A little late, but it's been a transition being back home. Our last trip we took was to Goerlitz, the border town where 1/3 of the town is actually in Poland, and Bautzen, where there was cool stuff including a mustard store with free samples! Goerlitz was actually really beautiful. The buildings were lovely and it was a quiet, non-hectic place, and I really liked being there. We went to this amazing Medieval shop where the storekeep sold hand-crafted jewelry and had a huge variety of old Celtic music. I ended up getting this really beautiful necklace that's actually a sun-dial! So cool~ he was amazingly nice, and I totally wanted to buy everything. Then we went to an old beautiful church with this famous organ called the Sun Organ, designed by a German who went ... read more

We started bright and early Friday morning to get to Weimar. It was a long train trip, so most of us slept or listened to our ipods, and when we got there, the first thing we did was go to Buchenwald, the concentration camp that was set up about 8 km outside of town. This was one of the things I was really excited to do, because visiting a concentration camp is on my bucket list; I think it's a very important piece of world history and I think that seeing it was very important to me, to remind me of things and just make me realize how bad things can get. I knew going in that it was going to be a very emotionally intense trip. The first thing we did was look through the ... read more

The past three days (plus today) have largely just been spent doing things that need to be done here according to my schedule. Jamie took off Monday morning for Berlin, and I went to my mittelschule observation and taught six 7th graders for 90 minutes, which were the longest 90 minutes of my life. Ugggghhhh do not want to teach middle school ever oh my god. But at least after that, things got slightly better. I wrote up a full lesson plan "just in case" my teaching partner's didn't get approved by Dr. G and it's a good thing I did, because in the lesson planning meeting yesterday, he basically told me that we'll just use mine (without having ever seen it- does this say something about his faith in my abilities?). This week is a ... read more

So, it was Prague day! After an extraordinarily exhausting week of working my butt off, I got up at 6 AM the next morning to meet everyone at the bus that would take us to Prague. It took about two hours, and the ride over was very beautiful- tons of hills and mountains and sandstone. We met Jamie at the bus/train station and started off towards Prague Castle, walking up the back entrance which was a lot of steps but really cool. The view was amazing! And, of course, we saw the window where the Defenestration of Prague happened which started a war, because pushing people out of windows is cool lmao. We saw two churches, St. George's and the Cathedral, which looked like Vegnagun from Final Fantasy X-2, I swear. We went through some of ... read more

We started our observation in our school today, and got to sit through two 7th grade English classes. It was super easy to find and when they gave us our schedules, we only are going 7 days in 4 weeks, lol, and only to see 2 classes per day. LOL WHAT IS THIS we totally lucked out with this, because our travel time is so low and we started late to begin with. Maybe it's to make up for the fact that we are actually teaching way more than other people. I was nervous because this morning went wonderfully, with the kids, but I had to teach tonight again with a ton of people watching, observing, and critiquing. Joern, who is one of Dr. G's assistants in the program evaluation and such, met us at our ... read more