The List's

Continued from previous post-

Herr List met me at the train station, and first impression: intimidating. He's not much for chitchat, but I think that because he's not very good at English. The more I've talked to him over the last few days though, he's opened up a bit. He brought me home in his (new, gorgeous) BMW to meet Frau List and Alexandra. Frau List is super sweet. And Alexandra is one of the cutest, most energetic little girls I've ever seen. She's 8 years old and never stops bouncing. Which is fine for me, but I'm sure it tires her parents out. The List's have 2 older children as well, a 23yr old son who is studying in Vienna and a 25 yr old daughter who lives somewhere else in Salzburg with her boyfriend. She just graduated med school. I haven't met either of them yet, but I'm sure I will. Alexandra's first communion is this Sunday and the family invited me to go with them. It should be very interesting since 1) I'm not Catholic & 2) Everything is going to be in German. A double whammy. I'm looking forward to it, and I know it means a lot to Alexandra that I'm going.

My room: My room is in the entry hallway, which isn't really as weird as it sounds. There's a hallway where they put their coats, shoes etc, and then a door that leads to the living/dining room. My room is off of the hallway, so I'm separated, but have easy access to the main house. The room is fairly small, but that's totally fine since I don't have even 1/10 of what I have in my room at home to fit in there, but there's a bed that's half of a couch, a desk& closet with a few other storage spaces around. There's a door that leads out to (my personal) terrace, which will be awesome in the spring. That door is my window as well, but the view is of the next door house. I'm not in my room during the daylight hours very much though, so I don't particularly mind. I have my own bathroom; the only other person that uses it is Alexandra, but that's only if she's downstairs.

Herr List is starting a new job in Feb, so he's been around a lot, which apparently isn't the norm. He said that he's been bored at home, and is anxious to start work again. Frau List works for a leasing company (I don't know what she leases), but she works mostly from home. Apparently she has an office upstairs. I haven't been upstairs yet, but I think that's their personal space and that's totally fine. Once a month she goes to Vienna for 3 days. She left on Monday and is getting back late Thursday nights, so it's awkward breakfasts and garbled dinners for me& Herr List until Thurs. Alexandra is home for dinner every night, but has left for school by the time I have breakfast. Herr List is really nice, and we try to talk, but conversations don't last very long. Hopefully as I get further into my German classes, it will get easier.

More to tell, but that's a general overview of my family. After talking to a bunch of the other students, I definitely lucked out with my housing placement. I'm really excited to get to know them better of the next few months (:

Lovelovelove

PS- it was snowing when I got up this morning. IT'S SO GORGEOUS! Although it's kind of like living in a bubble/ snowglobe because I can't really see anything past the buildings in the city, but when it clears up on Friday, everything will be stunning. I'm so excited (:

Post first week settling in (Catch up post about Munich)

Sorry I haven't written in foreverrrr, if anyone didn't know already, I was bad at communicating when I was at home, I'm just as bad overseas (I was thinking the time change would make me better or something...) But, I'll backtrack and go through my week at Munich because it was incredible. (Sorry for the length of this post, but everything was just so cool)

Monday: In last blog (I think)

Tuesday: Walking tour of Munich- We walked for about 4 hours straight and it was bitterly cold which took away from the awesomeness (yes awesomeness) of the city, but not by much. We saw a ton of churches (and church organs!!) and every single one had breathtaking architecture. There was a wicked cool one that had the "Devil's footprint" in it- the story is that the architect needed help building the church, so he made a deal with the Devil that the Devil would help him build a church, but the Devil said there couldn't be any windows in it. He (Devil) assumed the church would fail without windows, but it didn't. So the Devil went inside the church one day and saw that there was light, and assumed that the church was illuminated by God, so he stamped in the ground really hard and left a footprint. In actuality, the windows were just set very far back in the walls. It was a neat story. We learned a lot about the different forms of architecture that was used in building the churches, the Royal Home and other places, which was really interesting to see the variety all within a few km of each other.

That same day we went to the Deutcheus (sp?) Museum which had literally every exhibit you could think of in it. We had a tour of a few of them, and then Jesse (the other music major) and I went to the instrument exhibit. AHHHH!!!!! I have about 70 pictures from the exhibit. I didn't post all of them on my facebook for those who have seen my album. It had every instrument family, and an example of each, from basically the time it was created (including bagpipes, bassoons, others that I didn't even know existed.) THERE WAS A GIRAFFE PIANO! Probably my new favorite instrument. So anyways, that museum was wicked sick. Then we wandered back to our hostel and went out to Augustina, the oldest brewery in Munich.

Wednesday: Fussen, Castles& Clubbing. We started the day off with a train ride to a Medieval village called Fussen. More on that later. The cool part of the day was when we went to the castles a bit north of Fussen. They were the "Fantasy Castles" or something like that. Turns out that the guy that built the castle only lived there for ~132 days before he died. There were only 13 rooms finished in the entire castle, but man, they were the most detailed, elaborate rooms I've ever seen, or will ever see in my entire life. Nevermind the stunning views out the windows, the paintings and decorations alone were incredible. We weren't allowed to take pictures unfortunately, but we had the coolest tour guide. There was another castle in that area, but we didn't go into that one. We found a gorgeous lake and hung out there for a little while before returning to Fussen. (That was when Jesse fell through the ice and had to deal with wet shoes and shins for the rest of the day.) When we got to Fussen, we all split up, but the girls followed Konrad around because he knows what he's talking about and always has interesting tidbits. Konrad is the academic advisor/ professor/ cool guy at the college. He's been working for Salzburg College for about a year, but he always seems to know everything. He showed us another church, which was attached to a monastery, (all medieval) and some other views. That night, we went to a club since it was our last night in Munich. I don't know if I'll be visiting clubs much, and that's all I have to say on that topic (:

Thursday: Moving day! We went to the Olympic Park in the morning, which was really cool. Unfortunately it was raining, but you could tell that on sunny days it's an awesome place. (Sorry I use so many generic adjectives for everything, just imagine my excited face and flapping hands to get the point across about how much I am loving everything haha). We went up in the needle in the middle of the park and you could see everythinggg. I would assume it's sort of like the needle in Seattle, but with probably a lot more churches to be seen from this one. There are churches every 100m around here. After the park, we went to the BMW factory. The tour we took was super secretive, I'm afraid if I write about it my computer will get confiscated or something. Everything there was really fancy and... clean. Very clean. The tour seemed to take forever, but after all the walking we had done the entire week, we were ready for the train ride to Salzburg. The train ride was 2 hours, and all but 15 minutes of it was in Germany. Germany is 2km away from Salzburg. I finished reading "The Help" while on the train- for anyone who hasn't read it, get on that now. So good. Anyways, we had a long train ride, and then our host families met us at the train station. I'll pick up my next blog there. (I promise I won't wait so long to write it!)

I miss everyone so much, and those of you who are starting second semester, good luck!! Lovelovelove

Day 1...Let's do this.

Let the blogging commence. Since I've never done this before, I might try a few different versions of writing. I'll start with something like journaling though.

I'm in Munich!! It's been an incredibly long day, it's currently a little after 4pm Monday here, and I've been going since 8am Sunday, US time. My flight was non eventful, (which is better than eventful!) and I met up with a girl named Jenna who's from near Boston. We had facebooked a little before our departure day, which was nice so we had each other to deal with the airports and everything with. We ended up sitting together on the plane as well. When we met up with the rest of the group at the Munich airport, we discovered that there are 16 people in our group.... and 16 people in the entire Salzburg College school. Which will mean lots of lovely individual attention in classes. The program director and academic director are with us, and they're awesome. Both of them have only been with Salzburg College for a year or 2, but they know everything (so far).

Everyone in the group is great so far. There are 10 girls and 6 guys. We're staying in a hostle for our time in Munich, but I have a feeling like we'll be doing a lot of group things. It's one of the guys birthdays today, so we're all going out later. We had lunch/ orientation at the Hofbrauhaus today... like the original Hofbrauhaus. IT WAS SO COOL! Pictures to follow, of course. Lots of walking, as expected, but I'll be glad to go to bed tonight. It's one of the STRANGEST sensations ever, being in a place where I literally can't understand anyone when I walk down the street. Hopefully with my German class, I'll start to catch onto things a bit easier. I never understood the power of pictures until now! So, I feel like there has been a million things I want to tell everyone that went of today, but my head is so tired, hopefully I'll remember it all later.

I miss everyone A TON already, but I can feel ya'll's (channeling the inner Texans on this trip, there's 3 of them) spirit with me. Love you