throughout the evening. The senior partner is an avid art collector, so we toured the office and saw art such as Warhol and Liechtenstein and many famous German artists. I began chatting with one of the [View Full Entry]

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It's Friday - finally!!! On Wednesday night we had a reception at the law firm WilmerHale here in town. It was obvious that they weren't enthusiastic about us stopping by because we were told that they usually have great pastries and drinks; instead, they served pretzels and gummy bears. We all headed to dinner afterward at an Indian Restaurant. Which reminds me of something - the Germans have a different concept of customer service than Americans. It took more than two hours to get our food at the Indian Restaurant, which is about normal here. It also takes forever to get [View Full Entry]

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This is our third day of classes and the coldest day in Germany so far! It's actually a little chilly outside. Classes are getting a little better. We do role-playing exercises every day (the American students are paired with international students) and the scenarios get a little more complicated each time. We've been working on negotiation this week and next week we will focus on mediation. One of the Germans in charge of the program has been organizing evening gatherings. Last night we joined some other students at a hangout on one of the rivers. There was a swimming pool in [View Full Entry]

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It's been a long time - which means that this entry will be a long one! I've been trying to make notes as we've traveled so I'll try to retrace our steps. I'll go backward... Today was our first day of classes. The program is hosted by Humbolt University - home to 29 nobel prize winners. Right now I am looking out the window at a statue of Freidrich II (the Great); he's the man responsible for much of Berlin's grandeur - but more on that later. The British Embassy is across the street from our apartment and we have a [View Full Entry]

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Sorry the posts have been so short - and so sporadic. We haven't had much internet access. We're in Krakow today and will fly to Berlin tomorrow. Once we get to Berlin, I should have a few minutes to update you on everything (specifically, our stay in the High Tatras in Slovakia). I have tons of pictures and plan to post some tomorrow. Eastern Europe welcomed us with open arms, but the past few days have been a whirlwind. Stay tuned... [View Full Entry]

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We're in Eger for a second day - not by choice. We should have taken the 7:22 am train to Kosice, Slovakia but we thought we could get there by bus later in the day. After much pantomiming (no english here!), we discovered that there were no buses going to Kosice today. So, we tracked down a nice hotel just outside of Eger and have been lounging by the pool reading our assignments for next week's class. Tomorrow morning we'll take a train to Kosice and a bus to Poprad. We'll then have to take another bus to Tatranska Lomnica where [View Full Entry]

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