Freakishly Happy

Today was yet another absolutely beautiful 70 degree day without a cloud in the sky. :)
This morning we ventured out for a little while and went to the AYF office and talked to Ulli our super-hero program director, and met Christie who I will later tell you about in the next paragraph.

We made a new friend named Christie, who was a former AYFer (Academic Year in Freiburg)who came back for a while to help with get all of us newbies (what a dumb word, huh?) registered. We went out to a restaurant called Cheers! where I had Gnocci for the third time this week. Its really good stuff. Cheese filled pasta in creamy butter sauce with herbs. hhmmmmm good.... Then we went out for REAL icecream (way good) walked around town and hiked up the hill to the beer garden for waters and cappuccino.

It was really great talking to her because we were able to totally pick her brain about all things German. Like for instance, we learned that we had been grossly over-tipping the wait staff at the restaurants. Here, unlike in the US wait staff is actually paid a decent wage, so you are only expected to tip them $0.30 - $0.50 / meal, unlike the 15-20% that we had been tipping... Good to know!

Well, it is fairly late-ish here, so I'm going to sign off.

Wow! The last four days have been a whirlwind! We arrived safely on Sunday morning, after a long flight on India Airways. The flight was interesting, as we were served Indian food, and all of the service crew (all female) were in traditional dress. We sat next to an interesting Indian man, who I had fun talking to for the first four hours of the flight. We talked about everything from riding elephants to American prom.

We got off the plane around 10:00 am, groggy and wishing that we hadn't packed so much stuff. Luckily, there were free luggage carts, so we were able to easily maneuver our mountain of stuff up and down escalators and through terminals to the train station.

We hopped on a high-speed train that arrived just minutes after we came to the loading area. The train took us about 2 hours, with a quick train change in the town of Mannheim.

We arrived in Freiburg exhausted, and were glad that our Hotel was easy to locate. We're staying at wonderful Hotel Schwarzwald (The Black-Forrest Hotel), which is located right in the middle of the beautiful Altstadt (old city). We napped for a couple of hours before emerging to find dinner. We ate at a great Italian restaurant, and came home again to sleep.
We both woke up in the middle of the night to talk and read over our guide book, having been fairly well rested from sleeping earlier in the day. Given my love of sleeping though, I was able to fall asleep again, while poor John was up for most of the night.

Monday, we spent the day walking around the city. We found the University, and met the Facilitator for my study abroad program. Then we walked/took the train to our apartment for the year. It is in a completely differnt part of town from the Altstad, whose name is escaping me right now. Its a new-ish? building that sits by itself, and has a larg pet store covering the whole bottom floor. We'll be living on the top floor, and will hopefully have a great view of the mountains The apartment is fairly far away from the University by foot, but only a 5 minute train ride (trains here are FAST).

Then we walked home, did some shopping and came back to the hotel to hang out. John still recovering from jet-lag napped and I read a book for most of the afternoon. Pretty low-key ;)

We went out again around sun-set, and hiked up a set of stairs near the hotel. The stairs kept going up, and so did we. Eventually we found a walking trail that lead up the side of the mountain. We walked probably 3/4 up the mountain and sat down to have dinner of asiago bread and white wine (how very bohemian of us). The view of the city and surrounding mountains was absolutely breath-taking, especially since it was highlighted by the sunset.

Today we've been layin' low, studying German and hanging out in the city gardens.

Freiburg is really wonderful. I can't get over that I actually get to live here!! Most of the buildings are colorful stucco, (orange, pink, yellow-pretty much any color you can think of). There are all kinds of shops down on the first floor of every building. Every shop has its own specialty- no Wal-marts or big chain stores here! Most of the buildings are dated from the 15th Century, and some are even older. The streets are all cobblestone, and there are many pedestrian zones all over town. There are small canals that run down most of the streets that lead to a big waterfall and stream near the University.

Everyone has been very friendly. It’s a little strange to hear German voices wafting up from the street in to our hotel room, it feels very surreal. I still haven't been very brave with speaking, but I'm getting a little more confident as time goes on. John and I have been practicing with each other as much as possible, so hopefully, by the end of the month, we will both be speaking a significant amount of German.

So, to get to the point We are still alive and are having a GREAT time! ;)

This is a map of Germany. We will be living in Freiburg, which is conviently indicated in red :)
CH is Switzerland and F is France.