Blogs from Trier, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, Europe - page 8

It's been a pretty good last couple days. Tue night I went to game night with Matt. That was a lot of fun. We joined a bunch of other international students and played 'Activity'. It's a word game. A player from a team has to draw a card. On the card are a bunch of compound words, the player then has to describe the word, do sharades or draw (depending on what space they're on on the board) and get their teammates to guess the word before the time runs out. It was kinda hard to play, since all of our German was at different levels and sometimes the vocabulary just wasn't there. It was sooo much fun though=) Not much exciting to say about yesterday. In the afternoon, I was going to play piano ... read more

Well, today was the first day of my language class. I have mixed feelings about it. There are 17 people in my class (and I made it into the Oberstuffe... upper level =) ). There are students from the US, France, Italy, Estonia, Denmark, Greece, Romainia and Hungary. That's pretty cool. The kinda sucky thing though, is that they all knew somebody arlready in the class and today everyone stayed with their friends (so that left me pretty much to myself). Also, the French and the Belgians are always talking amongst themselves in French. When they start doing that the others start talking amongst themselves in their native languages which makes for a very boring break. Oh well, I'm hoping it'll get better. Today class wasn't difficult. I'm not having any trouble understanding anything. That's a ... read more

Last night was a lot of fun. All of us internation students participating in the orientation went to dinner. The dinner wasn't anything special, but it also consisted of wine tasting =). This region (as I may have already mentioned) is like the Napa Valley of Germany. It's wine country so each table had a few bottles of different wines from Trier. All of them were white wines and were pretty good. Jaime, Matt and I sat with a girl from Belgium (don't know how to spell her name yet) and Mosuku from Japan. Both are very nice. Sitting at the table right next us was a group from Istanbul. =) It was cool to get to talk with them. They were very nice. It was a fun evening of just getting to know people. ... read more

(typing this on Oct. 6th) I've never felt so overwhelmed and lonely in my entire life. The drive down to Trier was wonderful. The area is goregeous. We visited a town along the Mosel (don't remember the name, I'll have to get it from my room). It was absolutely gorgeous! The houses were all sooooo old. I have some really nice pics, but as of yet can't put them online. I'm working on that though and will hopefully have some pictures up soon. We walked around the town for awhile and then found a place to have lunch. I got to try Federweisse for the first time. (It's kind of like grape juice but with some alchohol in it. We then walked around some more and just enjoyed looking at all the old buildings. Some ... read more

Anybody who tries to tell you that the French have mastered the Art of Living has not spent enough time in French bathrooms. Nothing throws this fact into sharper relief than crossing the border into Germany. Even in Trier, an 1,800-year-old wine town just over the line, the contrast is startling. With a nod to the tired old "white people dance like this / black people dance like that" stand-up comedy formula, here's an overview of the contrasting approaches: The bath-tub In France, the bathtubs are all about three feet long. This may be because the French are all so short. Seriously, seriously short. I stand at nearly 6'4" and Ashley's 5'10", and we TOWERED over Paris, almost like . . . er . . . you know, some sort of Parisian tower thingy. We felt ... read more