In Switzerland

I've made it abroad!

After all the problems that went wrong this summer it's a miracle to be living in Lausanne, Switzerland. I've been here for six days now and so have gotten a feel for the city. It's absolutely gorgeous here and kinda strange with all the fields of corn, vineyards, and sheep interspersed with fine shopping and dining all over throughout the city. My mom came over with me to help me get settled in and buy me furniture and pay for other expenses which is great because everything is expensive here. As we have explored looking for the different places we needed to go to we have gotten lost countless times and still have neglected to find the metro stop downtown which is very frustrating.

School has started here, but I arrived late and so missed the language placement test for EFLE (the school of French for those who speak it as a foreign language) so I get to take the test on the 28th with all the other poor confused international students that didn't make it to school on time. I can't take any classes until I take the test and so that means I have another week to get things figured out which is good considering the amount of paperwork that I have had to fill out because I came over as an illegal immigrant because my visa is taking forever to come through.

So basically while here I've tried to understand all the French arround me although people have asked me questions in German and Spanish. (I think they were asking for directions but I don't know, somehow I look like I know things and so people keep asking me questions, luckily my French has been good enough to reply to all the ones in French exept one, but since I am learning on the fly I really think that I'm not the best to consult...) Other than that we have figured out the bus and metro system. Saturday was the Nuit des Musees. It's a once a year event where you can buy one ticket and go to all the museums in town from 2 in the afternoon until 2 at night. There were 22 different museums to go to and I managed to get through 10 before I was tired and sick of going to museums. So I've had some culture already here. Oh! I was adopted by a Swiss family here. They live about 10 minutes away from me and have had me over for some traditional Swiss food. They are very nice and have volunteered to take me to tour castles in France and lend me a bike for the year.
\n\u003cdiv\> \u003c/div\>\n\u003cdiv\>My adventure is on and tomorrow I'm going to IKEA to get some more furniture. I posted some pics of the city on facebook if anyone wants to see.\u003c/div\>\n",0]
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My adventure is on and tomorrow I'm going to IKEA to get some more furniture. I posted some pics of the city on facebook if anyone wants to see.

Nach den ersten Tag von Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest began yesterday. And we went, we being Molly and myself and other friends in the Junior Year in Munich program. And we walked right on through to the other side. The place was packed. Leading up to Oktoberfest, I had been hearing the stat that Munich, a city of 1 million inhabitants, swells as another 5 million come to party and drink. It was not hard to believe once I was there. Italians, Spanish, French, English, Irish, Americans, Australians, Chinese, Japanese all wearing their completely traditional dirndls and lederhosen and pressing in tight around you. While it's interesting to be amid such a mass, it does make the ordering of food and drink difficult. In order to order the traditional Maß, one liter glass stein, you must be sitting at a table. These tables, sitting about 14 each I believe, are located in 14 different tents, each operated by a different brewery. The largest tent had 8,000 tables, and the smallest 1,000. There were lines outside all of them, and those inside weren't exactly pounding down their drinks to make room for others. We ended up hitting an all-you-can-eat running sushi place I had found while looking for art galleries the previous Saturday. Did get to see one barmaid plow through the crowd to deliver 10 Maß, five in each hand and leaning back to take the weight on her body, to a table. It was all she could do to blow the whistle and get people to open a path.

The best American counterpart I can offer to this particular celebration is the state fair, only bigger and dirndls and lederhosen. Eliminate the competitive aspect with ribbons and shows and all that and shift the emphasis to the drinking, and you will have a fairly decent conception of what being there was like. There were some carnival style roller coasters and swing rides and a bunch of souvenir stores hawking T-shirts and stupid hats.

On the academic side, we finally finished with our paperwork for German residency and that critical but heinously boring stuff. Now we have one 2.5 hour class four times a week on such difficult subjects as "Living in Munich," "Studying at a German university," and "Current Events in Germany," the idea of these being to teach us how those little things like grocery shopping and formatting papers that one doesn't think so much about but can be quite different between nations.

Hope you're all enjoying Spokane or your respective new homes.

Später

In Limerick...

Hello my dear honors friends,

I am now officially started with my study abroad program, after about a week and a half of traipsing around Europe. As most of you know, Sara and I flew out to Spain, where we split our six days between Madrid and Granada. My favorite thing we saw in Spain was probably the Al-Hambra, although I did thoroughly enjoy looking at the grandiosity (is that a word?) of the Royal Palace in Madrid.

Then Sara left me for Turkey and I spent 3 days in Paris by myself. Paris was wonderful. My hostel was somewhat sketchy, but I got out of it alive and with all of my belongings intact, so I can't complain. I packed loads of stuff into my days in Paris and there is still so much I didn't get to see!

I got into Dublin Saturday night and then took a bus to Limerick in the morning, which is where my orientation is being held. We had meetings about living in Ireland all morning and now have the afternoon free so I popped into an internet cafe for a quick break from the extremely cold weather outside! I feel I was remiss in not packing a warmer jacket for this supposedly moderate climate.

Also, Mark would be proud to know that I had my first Guinness last night. It was not as terrible as I thought it would be, although I don't think I would ever drink more than one. I also got a cell phone and it has free incoming calls, so if any of you feel like racking up tons of wildly expensive minutes, feel free to give me a call.

That's all for now. Wednesday we head to Cork and get to move into our apartments. I will be sharing a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment with a kitchen and common room with 3 other people, so I'm content. It's about a 10 minute walk from campus and is actually half of a hotel. The pictures online made it look very liveable and I'm sure it will be an improvement over C/M and Madonna. :-)

I hope that life is treating everyone well and I would love to hear from you all when you get a chance!
<3,
Anna

Aus Deustchland

The studying part has yet to begin, but I certainly am abroad at this point, thus my post. Been staying in Cadolzburg, possibly the most Bavarian of German cities and also my grandfather’s hometown. My grandfather, he’s a great storyteller and has been telling me about his childhood adventures and the war since, literally, I can first remember. Now I get to see the watchtower from which he saw the American army approach and the forest he collected acorns in the fall or tobogganed through in the winter. It’s cool and the city is very nearly a living museum itself. Driving in, the welcome reads Historiches Cadolzburg, and there are informational signs all over, sharing some vignette of life in the Middle Ages when royalty still lived in the castle that dominates the town. To give you a sense of proportion, very necessary here, my hometown celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This summer, Cadolzburg celebrates its 850th.

Visiting the multitudes of relatives has been less great. They’re decent people, but when they get going with my grandparents in German, I’m gone. My grasp of the language is far from fluent, and they speak in their freaking Frankonian dialect on top of that, not the High German I was taught. Liking teaching a Mexican kid American Midwest English and throwing her to the Cockneys.

I imagine this going to come up eventually, so I’ll answer here. Yes, I have had beer since my arrival. The wife of one of my grandfather’s cousins was celebrating her fiftieth in a grand party that went from seven in the evening to four the next morning (I bailed a little after midnight) and actually started up in small measure the following afternoon as leftovers still needed eating. Some one hundred people were at this party. Of course the food and drink was in good supply. Anyway, I get to talking with some distant cousins, multiple times removed, and they say I need to try this beer. It’s brewed from wheat, so it’s sweeter than most stuff. I take a glass. Seriously, I can’t remember ever having something that bitter. However, I was informed that Ludwig-Maximillian Universität is legally required to provide its students with a bottle a day. If it’s free and that common, I'll have a long time to learn to like it.

Happy days to those who currently are abroad themselves, will soon be making the trip and those back at Gonzaga.

Später.