Yes, yes, I hear the crowd calling out for my brilliance. Well, good people, I'm here to appease you.

So it's been a while, I guess? I have FINALLY started classes! Hooray! Although I have probably the least amount of classes of anyone. Only four classes. But that is quite fine with me. At least two of them are master's classes too. Good thing I'm brilliant, right? Ha. I think they will be quite difficult. My schedule is:
Incentive and Behavior
Industrial Economics
Social and Economic Networks
Migration and the Labour Market.

The first three classes have the same professor. He is really nice and his English is great, so that is good. He reminds me of a younger Murry Bentley. My other professor is apparently very well-known or famous or something. I don't really know. His English is very heavily accented but I think the topic is good. The first three classes are primarily about microeconomics and game theory, which is NOT something I am particularly interested it (I am more of a macro fan) but I think it'll be okay. Pretty much I've just being doing that recently, figuring out how to do everything related to books and printing out readings and such.

I went to Munich on Friday to meet a friend of Hannah's who teaches at a Montessori school there. He is taking his class to London in May on a trip to help with their English, and I am hopefully going with them as an assistant. I will be helping teach English in the morning and then sightseeing in the afternoon and it's all paid for by the school. I say hopefully because they still have to get approval from the principal to take an extra chaperone, but it probably will be okay. I'm excited! I hadn't planned on going to England this trip, not because I don't LOVE England but I thought maybe since I've been there I wouldn't go back this time. But, for free, I think I can handle it. It's also over the Pentecost break so I'd only miss a few classes (which apparently you're allowed to miss like all of them...not that I plan to.) Hannah's friend, Thomas, is really nice and he showed me all around Munich. I came and went in one day (which is about 3 hrs each way) but it really wasn't bad at all.

My trip to Italy did get canceled thanks to that volcano. Luckily I am getting a refund for my plane ticket, so I'll have to reschedule. I don't really have any trips scheduled yet, so I need to get on that! I am planning on going to Budapest after the semester is over once my roommate and her friends are home. I'm excited about that! I am working on weekend trips to Berlin and Prague and then definitely a Scandinavia excursion as well. I have long weekends (Friday to Sunday) every week and then I have tutorials on Monday that are every other week, so I could potentially take some quite long trips. As long as my money holds out, eek!

I miss you all very much! I have pretty much settled into a routine here, which is good. I'm still looking for a job and I sent several inquiries today, but it's pretty limited considering my basically 0 German ability. Oh well. This is much more than I thought I would write, so you're welcome! :)

THE SAGA

If anyone has been following this awful saga regarding my thyroid medicine and the package that Jenny sent on March 20 that has mysteriously disappeared. Well today I went to a doctor, taking along my dubious insurance purchased from the internet and hoping to communicate in English. WELL: SUCCESS! Got a prescription for the medicine and took it to a pharmacy. DONE AND DONE. Overall cost, which was something I had literally no idea what it would be: 4.66 euros for the doctors visit and 16 euros for three months of medicine. On my own, communicating in English.

Needless to say, I am walking on sunshine today.

Oh, hey Alison, where have you been? Just around, I guess. It's been a SUPER boring week. I mean, a super relaxing week. I'm feeling a little guilty about doing as close to literally nothing as possible, but then again not actually that much. I haven't really had much of a real break in a while (a week around Christmas, a weekish before I came here) so I'm not feeling too bad. I do hope that I can find some sort of a job while I'm here. I have a woman who is going to contact me this week about the tutoring jobs. Who knows? Apparently I am a workaholic. Not having a job makes me feel like a lazy, good-for-nothing slob. Although it has lent me a lot of time to clean my room and wash dishes. I have discovered the secret to keeping your dishes washed: don't own any dishes. When you have two of everything, you have to wash your dishes nearly every day or else you're using paper towels for bowls and fingers for spoons and that is really not a nice way to eat cereal.

Yesterday was the one-month mark. It's weird because on all of my previous trips, that would be the halfway point and everything else is downhill. But this time, it's just the beginning. My semester hasn't even started yet! It's very strange. I think the newness is starting to wear a bit and homesickness (or comfortsickness or familiarsickness) is beginning to set in. I am hoping once I get a routine and have something to do with my time, then it will be a lot better. I am also planning on getting a bike this week so I'm pretty excited about that. The town is really small to afford walking everywhere and has a pretty regular bus schedule, but I just think having a bike will be fun and also lend a bit of that automobile freedom that I am missing : ) Classes start on April 19, so this week is again a bit of a slow one. I was hoping to maybe go somewhere but I just can't seem to get all the logistics together.

Okay there's your weekly update. My camera is dead because my charger is in my mysterious package that refuses to arrive and consistently befuddles/infuriates me every day. Not that I have done anything super exciting to take pictures of. I just re-read what I wrote and it's a bit whiny. Sorry about that, I need to infuse my writing with better words but I think maybe I'm losing my English as well as not learning any German : )

Fränkische Schweiz

Oh dang. What a crazy day! We went on another day trip, this time to the Franconia area in Bavaria. We went by bus (all of us a bit wary from last week's excursion...and rightly so, as you will see later) and first went to this tiny town where they have a fountain that is decorated with Easter eggs and garland. It's apparently a traditional thing in this region, but for us it was, um, not to interesting, not to mention freezing cold. Plus there was some sort of market to be open, but it wasn't open yet for the day. So it was basically fifty college students in the main square of a tiny town staring at this fountain. It was pretty funny in it's ridiculousness. Plus they were like, okay well we're going to be here for an hour. Haha! Luckily it ended up being about 30 minutes. Not too bad.

Then, we went by bus to a choice of two options, a somewhat inexplicable "bobsled without the snow" ride or a trip to a cave. CLEARLY i chose the bobsled thing, because 1) I hate caves and 2) the bobsled sounded awesome. Turns out, it totally was. It was sort of like a go-kart on a roller coaster track on the side of a Bavarian mountain. It was super fun. I was kind of freaking out of awesomeness. Then we went to this lake where some people went on paddle boats. I didn't go on the boat, although I did tell the story about Mom & Dad in the paddle boat not once but two times, it's always a crowd pleaser. I sat on the side of the lake soaking up some much-loved rays of sun. We then walked about a kilometer to the cave where the others were and took the bus to another little town.

At that town, there was a church and castle/fort thing, but we were mostly interested in lunch. In Bamberg there are TONS of take away places with sandwiches and pizza and Doner Kebabs (a delicious Turkish sandwich.....soooo good) but not in this town. We ended up eating bread and ice cream for lunch, always delicious. We were pretty tired and not really interested in seeing "the sights" but we DID stumble upon a church rummage sale! I have seriously been looking for this kind of thing since I've been here, just for some random household items that I need. I ended up buying a little red pot, a measuring cup and two scarves for 3 euros. Score!

THEN: They were all, oh hey, now to meet the bus we are going to hike for one and a half hours. We were all, WHAT?! And that we did, just took off through some neighborhoods and through some fields and through some woods. It was pretty beautiful but the weather was so weird, it would be cold and then hot and then windy, apparently "April weather" in Germany is code for extremely unpredictable. I wasn't super prepared for hiking and it was pretty tiring. But overall it was nice. Unfortunately my battery charger for my camera is in my elusive package that refuses to come, and my camera has finally died. But everyone else took tons of pictures that I'm sure will be on FB soon. I have decided not to put pictures on here because it's a hassle to resize and upload and everyone has Facebook anyways.

OK on the way back, our bus driver ran into a wall! What?! It was so weird, he was turning a corner and scraped against a concrete fence/wall. Everyone was like, NOOOOO (flashback to last week's bus drama). The driver got out and had to go knock on the door of the house and then go next door and find someone to talk to about it. So crazy. Unfortunately we had to skip the last stop of our trip (which was another Easter fountain thing....dang, they love these things) but I'm pretty sure everyone was like, SCORE because we were kind of over the fountains anyway.

SO YEAH. That's what happened. It was such a crazy day, at 3:00 we were walking through some woods, and I was amazed at how much we had already done by that time. Oh also yesterday we went to a park here in Bamberg for a picnic, it was really nice. Everyone is so eager to make plans and hang out and do anything. It's nice because if anyone suggests anything, everyone is in for it. Alright, movie night! See ya!