USA vs Spain

Hello Everyone,

So last night the USA soccer team had a friendly game against Spain that was played in Santander so needless to say...a little bit of a rivalry developed throughout the day between my Spanish roommate and I. Unfortunately, the game wasn't on German television but we were able to find a live feed online and watch the game through my computer. It was a lot of fun, but unfortunately the USA lost 1-0. I'm looking forward to rooting against Spain (for fun) in the upcoming European Championship that starts in a couple days.

It's hard to imagine that I have only one month left here. We just finished our second-to-last course on Monday. Instead of having a test we had to write a 2500 word essay which I just finished a couple hours ago. The Germans have some weird standards for their papers but it wasn't too bad.

Anyways, I guess I should give you a recap of the last couple weeks. My trip to Cologne, or Köln as the Germans call it, was excellent. It started out quite difficultly though. I woke up at about 10am on the 22nd of May and got everything packed and got on the 11:30am train to Köln. I was only on the train for about two minutes when I realized that I had packed everything except for my train pass. I started freaking out because you can get a pretty big fine for riding a train without a ticket. At the first stop which is a small town about 4-5 Kilometers from my town I hopped off the train and started walking back home. It took me about an hour to make the walk since the roads are never straight but I got back and had to wait an hour til the next train left town at 1:30pm.

Once I finally got to Köln I was really impressed with how beautiful the town was. I dropped my stuff off at my hostel and started walking up and down the Rhine river. It was absolutely beautiful, you have to check out the pictures on photobucket since I'm too lazy to put them up on here. The Kölner Dom, or Cologne Cathedral, is amazing. It is absolutely huge. I walked all the way up to the top of it and had an absolutely breathtaking view of the city. Ok I'm not doing this town justice without pictures in here so I changed my mind and I will add a few:






So I got back from Köln Friday night and met up with some of the Germans in town and had a real fun night. On that Saturday I made a return trip to Stuttgart and saw the Mercedes-Benz Museum that the rest of my class had seen much earlier in the trip the weekend I went to Prague. It was an amazing museum. It has about 8 floors I think and each floor represents a different era in Mercedes and world history. It was very well done.

Since then I really haven't done a lot. It was ridiculously hot all week here. It was between 30-34 degrees celsius (86-93 F) and extremely humid. The germans were saying it was really uncharacteristic for it to be that hot. The classrooms don't have air conditioning and neither does my apartment so the only place that provided relief from the heat was the grocery store. Needless to say, I did a lot of grocery shopping last week.

This weekend was really nice because the weather changed from 90 degree heat to thunder and lightning storms. It was beautiful to watch and it made it a little easier to do research for my paper since the weather wasn't too appealing.

Now I'm just relaxing for the afternoon. I'm going to get some cleaning and laundry done and then take off for the weekend. On that note, here is a small breakdown of my remaining schedule:

- Tomorrow (June 6th), I leave for Hamburg to visit my friend Sven who was a foreign exchange student in Philomath during High School. Should be lots of fun, haven't seen him for a while and I hear Hamburg is beautiful. Also, on Sunday Germany plays their first game in the European Championships against Poland and we are going to go to a big public viewing of the game in downtown Hamburg. I'm really looking forward to the weekend. I will come back on Monday for a short break until...

- Tuesday early morning (June 10th) our whole class is making a 4 day trip by bus to Berlin. The school is planning the whole trip including museums, lodging, and everything. Should be lots of fun. The school is covering a lot of the cost so it will only cost us 50 euros each for the whole thing. We have to purchase our own Lunches and Dinners though. We get to watch another public viewing of Germany's second game of the tournament against Croatia. (Yes, if you are counting that is consecutive public viewings of German soccer games in Hamburg and then Berlin). We get back Friday evening from that trip I'm sure I'll be spending much of the weekend sleeping and relaxing until our final class starts on Monday the 16th.

- The final two weeks of class are going to be very boring since the class is International Accounting & Finance but hopefully I will learn something interesting.

- Then classes end on June 27th and my Dad gets here on the 30th and we will travel down through Germany, Austria, and Italy and then return to Frankfurt and leave for home on the 10th of July.

Well that's all for now.

Viele Grüße aus Deutschland!