hi guys, it's stephanie, coming to you from Germany. What's up? Sorry if this is a bit long - I will be posting it on the blog and email just,.... because.
Second semester marches on, we had just started it at the end of April, and it won't be ending until end of July, in case you're wondering. But it's very relaxed; a. b/c i'm an exchange student, that can German-as-a-second-language classes, with much hand-holding and help from the teachers, and only have to take a limited amount of harder classes (for real students) b. because this time of year there's a new holiday every week almost. This week we have the whole week off for pentacost, even though like everyone here is seemingly agnostic. But it's great and i'm learning a lot. I only have met one onther Chapel hill student here, but thats alright, plenty of others.
I hosted a small get together yesterday of american exchange students and a couple Germans and we taught them how to make s'mores and play apples to apples (found an english version here). Like so many of our various culinary delights, they reacted with surprise at the immense sweetness, too sweet in fact, they say, which we're a bit infamous over here for. There are no graham crackers, so we subsituted a similar looking thin butter cookies that worked well.
Saturday i took a trip to Basel, Switzerland (like 3 hrs SW of where I am) and that was cool. it was with the international exchange student group at the university and I met someone from my home state Missouri who goes to Mizzou and served as a kind of a mirror picture of my experience - "how it would be" if I had gone there instead of UNC or any other out-of-state school. This program seems to be the big one for them, so in that respect it wouldn't have been different. But I am still happy and glad I chose UNC.
I actually ended up having to go grocery shopping there because it would've been too late by the time we got back, and (yesterday and today) are Sunday/holiday, which essentially means EVERYTHING is closed except for restaurants. So i picked up a few groceries in switzerland and underway, a little old crazy lady carrying a stick, told me off in swiss-nonsenese and poked me with it. Very funny and startling at the same time. but it was fun. Tried to walk to the French border but was farer away than we thought, and turned around (Basel sits in a corner of switzerland bordering Germany and France. But we took a tour and ferried across the Rhein, it was a lovely, beautiful day.
other than that, not a whole lot else going on at the moment. Gonna try to get some work done with homework, maybe watch some "House" episodes in German, (I volunteer at an an American library here which gives me acess to many books, magazines, and DVDs both in English and German.) Back when The UNC-Duke games were on even, one of the American magazines in the library had a big article on it, which I proudly displayed and explained to the Germans working around me. They find the sports culture so weird here because there's nothing like that her, what we have in America with college sports.
But hope you guys are all doing great, and enjoying summer. I'm super psyched to be living with you next year, and I miss you guys!----Stephanie
Monday, June 1, 2009
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