First week of classes and Naked Time in Baden Baden

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I have now encountered my first evening of complete freedom from responsibility or previously planned events, and I must say it is slightly confusing after having so much structure to my life during the last three weeks. So I'm writing a blog post or two!

First, CLASSES! I have completed my first week of classes and am now entering the second, which has given me a general idea of the future difficulty. Overall, my classes seem fairly easy, excluding my course on European Rights, where we are learning about the entire legal framework for Europe and were given an especially large "reader" which is better described as a tome of legalese. If you are curious what my courses are about, you can feel free to click here.
As far as enjoyment goes, My courses are neatly split by subject; International Studies courses are incredbily boring and the French courses have been excellent. In particular I've found myself enjoying reading Les Miserables in my French Realism immensely; the professor actually clarifies the literature and raises meaningful discussions during class.

Enough about classes, my classes just aren't that interesting compared with co-ed naked saunas.

This last weekend, I had the opportunity to travel with several of my friends from the Syracuse program to the small town of Baden Baden, which translates quite eloquently from German into "Bath Bath." I had the unenviable task of planning this trip, which included navigating the DeutschBanh website, in German, and making sure that the spa was actually open. During this planning, I made the discovery that, following the insane logic of French public pools, typical boardshorts are banned on the ground that they are somehow less hygienic than a speedo. Although I find this policy to be frankly ass-backwards, I have nevertheless invested in a pair of speedos, which I assure you, are quite flattering. Anyways, after the obligatory 45 minutes of getting lost, I eventually got our group to the train and on to Baden Baden. Although we toured the town and saw nice churches and gardens and other tourist things, the highlight was, of course, Caracalla Therme. All while I was examining this site, I kept expecting to be required to have a Swiss bank account or a yacht, because it seemed so posh, but to my surprise, 3 hours costs 17 euro! This place had 6 saunas of varying intensity, including a traditional outdoor Finnish sauna/cabin/deathtrap, and a hot spring waterfall! After relaxing in said waterfall/hot-tub, our group did muster up the courage to visit the 2nd floor saunas, the sole domain of the nudists. Although it was certainly a bit unnerving at first to be naked in a mixed group, and we did lose one person,who couldn't take the European-ness of it all, I had an absolute blast. We did about 4 sauna sessions, including 2 in Finnish saunas, one of which was 95 degrees Celsius. For perspective, thats 5 degrees short of boiling water! During our stay in this sauna, a gentleman well over 80 years old came in and laid down, and I quite seriously wondered whether he would survive (he did). But after an intense ten minutes in there, we fled and immediately jumped into ice-cold showers. Although I came out incredibly, (probably dangerously) dehydrated, I came out even more relaxed and europhic. I love Caracalla!

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