Homesickness with a touch of Budapest

It's now been three weeks since I left all you beautiful people in the states on my transatlantic flight.  Homesickness was still foreign to me, until yesterday.  It was very brief, though  (Grandma I'm FINE).  I'm not sure if I'd even call it homesickness,  but whatever.  Basically, yesterday in class, my professor asked if any of us had "heimweh" (homesickness) yet, and we all were like pffff noooo we're here and we're loving it! After that, she proceeded to ask us questions such as, "where is home? What does the word home mean to you? What is your family like? Who are your friends? Who do you miss the most? What things aren't available here that you wish you could get from home?".... Jesus lady.  All of us were quite notably agitated with her, and all quite visibly a tiny bit homesick.  It kind of goes without saying here, that if we speak about home, it's brief, and then we move forward.  It's not that we don't like speaking about all of you, but hey, it's another 12 or so weeks, so not thinking about it is the best solution at the moment.  Dang professor.  But oh well.  That small wave did not really effect the great ocean of my travels, so we're good.  And now, moving forward to the rest of this blog!

I'm going to Budapest!  For those of you who haven't brushed up recently on your European geography, that's in Hungary.  The usual question that follows this announcement is ... "why the hell are you going to Budapest?"  Answer?  No idea.  I really have close to no idea what is there, and it's never been really in my mind as a "must see" place.  However, I was dazing off one day in my language class and then from some random point in my brain came the word "Budapest" and well, the rest is history.  It's a spontaneous adventure, but I've heard that those can be some of the best.  Plus, it isn't all that spontaneous since I'm not leaving until the 10th of December out of Dortmund; I'll have plenty of time to plan out my travels.  As for other travels, we're (me and some of my other American friends) are looking into Possibly Lisbon, Portugal, Paris, London, Dublin or Rome.  I'm assuming that everyone is probably thinking, where are you going to get the money for all of this?! Well, flights within Europe can be found for ridiculously cheap.  I mean we're going to Budapest for like 4 days, and our entire round trip with taxes cost us about 60 US dollars.  We found a flight to Rome for the weekend for 14 US dollars, Dublin was around 30, etc.  And these were all round trip.  So, that's my secret.  As for hotels, we found a list of some really nice hostels at the hostel in Berlin, so we're planning on doing those.  They're really not as bad as they have been portrayed in the past.  Trust me!  Especially if you go with a group, because then you'll get like a dormitory room where like 6 to 8 people stay together in one room, but it's all your friends.  Not too bad!  One of my life goals is to travel to all the European countries at least once (yes, that includes Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, etc.) so hopefully I can do the majority this year.  It shouldn't be too trying on my budget, so i'm really quite excited.



^^ That is supposedly Budapest, so if this picture isn't some google scam, then heyyy I'd say I picked pretty well. 

In other news, last night some of my American girls and I got together to make grilled cheese, cookies and watch Peter Pan auf Englisch.  After having listened to German all day long, sometimes you just need an American evening.  So yep.  The cookies kind of failed.. I mean they're edible, but not by freewill.  One interesting note, I'm not sure if it's just the pans in my apartment, or the pans in all of germany, but, they have this engineering flaw in which the pans can be like slid to make it longer or shorter to fit in different ovens.  However, this sucks when you're actually using them, because they often slide together while you're trying to put the already hot pan into the oven with a new batch of cookies, and then it slides together sending cookies everywhere and burning your left thumb... sigh.  Yeah, whoever said that German engineers were the best in the world clearly hasn't been in my kitchen.  But whatever.  Maybe bridges and cool building structures are their forte', not kitchen goods.  Our grilled cheese also tasted a little funny, but that's because we couldn't remember our Cheese vocabulary and just took a wild guess and grabbed a pack of cheese in the deli.  Oh well.  It still beat my pre-made pasta dishes. 

Classes are still going well.  Now that i've moved up a level I find myself way more into the courses and not watching the clock as closely.  I've added quite interesting words to my vocabulary, including how to say the morgue, autopsy, to hang oneself, to kiss madly, etc.  Ok, don't panic.  It turns out we're actually writing mysteries for the course,  hence the creepy words.  That's due Monday.  Plus we watched some Criminal-Mystery type show thing for class too, which is where that all came from.  But yep.  Seems like everything is going well.  I had a presentation in my culture course on Tuesday, it was royally boring, but oh well.  Conversation course is the best; we play games like scategories, tabu, etc. that involve vocabulary.  Also, we meet in cafes' and such instead of just having another classroom course.  Those are every Wednesday.  I'll start having to do interesting events to spice this blog up before it turns into a list of my school assignments and such. 

FYI, if you're coming to Germany, you might want to bring your favorite hard/fruit flavored candies.  Chocolate and gummi things may be in abundance here, but Mike and Ikes, Skittles, Jolly Ranchers?  Heck no.  And trust me, the withdrawals are intense.  The shakes and everything.  So, that's all for now.  I promised you I'd tell you about the rest of my weekend, but it basically consisted of partying in two separate places on both nights.  I'll leave you with a few pictures, and a kind reminder that I have a mailbox that is more than willing to be filled with your snail mail letters from home :) 

Yep.  Both quite fun evenings.  So adios folks.  I'm off to attempt the grocery store again, but not until I find my umbrella.  It's starting to become an additional limb.