Die erste Woche

It is with a heavy heart and much trepidation that I resurrect this website from its former stagnant glory in an attempt to once again make it useful rather than a waste of both perfectly good space on the GoDaddy.com servers and 50 of my own dollars every two years.  In other words I guess it takes studying abroad to hasten me from my blogging slumber.  To that effect, I have decided to take advantage of my already established blog and, after clearing away the cobwebs, a few squatters, and charming the mistress that is blogger.com with a box of chocolates and a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils I have taken up the old axe as a means for logging an account of my various adventures in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany and, eventually, in Vienna, Austria (not Australia, let's be clear), home to the Viennese Sexologist himself, Mr. Sigmund Freud.  My hope is that my family and friends can check in on what I hope will be, at the least, weekly updates thereby saving me from the carpal tunnel that would inevitably result from typing up accounts of my adventures over and over again in emails to various loved-ones or in posts on Facebook.

That said, I'd like to make a quick note about the website to anyone who is visiting it for the first time.  The long-and-short of it is that I've been masquerading as an internet-savvy webmaster since about the seventh grade on a website I call rob64.com.  Rob64.com takes its name from what has been my constant internet handle since the days when AIM was still an infant, which takes its name from the robotic character in StarFox 64 that flies the Great Fox.  It was called rob64.com long before it was actually located at http://www.rob64.com and was alternately hosted on Fortune City and Angelfire.  In those days the site had little original content and was really just me having fun with Microsoft Frontpage '97 and copying things I thought were cool from other websites.  During my freshman year of college, I decided it would be a good idea to revamp the site, buy the space called rob64.com, and make the site legitimate.  The result is what you see here... a sort of schizophrenic amalgam of my various forays into the territory of creativity and self expression, what can loosely be called a portfolio.  However, I haven't really touched the site since the Great Re-Vamping of 2005 and upon returning, I have realized that the surviving contents are less than flattering.  The written work in particular is atrocious, especially for someone who supposedly calls himself a creative writing major.  Therefore, I issue this warning: don't stray from the blog if you have any semblance of taste!  The exception would, of course, be my photographic work which seems to be light-years ahead of my written work, and of which I am still quite proud (my school has published my photography in various literary magazines on at least four separate occasions, two of which included my work on the cover, but has summarily rejected each of my desperate attempts to submit literary work).  I hope to update other parts of the site if and when I have time.

That said, on with the travel blog!

It was hard to say goodbye to Megan and my family on New Years, but I was equally as excited to be going as I was melancholy.  The plane ride was fine, though, unlike my brother, I cannot sleep anywhere and everywhere.  Only through sheer willpower was I able to get myself to sleep at all.  I think I slept perhaps three hours all told, but once again, my excitement acted as a kind of stimulant and it propelled me through the following day of travel throughout south Germany.

I was extremely pleased that not only was I able to pretty successfully navigate the German transit system (more a credit to their organization than my prowess at navigation) but I was also able to converse when I needed to know where I was going.  It was mostly simple stuff like "Wissen Sie, ob diese Zug nach Stuttgart geht?"  But I did manage to fend off a guy who tried to con me in both German and English at the the Frankfurt airport.  All of this made me feel pretty confident when I arrived awkwardly in Schwäbisch Hall with my 2 million pounds of luggage.  

I say I felt confident, but that was only until I arrived at the Goethe Institut, where I was immediately thrown into the placement test process.  I got through the verbal interview fine, though not without the help of a lot of hand gestures, but when I got to the placement test I wanted to cry.  I would say that, to put it generously, I was able to complete a third of the test (I also didn't realize that you where supposed to stop when you couldn't do anymore).  In any case, the rest of the test might as well have been in Martian for all that I understood.  Either the test must be nastily hard or I did better than I thought, because I was placed in the B1 class, an intermediate class (as in A1, A2.1, A2.2, B1, B2, C).  I was then given my key and the Zivis (German RA's) drove me to my Wohnheim (student housing).  The Zivis, Alexander and Christian, are extremely nice and quite funny.  I had just enough time to unpack a bit and say "Hi" to my roommate before I passed out.  I slept from about 6:00 to 1AM whereupon I couldn't get back to sleep so I filled up on melatonin and zonked back out until 7.

Our first day of classes went well, considering I had 3 hours of sleep in 48 hours and then about 12 hours of sleep (that crazy kind of schedule might just be the cure for jet-lag; I think I must have confused my body so much that it just reset the next night).  As it turns out, B1 is a pretty good fit for me; it's very challenging and every day I come out of it feeling exhausted, confused, enlightened, and satisfied all at once.  Our classes run from 8:15 to 12:45 with a good half-hour break around 10:00, but they never seem to drag (until I got sick and all I want to do is sleep).  After that, it's lunch and then we have the rest of the day free.

The makeup of the students at the Goethe Institut is pretty diverse.  I've made friends with several Americans, of course, as well as a few Brazilians, a Ukrainian named Boris, and a 61-year-old Japanese man named Terada (he acts more like he's about 16).  Other students in my class come from Vietnam, Korea, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.  With all these various backgrounds, it is very interesting for the common language to be German - it's actually really nice because most of the time we have no choice but speak in German (when I'm around other Americans we tend to lapse into English in order to be able to better convey what's on our minds).

Over the weekend, we had the option to travel with a group from the school to Neuschwanstein (New Swan Rock... it was pretty funny to hear some of the Brazilian students saying "Neuschweinstein," on the bus, but thankfully we weren't going to New Pig Rock).  Neuschwanstein is the castle that they based the one in Cinderella off of.  We traveled three hours by bus out of Baden-Würtemburg into Bayern (Bavaria) and had the distinctive pleasure of experiencing a German truck stop, and let me just say this about the German truck stops... they still have a lot to learn.

Neuschwanstein and the nearby town of Füssen ("Feet," as in "at the foot of the mountain") were both beautiful.  Like Schwäbisch Hall, Füssen is a surprisingly successful combination of new and old... the traditional Bavarian style architecture and closely huddled buildings give a feeling of coziness without feeling cramped and yet all the shops (or all the ones we saw) were very modern. 

 

 

Füssen from one of its many churches.

The castle itself is nestled in the mountains and it looks pretty spectacular in the snow.  The institut set us up with a tour and we were able to see the inside of the castle, though we weren't able to take any pictures.  It's pretty clear that Ludiwig II, who had the castle built thought an awful lot of himself from all the murals and the lavishness of the castle and, as one of the students pointed out, while it is pretty, it wouldn't have held up so well under siege.  Still, it did my little German heart good to see all the Bavarian coats of arms and the beauty of that part of the country.

 

View of the Mountains from Neuschwanstein.

 

That's all for now.  I'm off to watch a movie auf Deutsch in the Goethe Pub: Das Tunnel.  Check back in the near future for more posts!