blame it on the volcanic ash

I'm sorry it's been so long since my last post--and I hate the "I'm too busy" excuse, so I chose the volcano instead--here goes!

Since my last blog (I'm realizing now just how long it's been!) I've been to France, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and all over Germany--we just got back from Munich today. To save y'all from having to read a ridiculously long blog entry, I'll split this into two. For this one, I'll just give you the Reader's Digest version of my spring break.

I started out in Paris with my friends Meghan and Hailey--we took a late train out of Munster and ended up getting into Paris around 11:30 pm, figured out the metro system, and found our hostel on the first try. Success! I hadn't been to Paris for five years, and I was really excited to be back in the city--we hit all of the highlights in the three days we spent there, and I'll hopefully end up back there again someday! We went to the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Champs de Elyesses, Montmartre, Basilica du Sacre Couer, Notre Dame, the Catacombs, THE LOUVRE, Musee du Orsay, and we ate tons of baguettes and crepes. I love Paris.

After Paris, Hailey and Meghan headed to Barcelona, and I headed north to Norway to meet my relatives and to see the country. I flew into Oslo, where I met Ingrid, Sonja, and Leif and had dinner with those three and Marianne and Johnny. The next two days were spent in Oslo, getting to know the city and of course seeing some of the museums! The next day, there was a family gathering at my great-grandpa's farm, so I got to see that farm and meet some more family--the language barrier was pretty large at times, but everyone was very nice to me and I always felt welcome! I also was able to see a movie in Oslo with Cecilie and Stian--I've never been in a theater as big as this one was. For Easter weekend, we headed to a cabin in Sweden, where we spent time reading, going for walks, playing with the baby, and eating really good food--I can now say that I have eaten moose :) For my last night in eastern Norway, I stayed with Stephanie and Sten, and had dinner with them and some friends of theirs--I was sad to leave the Oslo area--it's another place I really hope I can return to sometime soon!




For my second week in Norway, I went on a cross-country road trip with Solveig, stopping for the night in Lillehammer and seeing Maihaugen and the Olympic park, and meeting some more new family members! We finally made it to the Alesund area, and I spent the week there in awe of all of the mountains! I went for a couple of walks around the island with Samuel, and we traveled to a nearby fjord, and Samuel and I also climbed a small mountain. I also spent a lot of time drinking coffee and having conversations with Roger, Solveig, and Samuel--and also walking their dog Blacky :) For the last day in Alesund, we went to an aquarium where we got to see penguins, and then I flew to Bergen for the night--after a sometimes-eventful 21 hours or so, I hopped back on a plane to meet Meghan and Hailey in Dusseldorf to go back to Munster. I loved all of my spring break adventures, but it was definitely good to be back in Munster again!

berlin, wittenberg, potsdam, oh my!

First of all, please excuse the cheesy title. And yet another jumping picture--this one's with the Reichstag.Second of all, my trip to Berlin. One really cool aspect of this program is that we get to go on so many trips for which the program pays! We left early on a Friday morning, and got to Berlin in the early afternoon, where we met up with Katy--she used to teach at Luther, but she's originally from Berlin and has since moved back. We found our hostel and from there went to explore a church that was bombed during WWII and has been reconstructed, but to look completely different than it did before the war. We also paid a visit to the Kaufhaus Des Westens, or KaDeWe, which is basically Berlin's version of the Mall of America. Forgive the Gilmore Girls reference, but I felt like Emily Gilmore without Emily Gilmore's credit card in that place!

Many aspects of the trip were designed to relate to our ethics class about the Jews in Germany, so we went to the Jewish Memorial, the Zentralrat des Judens in Deutschland (the central organization for Jewish affairs), and a former concentration camp. We also saw what is called the Neue Synagogue which was destroyed during Kristallnacht but rebuilt afterwards. All of these aspects of the trip were really interesting and raised a lot of difficult questions that our class will continue to tackle throughout the course of the semester.

We were also able to do a lot of fun things in Berlin--we went to a performance of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra--I don't know a lot about music, but I really enjoy orchestra concerts, and this one was excellent. We also went to Carmen at the Staatsoper (City Opera), and that was especially interesting because the opera was performed in French, but there were German subtitles. The other "theatre" type thing we did was attend a performance of Qi--it's billed as the biggest Vegas-type show in Berlin. There were acrobats, an ice-skating rink, and a swimming pool that all popped up on that stage at one point or another. Quite the experience!

Other Berlin highlights were a tour of the Reichtstag (the German equivalent of the U.S. Capitol)--our tour group was really fascinating. We had an English tour with a group of Egyptians, two Russians, and our group from Iowa. It was really fun to experience that tour with the group of people we did. Also, we went to the Berliner Dom--a cathedral built by the Prussians, and went up to the spinning restaurant on the top of the Fernsehturm (TV tower). My personal favorite part of Berlin were all the museums--last January we had to walk right by them, but this time I actually got to go in and see everything. I liked all of the museums, but my favorites were the Neue Museum (which has just re-opened after being basically destroyed in WWII), the Pergamon Museum (it has the Ishtar Tor. enough said.), and the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte (Museum of German history). Other museums I visited were the Altes Museum, the Gemälde Gallerie (Painting Gallery), and the Jewish Museum.

From Berlin, we went to Wittenberg aka MartinLutherLand. I find the European Reformations endlessly fascinating, so I was really happy to get to go back to Wittenberg. We did a city tour and and I got to go back to the Martin Luther museum--I like that place a lot :) This picture is of me with "The Door" of Wittenberg--where Martin Luther may or may not have posted the 95 Theses on October 31, 1517.For our last day, we basically went back to Berlin--Potsdam is basically a suburb of Berlin in which tons of rich people built palaces. We toured the most famous (Sans Souscci--I think I spelled that right) and walked around to see others.

This trip was a lot of fun, and we've been back in Münster for about two weeks, and we leave for spring break tomorrow!

just checking in...

I've been informed that I've been slacking on this blog. Which is true. I do; however, have a good reason. My group took a 10 day trip to Berlin and Wittenberg, and we didn't have any internet access, but we did have a huge amount of fun and learned a lot. As soon as I'm able to upload pictures to my computer, I will indulge you all in a dazzling description of my time in eastern Germany. I hope you're all doing well and enjoying the good weather that seems to be presently hovering over the midwest! (Here's hoping it comes to Germany soon...)

Auf Wiedersehen!

hamburgers and doms

Hi again! Sorry it's been so long--I've had a lot of exciting things going on the past week and a half!

First: Weekend in Hamburg. One of my friends from the program has a friend who lives in Hamburg, so we made a weekend trip up there. Hamburg is a gorgeous city--it's historically been a huge port city, so many important people have been through Hamburg at one point or another. We took a train on Friday morning and made it to Hamburg around 5:00, where we met up with Melly and took the S-Bahn back to her house. She lives with her parents who both speak only German, so our German skills were really put to the test! We spent Friday night taking a boat tour of Hamburg's harbor and walking around the Old City--it really reminded me of Amsterdam because of all the canals and bridges. We slept in on Saturday, and then proceeded to see a couple of churches, the shopping district, and of course the Rathaus (city hall). We ate dinner with Melly's parents--I have yet to have any German food I don't like! On Sunday, Melly's parent's drove us around so we could see a football (soccer) stadium, and we drove under the Elbe River! We also walked under the Elbe--there's this old tunnel that is still used by commuters, etc. to quickly cross the Elbe. Another highlight was eating hamburgers in Hamburg :) We headed back to Münster on Sunday without any train problems--as much fun as we had in Hamburg, it really felt good to be back home in Münster! This picture is of us in front of the Hamburg Rathaus.

This last week was really a blur of classes, homework, and preparations for the rest of the semester. I'm still really enjoying my classes, but the enormity of picking paper topics is looming...I'll be a lot happier with that when I know what I'm doing! Other highlights from the week were dinners with host families (they're so much fun to talk to!), meeting the son of a friend of my advisor at Luther--the whole group had a "play date" with him and he showed us some fun places to go in Münster where we can probably make some friends.

Yesterday was our first group trip--we went to Köln to see the Dom (cathedral) and the rest of the city. I spent the day in museums...who'da thunk? I started out at the Römish-Germanisches Museum, which is dedicated to showing the history of the Roman Empire in Germany and Köln in particular--the museum is actually built on top of the site where they discovered a gigantic Roman building. The museum had a few cool mosaics, and tons of Roman tombstones and everyday objects. I had a conversation with one of the museum guards who apparently had his razor sharp American-radar on, and we talked about a few of the different objects in the museum, and he told me about the other museum I went to in Köln.

I can never remember the name of this museum, but it featured art from the middle ages through the Impressionists. This museum's collection was really concentrated around art from Köln, but they had a few Rembrandts and one Cranach painting, so I was happy. I didn't make it up to the top floor to see the Impressionist paintings because the museum was closing for the day. Next time, I guess :)

The other highlight of the day was getting a tour of the Köln Dom--I'm pretty sure it's one of the largest cathedrals in Europe. I love cathedrals (the picture reflects my love of both cathedrals and jumping pictures), but I'm still deciding if the tour of this one added to my appreciation for this particular cathedral or took away from it. Construction of the cathedral started way back in the day (and by that I mean somewhere around the tenth or eleventh century) because Köln was a huge port/trading city with a lot of rich people who were willing to fund a cathedral. Construction stopped and started at various points throughout history whenever there was money or interest, and was only completed at the end of the nineteenth century as a majestic show of German nationalism after it became a country in 1871. I mentioned that to one of our professors, and we talked a little bit about how a lot of buildings in Germany have more than one meaning--it makes it really interesting!

Well, this has been really long. I have a presentation tomorrow, so I'm going to go finish that!

karneval

Good morning! This weekend was our first "real" weekend in Münster, and it just so happened to be Karneval, which is a huge party. From what I understand, it's pretty much the German version of Mardi Gras--it takes place the Monday before Ash Wednesday and has historically been a day in which all social norms go out the window and everyone celebrates! The day started out with a gigantic parade, which had some of the craziest floats I've ever seen. The announcers for the parade were hilarious--they were announcing different things going on during the parade, and just providing comments on everything under the sun. I was happy to discover that German parades also hand out candy--that meant lots of free German chocolate! After the parade, we went around the city for a while and ate street food that was super good (french fries and bratwurts, go figure) and just observed the general craziness that was going on. The only bad thing about Karneval was the fact that it's been cold lately for Germany, and so it wasn't very fun to be outside for much of it. Here are a couple pictures from the parade--everyone knows Germans wear leiderhosen all of the time, right? The one on the bottom is one example of the floats in the parade; many were made of fiberglass(?) and were gigantic sculptures of tons of different things--we saw ones of animals, people, and all of the floats were pulled by tractors! W even saw a John Deere. Way to represent, midwest.
On Sunday, Hailey's host dad took us to a volleyball game. The local Münster team is apparently pretty good, and they were playing against a team from Berlin. It was really fun being at the game--there was a pep band of sorts, and everyone at the game would clap on beat to the drum (if you've ever sat next to me in any sort of setting in which clapping on beat is required, you know how difficult that was for me...), and Münster ended up winning the game!

Dinner last night was a grill-out with my host family, Meghan, Hailey, and one of my host dad's piano students. They were all really curious about whether or not Americans grilled out in the snow, and we tried to explain the concept of tailgating to them; they think we're nuts. I'm really glad that I was placed with my host family--I'm still having so much fun getting to know them. On Saturday, Hailey and I played in the snow with my younger host sisters, and discovered the area around Gremmendorf a little bit--I can't wait for spring because this city is going to be so pretty!

This was a little long--sorry about that! Auf Wiedersehen!

cobblestones

This post is entitled "cobblestones" because I have developed a very love/hate relationship with them in the past few days. I think they're gorgeous, and the streets here in Münster wouldn't look the same with pavement; however, they are also very slippery when wet. I discovered this this morning when I went searching for a coffee shop with free wi-fi where I could finish my German Aufsatz (essay) and check my email. I got a little bit turned around in the Altstadt, which is ironic considering I was using a gigantic cathedral as my landmark for the cafe I wanted. Who thought you could lose a cathedral?


We started classes on Monday, and a few of us took a "first day of school" picture in front of the community center where we have our classes. As you can tell from the picture, we were really excited. I really like my classes so far--German grammar frustrates me to no end, but I'm getting better at speaking, which is what I really care about. The other classes sound like they'll be a lot of fun--we have to do a couple of presentations for our Paideia II class, and it sounds like we basically get to choose the speed of my seminar class, so if we get all the work done in two months, then we're done!

My friends Hailey, Megan, and I have been eating dinner with each others' host families a lot this week, and it has been really fun to get to know the other families. Tonight, we're eating at Hailey's house with her host mother, father, and sister. We ate with my host family last night, and my host mother made fahnkuchen (pancakes) for us, and we put nutella and jam and applesauce on them and they were amazing. We ended up talking with my host parents and sisters for a couple hours about tons of different subjects--we talked about our families and friends in the United States, my host sister's schools, our classes here, and Münster in general. It's been a crazy cold winter for all of Europe compared to what they're used to, so all of our host families have been warning us about the frigid temperatures we're likely to face on any given day. It's not pleasantly warm outside, but it's no January in Iowa, either. The weather's supposed to turn nicer in a couple weeks, so it'll be fun to be able to really enjoy all of the outdoor activities Münster has to offer.

Bis Später!

münster--finally!

Hello all! I finally made it to Münster--three flights and 24 hours of travel later! My parents took me to Minneapolis on Wednesday night, and I stayed with my friends Kristin and Hannah who drove me to the airport last Thursday morning for our first flight of the day from Minneapolis to Chicago. We had a bit of a layover in Chicago, so we passed the time by playing cards and talking about how excited we were for Münster!

Our next flight took us from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany. We flew with Lufthansa, and it was easily the coolest plane I've ever seen. There were STAIRS in it. No one else in my group thought it was quite as cool as I did, but that's okay. I tried to watch a couple of movies and sleep on the way over, but that didn't work so well, and we were all exhausted by the time we got to Frankfurt at about 7:00 am German time. We had another flight to catch to Münster, so we made our way through the Frankfurt airport, drank some free coffee, and caught our last short flight to Münster, where our professor met us.

Once we got into Münster, we stored our luggage and walked around the city to keep ourselves awake. I was so happy to see the cathedrals and the castle again, as well as the rest of the city! Because we were all so tired, we went back to our classroom for a little while before we met our host families and just sat there, trying to make conversations that made sense and not always succeeding.

We met our host families at a cafe near the Münster Hauptbahnhof (train station), and went home with them. My host family is amazing--they're very welcoming, and they all think I'm best friends with Barack Obama because I have a picture of him on my screensaver from when he spoke at Luther! They only speak German to me, which is good because it forces me to use my not-so-good German, which is hopefully getting better!

Today's the first day of classes, so that's where I'm off to right now--I hope all is well with all of you!