It's been a while...

So, I guess it has been more than a month since I have written a blog. Mainly, I've been really busy and then when I have had free time I haven't felt like writing. But I have the whole afternoon free today so I thought a quick update was in order.

Since my last blog about Munich I have done a lot. The next weekend I went to Prague and had an excellent time. That is still the most beautiful city I have seen so far. It was unfortunate that it was raining the whole time that we were there, but we still made the most of it and had an excellent time. The next weekend after Prague I went to small town between here and Stuttgart and hung out with a couple of the German students that went home for the weekend. It was really nice because I had some homemade German food for dinner and breakfast. The town itself that I went to wasn't anything special but it was still fun.

The weekend after that (The first weekend in May), I went to this incredible Wine Festival in a town about an hour away from Bad Mergentheim, where I am staying. The area was the home town of one of the German students here so he invited me and my roommate from Spain and another German student to come visit the area and to join him at the Wine Festival. I had so much fun. It is the most famous Wine region in Germany and it was by far the best Wine that I have ever tasted.

The next weekend I finally just took it easy and rested and just hung out with some of the German students in town. I've found that I enjoy hanging out with the Germans much more than the other International students. It's weird because the other American's don't hang out with the Germans all that much so when I go places it is usually about 10 Germans and myself. They all speak English so well that it is hard for me to learn German because I am not forced to communicate in German. I still have been picking up a lot of German though. When I hear them talk I can usually pick up the subject matter that they are talking about but I usually am not able to pick up all the details. I'm sad though because with the way the structure and schedule works at this school, all of the German students, except for the ones in my class, end their term this week and start working again for three months. I've made a lot of good friends so it will be weird to have to go through the process of meeting a bunch of new German students next week. It should be fun though.

This last weekend I finally got to do something that I have been wanting to do ever since I got here. I went to a German soccer game! Four of us hopped on the train at 10:30am and rode down to Stuttgart to watch VFB Stuttgart play Arminia Bielefeld. I found us an incredible deal online for the tickets so it was only €21 each and we were sitting in the third row in the corner behind the goal. The atmosphere was really awesome because the visiting fans were all only two sections away from us and there was literally a 10 foot high fence all around their section to prevent fights between the fans. It ended up being a really good game, Stuttgart was down 1-0 and then got a penalty kick in the 75th minute or so and tied it. Then the scored in the 85th minute to go ahead 2-1 and while everybody was still celebrating and going crazy, Bielefeld scored in the 87th minute to tie it back up and it ended in a 2-2 tie.

On Sunday I hopped on the train in the morning and headed towards Brussels. I had a couple days free and figured I would check out the area. The other internationals were either too tired or didn't want to go so I ended up just going by myself. It was a lot of fun because when I got there I was able to just walk around and go where I wanted and not worry about coordinating a plan or anything. Overall, Brussels isn't my favorite town I've been to but it was still quite enjoyable and since it didn't cost much it was definitely worth going to.

Now I'm just in the computer lab trying to figure out my plans for this weekend. It looks like I will be heading to Cologne tomorrow and staying a night there and then coming back on Friday to say bye to all the German students who will be leaving. On Saturday I think I will make a day trip down to Stuttgart and check out a little more of the town; all I saw was the football stadium pretty much last weekend. Should be quite a fun weekend.

Since I'm typing this at the school's computer lab it is too much work to try and put pictures in here. But I have put a lot of pictures up on photobucket. There are a bunch of pictures from my weekend in Prague and a couple other small towns. When I get internet back at my house (hopefully today or tomorrow, we haven't had internet for about 10 days now!) I will upload a lot more pictures and put some on here and a bunch on photobucket.

Here's the link to the prague album: http://s83.photobucket.com/albums/j286/J10Brooks/Prague/

Take care everyone.

Viele Grüße,

Josh