Auf Wiedersehen!

As I said in the previous post, for the past 2 weeks I have been doing orientation, paper work and hanging out with the other Erasmus students. Classes don´t begin until October 8th, so Amanda and I our taking the opportunity to travel for 2 weeks. Before arriving in Darmstadt, one of the things I was most looking forward to was traveling Europe. After arriving, becoming so close with the other students and generally having a great time, I was sad to leave them. For our last night we all had dinner and drinks in the Exil, the restaurant/bar in our complex. It was so sweet everyone was so genuinely sad to part for 2 weeks. It was like we we´re saying goodbye to old friends. I will try to blog periodically if possible, but look for tons of pictures upon my return. Our planned adventures are as follows:

September
15-17 Barcelona
18-20 Madrid
21-23 Rome
24-25 Florence
26-28 Cinque Terre
29 Pisa
29-30 Venice
1 Verona & back to Darmstadt

Ciao!
Nikole

Orientation in Darmstadt

Updating this blog has been much more challenging than I had imagined. I think this can be seen as proof of the amazing time that I am having. I am winning at life, losing at blogging :) I am exhausted from going non-stop for 2 weeks now, but I just can not tear myself away from the other exchange students or the new experiences. Our usual schedule is as follows.. 9am: paper work and/or city trip and site seeing, hanging out with everyone in the town center, Luisenplatz, to shop, eat, walk, then the day is finished up by going either the bar in our housing complex, Exil, one of the other clubs in Darmstadt, or to a spanish party in our complex which usually includes plenty of sangria and live guitar and kazoo playing until 5am. Tough life :)

Before arriving, I was excited to study design in a new country and to travel Europe, beyond this I had no real expectations. Being here for 2 weeks for orientation surrounded by all my new friends from around the world has completely exceeded everything I hoped this experience would be. Everyone has this hunger to learn from each other, experience new things and live life. Being in similar situations, in a new country without our family and friends, I think we have all become very close quickly. It's nice to have such a great group of people.

I also am very lucky to have wonderful, fun flatmates. I met the last of the 4 the other day, Marina. She seems very cool. She had just returned from a backpacking trip to Thailand. It´s nice to go back to my flat and have people to hang out with and talk to. Burkhard and I always end up talking for hours-about everything. I´m very sad that he is moving out soon. I´ve watched "Die Simpsons", their favorite show, with them a few times. The German voices are hilarious. My flatmates translate for me so I can understand the complex plot :) Actually I´ve been quite surprised at the amount of American things that have made there way over here- movies, music, restaraunts, tv shows. This leads to my thoughts on being an American abroad, but I will post this later.

Moving on, some things we have done recently include two city trips to Frankfurt and Heidelberg. As we walked through Frankfurt I was beaming, I love the culture, character and history of Europe. In Frankfurt we went to a flea market which had everything you could imagine-jewelry, shoes, books, bikes, nintendo games. I was especially drawn to the old books. I will have to go back when I can spend more time. I also like this little center we stopped at that had old german architecture, live music, german food, and apfelwein (apple wine). While in Frankfurt we all of course got Krakauer, the longest hot dog/ sausage I´ve ever seen with a bun only big enough to hold. Heidelberg was a lovely city as well. We hiked up to a castle that overlooked the city, the views were breathtaking (look for pictures soon).

Besides my love for the history and culture, I also find many of the differences in everyday life to be very smart. For now, the transportation system:

1. There are buses, trains, and trams, making it easy to get around without a car. (Also, tons of people ride bikes)

2. The tracks for the trams run through the middle of Luisenplatz, but are quite unobtrusive - just little tracks flat with the bricks. This makes it easy for the space to transform into a walk way when there is no tram. When a tram comes people simply move out of the way. Smart!

3. The brick sidewalks are split in half-grey bricks and red bricks. Red bricks are for bikers, grey for walking. Unobtrusive, subtle, yet gets the job done.

4. Tickets are bought at a machine before getting on the bus, however no one checks your ticket. You are kind of on the honor system, but sometimes there is control and people come check tickets. This system is nice because it saves time and everything runs smoother.

Another quick difference: WARM MILK! They keep their milk warm in cartons, then put it in the fridge after opening it. Warm milk freaks me out, who knew you could do that.

I tried hard to keep this short, but I have learned and experience so much in the past 2 weeks, I feel the need to share it all! Check the new link for Erasmus (exchange student) shared pictures to the left. I will update with millions when I return from Spain and Italy.

Tschuss for now,
Nikole

Sprechen Sie Englisch?

Wow. I don't even know where to begin. The past week has been possibly the most exciting of my life, It's been very busy and full of new experiences. It feels like I've been here for a month. This might be long, so I'll break it up into chunks. Here goes..

The Journey to Germany
Amanda and I went out to dinner with our parents for dinner at Schmidt's Sausage Haus in the German Village the night before we departed for Germany. It was nice to see my parents and have a festive little send off party. The next morning my parents left early in the morning after reminding me to be safe, be careful, stay together.. etc. Amanda's parents took us to the airport and reminded us again to stay together, stay together, stay together :P And we were off. We flew from Columbus to Chicago to Manchester to Frankfurt. About 20 hours of travel time. In Manchester we had to go through several security points to show our passports. It was quite confusing and different people told us different things, which resulted in missing our flight to Frankfurt. We were able to get on the next flight, but would miss the activities planned early in the day for the students.

Some interesting things in Manchester- All of the doors to the bathrooms were very small in width, the police wear awesome huge hats, and the bathrooms have "chewable toothbrush" machines -inside they have little brush balls that you chew on. I really wanted one, but I had no coins.

Finally, we arrived at 4:30 in Frankfurt. We were now in Deutschland! We had notes from the girl who went from OSU last year as to how to get to the school, but it was still quite an adventure. We were running around the airport with 100 lbs of luggage each trying to find the bus. Many people speak english so it was not too hard. We took the bus to the main train station in Darmstadt, where we then had to find the bus to the school. We knew we had to get to the student dorms, Karlshof, before 8:00 to make it to dinner with everyone. However, we did not know where Karlshof was. We assumed by the school. Once we got off a the school we gave each other high fives as we were zoning in on our final location. We drug our bags into campus in search of Karlshof, where we saw 2 german boys sitting on a bench. Sprechen Sie Englisch? The one boy, Lucas, was very nice he said OK come with me and grabbed some of our luggage. He put us back on the bus and at 7:55 we found Karlshof and made it to Exil, the bar in the complex where dinner was. By now we had been up for 30 hours, so after running around the city, finally finding the place and meeting all of the other exchange students, we were overwhelmed with emotions. Everyone was so excited to meet all of the other students.

After dinner, our design advisor, Linnea, showed us our rooms. I met 3 of my 4 flatmates who were all very nice-a german boy, Burkhard, a german girl, Katrin, and a boy from Russia who has lived here for awhile, Witali. Amanda came over and we all had wine to celebrate my arrival. Quote of the night: "I'm sorry if my english is dirty, I learn from watching Flavor Fav" -Witali

One interesting thing about the flat- in the bathroom, the floor for the shower and the rest of the bathroom is all the same. Just a drain, a shower with a curtain, and a place to get ready by the sink and toilet- all the same floor! So when I took a shower there was water everywhere. All the exchange students were talking about how odd it was the next day. I will take pictures soon.

Guten Tag!

I am now in Germany! Amanda and I arrived in Darmstadt Monday evening and it has been crazy ever since. I have so many things to write about, but we've been quite busy getting paper work done and hanging out with the other exchange students. It has only been 4 days and I feel like I've been here for weeks. I'm having a really great time. We are in a group of exchange students from all over the world. As Bram from Belgium said, "the world is here". There are people from Spain, Belgium, China, Singapore, Australia, Turkey, Russia, Poland, Czech... English is the common language, so that is nice for us, however I feel bad being the American girl who doesn't know any other languages. Anyway, we are all learning each other's languages which is fun.

This post is a little flustered, but I wanted everyone to know I'm alive and doing well! I will go into more detail about everything in a new post soon, maybe tomorrow or this weekend I will have more downtime to update. In the meantime, a few pictures from the trip are up. I miss everyone and am glad to finally have internet so I can be connected again :) I'm off to the bar :P

Tschüss!