So many planes....so little sleep

Finally I have internet! Sooo much has happened in the last week, I hardly know where to start. I guess the beginning will do.

The journey here was an adventure in itself. First was the 4 hour drive to the airport where we weighed my bags and discovered that my carry-on was sooo overweight! We had to unpack and repack all three of my bags and keep weighing them until they all just barely met the requirements. It was pretty stressful…my dad was totally spazing out. Then it was time to say goodbye to my family…that was the hardest part and the part of the whole trip that I was most afraid of. It was fine though, my mom managed to hold her tears until she was out of my sight, and so I was ok.

We (Cora, Jimmy, Jarrett and I) got on the plane around 6 but it was delayed for 2 hours due to snow. Leave it to Canada. We finally got into the air around 9:30 and they served us champagne about an hour later for New Years….it was pretty mellow. No real celebration like you see on TV. We missed our connecting flight in Amsterdam because of the delay, and they made us run to catch a flight to Paris. When we were boarding, for some reason they took my carry-on bag…they said it was because the plane was totally booked, but nobody else had to give up their luggage, it was so weird! From Paris we caught another connection, where my bag was fully searched by a man who was very curious to know how old I was and if I was married….whatever….and then finally arrived in Stuttgart to find that our luggage, had not.

What else could go wrong? Well the person living in the room I was supposed to move into hadn’t moved out yet, so I got to sleep on the floor in a random room. The keys I needed to access my laptop for work were supposedly hidden under some bookshelf somewhere in Stuttgart….all kinds of crazy little things. But everything worked itself out pretty quickly, I only had to go one day trying to wear Tara’s clothes (Tara is another waterloo student, who is very very small.)

The next day consisted of waking up very very early and running around the city getting set up. In Germany you have to register in the city you’re living in, and we had to apply for all kinds of permits to let us live and work here. Thank goodness most people here speak English or I’d be superscrewed right now…

My room here is awesome, way bigger than UW residence! I’m on the top floor in my building and we have a balcony. A big one with an awesome view! Only thing is, I don’t have any curtains, cause the Hausmeister (guy in charge of rez living…a landlord of sorts) ran out… I started out opening the doors of my wardrobe thinger and changing in between them…but I’ve quickly grown too lazy to bother. I figure A, I’m on the top floor (the 4th) so it’s pretty hard to see in, B, it’s Europe…arent’ Europeans stereotypically supposed to be more relaxed about the whole nudity thing?, and C, changing in between the cupboard doors is a pain in the butt…

Thanks a million to you guys who have emailed me.....it's so so so nice to hear from home when you're across the ocean and 6 hours ahead...

more to come...