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.