...well, not quite yet. I still have a bunch of photographs to upload and more writings to do. However, I do only have a hand full of hours left in Germany. I did not get a whole lot of sleep last night and I am looking at more than twenty solid hours of travel, before I am finally back at my parents house. Hopefully all goes well, and my large amount of luggage does not manage to kill me. Talk to you again on the other side of the Atlantic.
I am now in that weird transition period. The one that comes when one chapter of your life is closing and the next is starting, but the first has not quite ended yet and the next has yet to start. Because of this, I am bout to be in a some what melancholy mood for the next weeks. It was brought on today by a couple things 1) Today was my last day at work 2) Today was my last day of crew practice. It had not really hit me until I was on the way back from crew that I really liked the people here, and it will be sort of weird never seeing them again, after so much contact for so long. OK, yeah, I knew that I liked them, but I did not think that I would necessarily miss them when I go back to the States. I guess that times like these teach you things about yourself.
The next week will be filled with paperwork, packing, cleaning, and probably not a little boredom. And a lot of good byes and introspective thinking. I am nearly as nervous going back to the States as I was before coming to Germany. They (yes, the infamous they) say that you can never go home and even if I was not convinced of that fact after moving from the Cities, I am sure that I will find plentiful evidence of this when I get back to the States. This is all a part of living, so I expect that this will not be the last time that this will be illustrated to me.
But, after such a lugubrious post, I will end with some things that I am looking forward to:
- Reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the flight home. (I am not even going to buy it until later this week, so there is no temptation to crack it open and get sucked in before I leave.)
- Seeing my Once and Future Flatmate and other friends again.
- Spicy food.
- An oven.
- Getting back to regular workouts. (Yeah, I am that mental.)
- Getting to watch a Twins broadcast on television, and not just the day games.
... since I last wrote and until I leave for the States (well, a little more than two weeks left). It is pretty crazy that I have been here for six months and in a short time I will be back in the States and back at school. I am not really sure how I feel about it, but I am sure that you will find out when I do.
Things are winding down. I am in the midst of my two week study break from work. I had my Finite Elemente Methoden exam on Thursday. I will just have to say that I do not want to talk about it. Yes. It was that bad. I will be ecstatic if I managed to pull off a three on that one. (A three is sort of equivalent to a C in the States. Top is a 1.0.) The hope is that Flugmedizin will go a little better.
I was in München last weekend. It was a lot of fun- driving on the Autobahn at 240 km/h. (You can do the math if you want to know what that is in mph.) And that was just getting there. Photos from our visit to the Olympic Park can be found in the München link. It does not seem like I took any other photos. But most of those were at Biergartens anyway. Funny story: We had just arrived at our hostel and were on our way out again when I saw this guy who sort of looked familiar and was giving me a funny look. Turns out that some of the other Purdue engineers in the country, who are studying at Karlsruhe, were visiting Berlin at the same time that I was, and we were staying in the same hostel. Pretty coincidental.
Next weekend I am going up to Berlin (yes, again), but this time I will be heading out to Potsdam on Saturday and then probably the Zoo on Sunday. I am looking forward to it. And I will be sure to post an absolute ton of pictures. I love Potsdam and Sansouci is one of the most gorgeous parks that I have ever seen.
As well as the München photographs, I have posted the pictures from the Staffelrudern in Hamburg. I have also added to the album called Nature. I took pictures on the way to the Thune (as far as I can tell, think the fish) boathouse am Mittlandkanal, as well as the boathouse and Kanal itself. (More water and boats. Believe it.)
Sorry, I have been neglectful again. Things are crazy busy. But, I have taken the time to finally upload photos from the Ostsee camping trip (as usual, accessible by the link on the left). And, if you are at all familiar with my photography style, you will be surprised to find out that there are actually people in these pictures.
I was in Hamburg for the Staffelrudern yesterday. That was cool. I will eventually get those photos uploaded as well.
But hopefully these will keep you occupied until I can sit down and actually write something.
OK, I am finally getting to tell you all about my visit to Paris a couple weeks ago. Overall it was quite interesting to be in Paris, the city much proclaimed by many. I have to say that I was not particularly impressed. I do not know why that is. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that I do not really speak the language, or because so many people told me that they did not really like Paris Or perhaps it is because I do not have as much of a connection with Paris as I do with, say, London, New York City and Berlin. The Once and Future Flatmate said that she was not surprised since the two of us ‘tend toward the Anglophilic side, and you can’t love both France and holly old England, can you?’ As true as that might be, it would have been nicer to have liked the city a little better. Oh well, you cannot like every city you meet, even if it is in Europe.
Other than that, Betsy and I are quite lazy when it comes to being tourists. We did all of the requisite Paris tourism things: Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Louvre, Champs Élysées, Arc de Triomphe, the Tuileries. I have to say that Notre Dame was quite cool, I had no idea that it was on a little island bit in the middle of the Seine. The river– surprise, surprise– was the highlight of the trip for me. We spent quite a while walking along the Seine, and it was quite nice.
One amusing thing is that in Place de la Bastille there is a restaurant named Indiana. Of course I took pictures of it. The pictures, by the way, are now uploaded and can be accessed by the link call ‘Paris’ to the left. I may or may not ever get around to annotating the pictures, but, if you ask me, most of them are pretty explanatory. Either you will recognise the landmark; or if it is a gardeny area (and by gardeny, I mean tan gravel – probably another reason why I was not too enchanted with Paris was the lack of a nice green garden to sit on, except at the Tower), it is probably the Tuileries; and if it is a body of water, it is the Seine. Another note about the pictures, if you bother looking at them, you can see that I was up to my usually trying to be artsy antics. Sorry in advance. I also seem to have been quite taken with the Tour d’Eiffel, despite that fact that it is really quite ugly.
There is not much else to tell about our weekend in Paris. As I said, we are sort of on the lazy side. Keep an eye out for the next post, whose subject will be the week before last, while I was on holiday while my mother was here.