Trying to keep up....

---

Day 5,
It is the 31st so I’ve obviously missed a few days. The internet’s going in and out but the hostel is getting it checked out. Let me just start out by saying I will definitely study abroad! This experience is so amazing! I can’t describe how cool it is to go out to eat and you can look across the table and see someone from the US, UK, Japan, Tajikistan, Russia, Germany, Palestine, Lithuania, India, Thailand, Israel, . I have met and have been becoming friends with people from all 15 of these nations. It’s so wild! Everyone here has been super nice and most can speak fluent English. The Lithuanians and the Russians speak broken English. It’s tough holding a conversation with them because once you get passed a lot of the easy questions they start getting confused. Which is really unfortunate because several of the Lithuanians are shall we say….gorgeous. Well all except for the smoking factor. So…that kind of sucks. The British are by far the most fun to hand out with but most everyone here is a blast to hang out with.
We went to Berlin on Sunday. The architecture was beautiful. The Berlin wall and the Holocaust Memorial was emotional. It caught me by surprise. Everyone was loud on the street and even walking up to the memorial. As soon as you got about 20 feet away from the memorial NO ONE talked. You could hear a pin drop. There were probably 250 people at the memorial and if anyone spoke it was in a whisper. It was wild.


Day 6,
We’ve had some trouble getting online. Their wifi which you have to pay for is out. They said that they’re working on getting it back but we’ll see. Dr Chelte took us out to dinner last night which was a lot of fun. HELLO free 24 euro steak! Today we went and toured a food company and helped them with their international marketing plan for marketing in all the different nations represented. For example, the other Americans and I put a plan together for them to market their product for Americans and those from the UK helped them with a marketing plan for marketing in the UK and so on. Really cool. By the time I get back to the hostel today around 6pm from the German company visit I’d had all I could handle of them for a little while. So I went running by myself. I figured out how far I ran when I got back and it turned out to be about 13km which is about 7.8 miles. And for me, that’s a dang good run. I don’t know what got into me. But it was awesome! I ran out of Erfurt (the town we’re in of about 200,000 people) and past cornfields and strawberry fields. Which I definitely helped myself to the BEST STRAWBERRIES I’VE EVER HAD! Ok, ok, ok so I might have hopped a fence in doing so and hid from a few cars that past but it’s all good. And I know youre asking yourself…so….yes I will be going back!!! I ended up going through the country to the next town over. On my way back I got a little lost considering the map I had only covered Erfurt. I got right where the map started and probably only .5 miles from the hostel by asking three people for directions because not everyone speaks English. I ended up running into a couple cops when I was about and through them only being able to speak a few words of English convinced them to give me a ride the rest of the way back. So I road in a German police car. Hopefully that’s the only time that will ever happen. But ya it was really cool! So what Im trying to say is…my body hurts!!! But wow…running on top of a mountain outside of Erfurt as the sun is dropping down behind a cornfield is one of the most amazing sights ive ever seen. God is an amazing artist!!!!! I was able to get away from the others and spend some time in prayer while running, which was needed. I feel so much better!

---