Meine Damen und Herren-
Wow its been a while. I'm just sitting at home during the Easter Break. Acutally, today is the first day of Easter, but the holiday also includes tomorrow, Easter Monday. I've heard that not much is really done on Easter Monday accept the working community gets the day off. I'll probably go into Stade and draw tomorrow with some friends or something along those lines. My parents visited last week- they left on Thursday. We spent about half of the time, starting the 1st of April, here in the north, adventuring Stade and Hamburg and so on. We actually saw quite a bit of Hamburg that I had never seen, so that was cool.
Afterward we shipped off to the south of Germany, hitting citys like Kassel, Köln and Heidelburg. I've been told that the south is pretty much what American's would call 'stereotypical' Germany. Beer, lederhosen, sauerkraut, and so on. We had a blast. I played navigator and translator through most of the trip, with help from my mother, who turned out to be pretty good at navigating the German 'natural-built' roads. Their cities aren't planned like ours were, with the purpose of being a large, easily-navigatable center of activity. They were built before cars were invented or widely used, so all of the roads GO somewhere (i.e. a town center, a theater, or a shopping district), but not always where you want to go. I'm a little nervous, because AFS Germany called the yesterday and asked about my parent's visit, of which they had had no previous knowledge. They didn't reach us because we were out celebrating Heide's father's birthday... I thought that AFS America would have taken care of it, because my parents had finished all of the required paper work and so on. Appearently not... We'll just have to see how that works out.
Well, I'm looking at my blog and I can see that I haven't written for more than a month. You're probably wondering what happened to that time, and all I can say is, I'm not entirely sure. Varrious judo tournaments, church events, and outings ate it up rather quickly. I took several test, with nothing surprising about any of them, really, just the normal struggles with specialized language and unknown words pertaining to Politics, Religion, and French (the unknown words there being namely the French ones). I also wrote a four- or five-page report on my Praktikum, which was not exactly easy. I'm pretty sure every sentance had to be corrected by Moritz or Heide.
Well, other than that I'm pretty sure not much has happened. AFS warned us about the last three months and how you see the light at the end of the tunnel and want to do all the things you haven't done but meant to do and blah blah blah. I made the mistake of not believing them on this point, thinking I'd just simply pace myself through the entire trip and get it all in without a problem. Now I'm 89 days from return and I feel like every minute I'm not doing something amazing and only possible in Germany is wasted and its driving me crazy. I'm sorry if my blog is the first thing to kind of fall off in my rush to experience everything I can but I'm kinda focusing on having experiences right now, not writing them all down... Maybe I'll just write a book of all my best memories on my way back... Well, see you all soon. I hope everyone is having a great easter and not forgetting for whom we celebrate and what it means for the Believers (I read the crucifixion-resurrection story in each of the four Gospels this morning). Peace be with you.
-Elliot P.
