The first one!

Welcome all you curious eyes! It's officially been 3 weeks since I got to beautiful old Bamberg, and it's been amazing! Let me share with you what's been going on in my life, cause it's been rather spiffy :)

Leaving Canada was rather uneventful although LONG! It was a 7 hour plane ride to Frankfurt (and my breakfast muffin scared me so I just had yoghurt) and then a 4 hour wait at the train station (where I did get to eat a very yummy pretzel) and then a 3 hour train ride to Bamberg. By that point in time I'd been awake for about 24 hours (I don't know how Jack Bauer does it haha) and was ready to crash! My tandem partner picked me up from the train station and brought me home for a nap, boy did that feel good! The next day was one beaurocratic stop after another: registering at the Foreign Exchange Student office, opening a bank account, registering at the University, registering with the city, registering with the Residence office... boy was I glad when that day was over! But Anita was a real blessing - she walked me through it all and translated all the legalistic german terms that went about a mile over my head!

My room is quite nice... although the concrete floor is not exactly conducive to yoga... as I found out the other day. I've got a single room which basically means a little kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. And when I say little kitchen, I mean little kitchen - I fight with the "counter" every time I cook dinner. Which I didn't do for the first week cause I was too busy eating my Lieblingsessen - Brotchen mit Butter (that's my favourite food - buns with butter!)

There's a church just behind our residence and I can hear the bells ringing. Although I haven't quite figured out their system yet. It appears to be 1 bell at quarter past and quarter to, 2 bells at half past, whatever they feel like on the hour, and then about 2 minutes of bells at noon and 7 pm... It's great... haha. But the view out of my window is nice enough to make up for it. Plus I get lots of sunlight. And you can see that I'm trying to be active and work off all that bread :)

Classes have been good so far - very different from Canada. I'm taking 7 classes at the moment and I've only got 10 hours of class. Most of them are pretty interesting (I'm taking a Bamberg Culture class and we get to go on field trips!), all of them are useful (especially the one on pronunciation), and I'm understanding a lot more German than before I came here.

And since I only have 10 hours of class I have so much free time to wander around and have fun! The cafe's in Bamberg are fabulous - lots of fresh baked goods and yummy coffee. They also have open-air markets every day. They're somewhat similar to St. Jacob's market in Waterloo. And the southern dialect is very very present there... Often I have no clue what's going on.

On the 25th some friends and I headed to Nuernberg for the Volksfest - I have no idea what it means... but it was a very fun, very German carnival. I had a blast, shared a lot of food (a giant pretzel, cotton candy, potato salad, langos (some Hungarian pastry and cheese thingy), ox, and roasted almonds), and lauged all day long.

As you can see... I wasn't kidding about the size of the pretzel!

May first is an official bank holiday here - it's the equivalent of Labour day in Canada. So some friends and I headed out (because it was a BEAUTIFUL day) to one of the many Bier Kellers (outdoor beer patio restaurant dealies) in Bamberg. You had to climb one heck of a hill to get to the Speziale Keller, but it was beautiful up there. Although service at a restaurant in Germany is very different from Canada.

The next day, we decided we were going to have a picnic. Sarah wanted to take her new car out for a spin and we all just wanted to be outside. So off we headed to Stienberg (to the second largest lake in Bavaria) to sit by the See (the german word for lake) and have a picnic. And boy did we eat a lot! No one could stay awake after our epic lunch, so we all fell asleep in the sun (don't worry - I wore buckets of sunscreen!)

And that about covers all the big events of the first couple weeks of my adventure. Which (by the way!) is going to last a whole year! I got accepted as an ESL conversation partner in a German highschool for this coming school year!! So I'll be keeping you all updated

Toodles :)

Sandy