Continued: Birthday!

Between Hamburg and now a few things have happened:
I went to a concert with the choir I sing in to watch a group that does songs from the Comedian Harmonists, which was a famous group in Germany in the 1930s. They sang popular music with a comedic twist and were one of the most beloved groups in Germany (and internationally) before they were forced to break up by the Nazis (3 of the 6 were Jewish). Sad story, but some really wonderful music.

More excitingly, I turned 21 on June 23rd, and the weekend before I had a little reunion with Kate and Courtney to celebrate!!!!
We met on Saturday in Salzburg, Austria and went on the Sound of Music tour. It was not quite all it was cracked up to be, but was fun nevertheless. It was neat to get to see the different sites in real life, and it was actually pretty nice that the guide threw in some unrelated Salzburg history in between the sites, so we got a little bit of a city tour as well. The tour also included driving up into the Alps and stopping for coffee (read: hot chocolate) at a cafe with a breathtaking view, while on the way to the town nearby that houses the wedding church from the movie. Part of the damper was probably that we were with this older couple that was asking really strange and irrelevant questions (such as: Do the Germans have a theory as to why Hitler was so evil? seriously.) But we had a lot of fun with it just from being together! Not to mention the cool pictures!



















After the tour we hung around for about an hour, I bought a postcard, we had dinner, and then hopped on the train to go back to Vienna (where they live). Happily, Kate's roommate was out this weekend again, so once again I got the chance to stay with a friend--fun AND free! So even though we were insanely tired when we got back, we stayed up until like 2am chatting. It was so wonderful to see them again, and hanging out was as natural as if we'd been together all along! I really hope we can keep in touch even after getting back to the States.
The next day we met up with Courtney and another of their friends, Heidi, and we went to a clock museum (which was free on Sunday, how cool is that?!). Then we walked around for a bit, went to the Esperanto Museum (Esperanto is a created language that was intended to be a "universal" language) and a globe museum. Yes, they are random, but it was pretty neat!










After that we went to Cafe Central (Vienna's most famous cafe, and where the "Viennese coffee culture" got started), which was really fancy and beautiful, and of which I stupidly took no pictures. :( Anyway, since we are poor college students we split slices of cake and drank water, haha, but we had cake at Cafe Central!!!
We later went back to Kate's (Kate, Courtney, and I) for a girls' night. We got big greasy pizzas (yum!) which surprisingly came with free cokes, then intended to watch a movie, as I had brought 4 on a flash drive to choose from. Unfortunately Kate has a Mac, and it kind of threw a fit because the movies came from a Windows computer, so we couldn't get the movie to play. But we talked and laughed for a couple hours and eventually went to bed (well, Courtney went home and then we assume she went to bed, haha).
It was kind of gross and rainy on Monday (ALL day), so we didn't do all that much. Got lunch at a little schnitzel place (local specialty!), but later that evening we did go out for my birthday! We went to LOCO, a bar/club (duh, turning 21!), where the 3 of us had cocktails (don't worry, not too many!) and had fun in our little corner booth. Some weird guys sent us drinks (we think it was grapefruit juice, lol), but thankfully didn't come try to talk to us or anything. Makes for a fun story though! Anyway, then we went home a little early (by 9, so no worries about me partying all night ;) ) because I had to get up a little early for my flight in the morning--which I made, by the way.
Here's Courtney and me at LOCO:










So yeah, that was my lovely weekend-before-my-birthday birthday celebration! The great part was getting to hang out with those girls again; I guess some people you just become great friends with almost immediately!
Oh, and I forgot to mention: We went to a burrito place where they sell DR. PEPPER!!! I have missed it, and I was really excited!










Anyway, that should cover everything up to now! I am going to keep updated better as my semester comes to a close, and it should be pretty intense: Barcelona this weekend, Dresden next weekend, my choir concert, then Paris, then getting ready to come home!! So, more to come after I come back from the sunny beaches of Barcelona!

Continued

So a few weeks later we had the equivalent of Spring Break (Pfingstferien), which literally means Pentecost Break. Yes, they have Pentecost Break. So that was the first week of June (and the last day or two of May).
First I went on another StudIT trip (much better planned this time). This time it was a day trip to Basel, Switzerland. It was about a 3-hour bus ride, and the city was beautiful. Since it was mostly people I didn't know I kind of had to randomly pick what group to hang out with, and I may have picked the wrong one, i.e. the one that walks around with no goal in mind and stops at random little stores that are not even interesting. But it was fun anyway. And it made me look forward more to my next trip.
The next day I left for a 3-day (plus travel) trip to Hamburg, by myself. You might think traveling alone sounds horrible, but it was actually pretty nice. I mean, I could go see what I wanted, and I can be myself more when I'm alone than when I'm with people that I'm not close to, so I'd rather travel alone than travel with someone random just to have a travel buddy.
I ended up in Hamburg through an option with the discount airline germanwings called Blind Booking. Basically you choose a theme and there are 8-10 possible destinations. You pick your travel dates and everything, eliminate up to six of the cities (for 5 euros each), and then after you finish booking and paying and everything you find out where you're going. The advantage to this sort of booking is that it's cheap--around 50 euros round-trip. Also, as I found out, you can end up going to amazing places that you would never think to go yourself. I would probably not have picked Hamburg out for travel on my own, but I'm really glad I went. I really like the city, and it had some wonderful things to see. It was cool to see a different part of Germany, to see a port city, and it was just overall a beautiful place.
I went on a walking tour with a group on the first day (a cool company, English-speaking tours whose guides work on a tips-only basis, so you pay what you think it was worth), and then went back to some places later. I of course went to the harbor, where they also have all sorts of little souvenir shops and restaurants along the water. I visited some churches (a standard stop in Europe), the Reeperbahn (the nightclub strip, and by visited I mean took a picture from the edge), the St. Nikolai WWII bombing memorial (the skelton of a bombed cathedral), and a really nifty place called Miniatur Wunderland--it's the world's largest model train and has like 5 rooms filled with miniature landscapes, everything from Switzerland to America to Scandinavia to Hamburg itself.
Here is a picture of me in Hamburg:









You can see part of the extensive canal system (Hamburg has more bridges than Venice and Amsterdam combined!) as well as the steeple of the Michel, one of the churches and also a famous part of the Hamburg skyline.

Still Alive Over Here, Promise!

Hey guys, sorry it's been ridiculously long sense I last posted. I guess I just lost track of time and stuff.
So, brushing over the last 2 months really quick so I can get to the most recent things and (hopefully) not fall behind again!
So, I am actually not taking all that many classes while I am here. I have 2 Spanish classes, a German class, and choir. That would be a reasonably normal amount except that they all meet only once per week, so all my classes fall on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and take up a grand total of 5 hours and 15 minutes per week! This makes for a fantastic travel schedule, but also for supreme procrastination, as I can quite easily fall into the deceptive mindset that I am not in school! I was originally taking a Spanish history course, but it turned out to be way too hard, and the professor recommended I take a Spanish comp course, so now I'm taking that instead. The other Spanish class is a phonetics class (we attempt to learn how to pronounce Spanish properly), and the German is an English-German translation course, designed mainly to broaden vocab and increase our understanding of German, using the translation as a tool. Pretty neat.
So, with all this time on my hands, what have I been up to?
Well, honestly, I have watched a lot of movies, but I have also done a bit of traveling, and have more in stock for the next month (like, a lot more)
A week or two after classes started I went on a trip to Ulm and Blaubeuren with the local student group, StudIT. Yes, you are remembering correctly, and I have already been there. HOWEVER, I didn't buy postcards. Also, the famous "Blautopf" in Blaubeuren was not looking its best when I was there before (in fact, it was looking pretty bad from snowmelt), so this time I got to see it in all its glory. But interesting story with this trip (a 2-day, 1-night trip). So, we got to Ulm, did our touristy thing, went back to the hostel for dinner, and then they went to take us on a hike. Never mind that there was rain in the forecast. So anyway, we hike what I would estimate to be several miles out into the countryside by Ulm, up to the top of a hill (mini-mountain) where there was a really nice view of the city. Great. Except that there was also a really nice view of this nasty-looking storm cloud:










This was also accompanied by lightning, and was coming in our direction. The leaders decide we should go back a different way (we apparently took "the long way" out). So this is what we do: as darkness is falling and the wind is picking up, we light torches (yes, torches, old-fashioned torches) and walk into the woods. As we go along the path with pretty much only torchlight, the wind picks up even more, and the torches burn wrong and have to be dropped and put out one by one. So, to clarify, it is dark, very windy, getting cold, we are in the woods, and we have one torch left at the front of our group of 20. Then it begins to rain, and within about 30 seconds it is pouring in sheets. I had an umbrella, but everything from the waist down and on my left (I was sharing) was soaked. As in like I had jumped into a pool. Everyone else was in the same condition. Eventually we get out of the woods and find ourselves in what looks to be suburbia. Now, if you thought we knew where we were going this whole time (so did I) you would be wrong. In addition, our leaders are nowhere to be found. Eventually they came back, but still didn't know where go, so we ended up asking random passing cars how to get to the hostel. Yeah. We eventually made it, like half an hour later.
Since this was a 2-day trip, I thought one pair of jeans would be plenty. So this is the story of how I ended up walking around in my pajamas the next day, like so:












I did get my postcards. And the Blautopf was amazing: