VI

Per request of Griog, I now have an account with Skype, a free online service which allows you to make "telephone calls" to anyone anywhere. All you need is a microphone and speaker. I have also used GoogleTalk with mom in the past, and that works, too. I can be reached through either:
GoogleTalk: undromance
Skype: brighidgriosal

So, a real update?
I am now a couple weeks into school here, and it is absolutely wonderful. I am taking a German Reading & Writing course, Intermediate Russian, Culture of Slavics, and I finally decided on Icelandic as my fourth, and it is definitely my favorite out of all of them.

So far I have taken a trip to France and visited a small village called Colmar which isn't too far over the border. I am thankful for the two years of French I had in highschool. Even though my knowledge of it is very elementary, it helped when I had to order food and be polite. Most of the French who live that close to the border know a lot of German anyway, but I didn't try. A week later I took a train with a few friends across the border into Basel, Switzerland. The city is directly on the country borders so there are different districts that belong to Switzerland, Germany, and France. Swiss German is completely beyond me. The dialect is so hard to understand, but especially because they speak so quickly it is nearly impossible. The city is wonderful, though, and a lot bigger than I thought. Near the train station is an open-air over-sized chessboard with 1.5 foot tall playing pieces. We saw some older men playing a game and there were many people just standing around watching the match. That evening on our way back we stopped and my friends Gabriel and John had a turn at it. And most recently, just this past weekend I made a trip to Berlin! My friend Jen Turner is there studying this semester. It was really neat to see her there. I met her in Portland about three? years ago, but then she left and went to college at American University in Washington D.C. Since then I haven't seen her very much at all, so it was something special to get to see her on the other side of the world. While we were there I saw a few museums, monuments, but not nearly enough. There is just far too much to cover in one weekend. I can't wait to go back again. We had a good time with her and her friends and we got to walk around a lot. I would also like to note that the Circus Hostel we slept in for two nights was exceptionally good (and clean!) and I will go there again next time. We had a very long and late train ride back, but it wasn't terrible. On Monday I finally got home at 5:30am or so, so I slept in to make up for all the sleep I missed on the trip. That pretty much brings us up to today. I had Icelandic!, then lunch, some homework, and now some more homework. Booooring.

My plant is still doing really well.