Details of my Life Part I

Time is running out and I have started to take pictures of EVERYTHING!


View of Freiburg from the top of the Münster

The little grocery store that I frequent and have a love/hate relationship with
The cheap Italian restaurant that we go to that gives everyone else free bread except us, so we don't tip them and then we don't get free bread the next time we go in. It's a vicious cycle.
Me with my husband

My bank

The sketch elevator in my dorm

The tram that I take into town

The walk from my dorm to the tram stop (it's right across the street)

Uni Freiburg. I feel like I went back into the 70s every time I walk on campus
The Uni again

My attractive friends enjoying a nice bratwurst for lunch at the farmer's market

Once again I have been bad about updating!
On Tuesday night, my roommate from freshman year of college, Laurel, came to visit me and we had a lot of fun. Wednesday we took a tour of Freiburg and I went around taking pictures of everything from the bakery where I always buy my pretzels, to the tram stop outside of my dorm, because I don't want to forget a single thing.
Thursday, Laurel went off to Basel while I stuck around for a final exam and a class. I also made an appointment with my Hausmeister to move out on July 29th. I say it again and again, but I absolutely cannot believe how fast time has gone by while I've been here. It seems like just last week that I had to make an appointment with my Hausmeister so he could give me my room keys and mailbox label, as I was officially moving in to my dorm.
This weekend, my friends are off in Italy and I've been in my room working on my last final paper of the semester. My brain is pretty fried now, but I think I'm going to finish it tomorrow.

Next week is the last week of classes, and then the week after is my last week in Germany. Holy smokes!

Post Post Script

These two pictures, taken by Emily, sum up our trip home from Prague, after we missed our train and lost all our seat reservations. The first one is a picture from our first train. We were stuck in this tiny aisle for 2 hours in tiny seats that we had to stand up and get out of every time someone walked by. Behind me is an obnoxious American tourist that was flipping out that all the seats were taken, REFUSED to sit in an aisle seat, and was on her way to buy a first class ticket. Across from me was a compartment of teenage girls all going on a trip and they kept running in and out every 2 seconds and making me stand up to get out of their way. This was taken right after we boarded the train, so you can see that we're still full of energy.

This one was taken 10 hours later on our last train from Frankfurt to Freiburg. We couldn't find seats and had to sit on the floor. We were notttt happy campers by this point, but I think my face pretty much sums that up.

Post Script

Of course we spelled out Prague, too!
Actually we spelled it in German, Prag, because there weren't enough of us for the English translation! :-)

Prague!

I promised that I would update this blog more, but I guess I kind of failed at it. I have an excuse though, from Thursday until Saturday I was in Prague! What a trip...

We left on Wednesday night on a sleeper train. I had never ridden one before, but surprisingly, the seats were pretty comfortable and went back far, so it was easy(er) to relax. The train took 13 hours and I spent a lot of it in a weird haze between half consciousness and weird sleep with crazy dreams. Still, it was definitely the best rest I've ever gotten on a train.

We arrived on Thursday morning and what struck me was how different the architecture in Eastern Europe is compared to the West, and the Czech language, which is totally indecipherable from looking at it (unlike languages like German, Spanish, or Italian). The city was GORGEOUS though!
Our first task was to take out some money from the ATM. The Czech Republic is not joining the Euro until next year, so they are still on their currency, called the kornua. When we got to the ATM, our choices were 500, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000. We had no idea what anything meant. I took out a 500, and was given a 500 bill. Not good! Emily tried taking out a 1000 and got a 1000 bill and then Jon got a 2000 bill! We had no idea how much any of this was worth until we converted it and found out that my 500 was only $23 haha. It still felt cool to walk around with money in such huge denominations, but freaked us out when we had to pay 3500 for our hostel, or 870 for a meal.

The next day, we visited the famous bone church outside of the city, where there are remains of 40,000-70,000 humans all arranged in different ways as a symbol of life and death, or something. It was so cool. We ate lunch that day at a grocery store, where we found rolls for $.02 USD. Gotta love the exchange rate!!

Prague was a very walkable city and it was fun to go between the Old City and the New City to see the differences. Everyone says that Eastern Europe is the new Western Europe and it seems as if Prague is THE place to go on vacation. It was still pretty commercial, but in no way as cheap as everyone says that Eastern Europe is (minus those $.02 rolls!).

Everyone has to have one insane travel story and ours was yesterday. Sleeping in the hostel was miserable because of a random guy in our room (we had booked a 6 person room and there were only 4 of us) who was snoring extremely loudly all night. We were all running on little sleep and in bad moods because of it, but managed to get up and get to the train station with a solid 15 minutes to spare. We looked on the screen to see where our train departed from and couldn't find it up there. We checked the ticket and realized that for some reason, we were booked to come home from a DIFFERENT train station! Immediately panicked, we ran to information to ask for help. They told us the other train station was 10 min away by metro or cab. We wanted to take a cab but were 100 koruna too short. Instead, we had to buy metro tickets (completely in Czech) and ended up getting to the station 10 minutes too late for our train. The next one wasn't for 2 hours, and because we had missed our original train, all of our seat reservations were gone. We did manage to get seats on some trains, but there were times where we had to sit in aisles, got hit by people's luggage and had to deal with obnoxious American tourists, and try to relax on floors. We had to change 3 times and had an hour break in Dresden where we got some lunch. It took us 10 hours of train rides to get back to Germany and I have never been so exhausted in my life!

My 4th of July

I never knew how much being 3600 miles away would increase my patriotism! Yesterday I had the greatest 4th of July of my life, despite the noticeable absence of fireworks. Here are a few picture highlights:

We tried to buy as American food as we could find in the German stores here. That weird toothpaste looking tube is mustard. Emily made an American flag cake, we had some cheddar cheese, and of course some German brats (they are way better than American ones anyway)

Emily and Todd making hamburger patties--the first hamburgers we have all had since we've been in Germany!

They had never done it before, but I think they came out pretty good!


We bought a little grill from the gas station and it didn't work very well. Thankfully two REAL grills were brought out shortly thereafter, but I just think this picture of Jon alone in the grass trying to get the burgers and bratwurst to cook is hilarious
There were a bunch of Americans all over Seepark (the park outside of my dorm) and three separate Fourth of July BBQs going on (and a lot of confused Germans sunbathing). There was a lot of mingling in between the parties and everyone was wearing red, white, or blue. Todd brought out his Wisconsin flag to represent and Emily modeled it.

These are the hamburger buns they sell here. All the American stuff has really bright obnoxious American flags on it, and makes me feel really stereotypical when buying it. These buns were about 2x smaller than REAL American hamburger buns, and there were no sesame seeds.
Katie and Jeff modeling some American socks (and Kayne West sunglasses!)

It was so hot out and at one point, we all went and jumped in the lake in all of our clothes! The boys also brought some tea bags to throw in and make the British girls angry. "What a waste of perfectly good tea!" they complained.

We stayed outside all night talking, singing American songs, and eating burgers and bratwurst. It was the first day in weeks where it didn't rain at all. Here I am with my two favorite boys from Wisconsin (Todd and Jeff)
Trying to keep the fire going after dark. I wish we had some marshmellows!

Heidelberg in Pictures

Yesterday, my friends and I went to Heidelberg, which is probably the most well known city in the state of Baden Württemberg. It was really cute and really German, the kind of city that you would probably read about in fairy tales.



Heidelberg is even home to a castle, which apparently on a busy day in high tourist season, gets 7000 visitors a day!

Heidelberg is known as one of the most beautiful cities in all of Germany, and because of that, it is a tourist's haven. I have not seen so many Americans or heard so much English being spoken since I was in Florence back in April! Here you can see all the touristy souvenirs lining the streets.

One really cool thing about Heidelberg is that it is home to Germany's oldest university, which was established in 1386. This University had a jail for students until 1914, where they were thrown into for being too loud and drunk, or chasing resident's pigs down the street. The jail was pretty relaxed, they were not locked in their rooms and were still allowed to visit each other and go to class. To pass the time, they would draw pictures all over the walls using the soot from the fireplaces.


Heidelberg is located on the Nekar River, which is what makes it so scenic. We stopped for a quick picture there.

We asked the boys if they wanted to take a picture there too, and this is what we got:

Jon's favorite activity is to wave to the old, jolly people taking boat tours anywhere we're traveling in Europe.

Sometimes, they even wave back!

Freiburg in the Wall Street Journal!!

It has been such an exciting semester with articles in American newspapers about Freiburg, the little town in the Black Forest that no one has ever heard of! First, in the New York Times about the car-less community of Vauban (where my friends Mitch and Emily live), and now we're featured in the Wall Street Journal! There is a wine fest in Freiburg all week (Freiburg is known for their wine) and they have huge tents set up at the Muensterplatz where you can go and try different kinds. My friends and I walked around it the other night but didn't stop to try anything. Check it out here!

Now, for something a little less academic...

Hot, humid July weather + no air conditioning anywhere + European irregular bathing and hygiene habits = Freiburg is starting to smell kind of bad

The Euro

Sorry, I'm gonna go "economist" on you for a minute here:

The idea of having a common currency in Europe was established in 1992 by the European Union under the Treaty of Maastricht. The biggest issue with this was deciding who could and could not join the common currency system. The same year, they fixed 5 conditions for the membership in the currency:
1. The inflation rate should be nearly the same in all countries so there is no difference between the internal and external value of the money. This was figured out by taking the inflation rate of the three lowest countries in the EU and averaging them. This is how they found the figure for how much the inflation rate should be allowed to change in the common currency system.
2. The interest rate is composed of two variables: the marginal productivity of capital (the real interest rate), and the riskiness of a country. It was decided that the risk should be the same in all the countries, so they took the average risk of the three lowest countries and decided that was the upper limit for risk in a country when they wanted to join the system.
3. The exchange rate criterion (developed previously, but still put into use) which took currencies from all the European countries and plugged them into a formula which took the exchange rate from that country as well as the quantity of that country's currency in the basket of goods (this depended on the National GNP vs. the European GNP) to figure out a country's worth in the EU.
4. The budget deficit should be less than 3% of the country's GNP
5. Aggregated governmental debts should be less than 60% of total GNP

In May 1998, all European Union countries could join the Euro system, except for Greece who had a poor economy, and Sweden, England, and Denmark who decided to withhold. As of January 1, 1999, the Euro was used only for over border transactions and 3 years later it was introduced everywhere.

The Euro coins have different things on the back of them according to which country you're in, so it's fun to check out your coins and see where your money has been. The bills are interesting too, because they have doors and bridges on them, so as not to favor one country over another, and to symbolize the opening of doors and crossing of bridges across the European Union as a whole. As the monetary value of the bill increases, the doors and bridges become more modern.

I like using the Euro but I think it's annoying that there are .01 and .02 cent coins, because you get dirty looks most places when you use them, and some places won't even accept them. Also, expect evil looks when trying to break any amount higher than a 20, but don't expect to get anything lower than a 50 when you go to the ATM! I think having 1 and 2 Euro coins makes a lot more sense than having the $1 bill (and now I understand why they are trying to get the $1 coin to catch on in the US), and I definitely missed paying in coins when I was back in the states. They're all about exact change in Europe, and don't even try pulling out a credit card because they will look at you like you're crazy!