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| 100 days of being a fly on the wall |
The first 100 days of my year abroad have already gone by. Instead of posting small things every now and then, I seem to have developed a pattern of working on a post for a long while and changing it completely before it actually appears on the blog. Resulting in *sigh* pretty sparse long posts that don't really cover what everyday life is like here. I suppose this is just as well, but in the future I hope to add in some more spontaneous writing for the sake of, well, spontaneous writing. I could right now tell you how my day is going, what I've been doing, eating, thinking about, and all of the things I should be doing instead of sitting here on the computer. Also I could tell you that right now I'm walking over to my desk and turning off the lamp, because maybe that's something you would be interested in knowing.
Today is Wednesday, November 18th. Wednesdays are the turning part of my week- Monday and Tuesday feel like swimming uphill and when I get to Wednesday everything starts going faster until inevitably Monday comes around again. I go to school later on Wednesdays because I only have two classes, History and Deutsch. Today I slept until 7am (a good thing, as lately my body has been waking me up at ridiculously early hours) and for breakfast I ate a pear and some chocolatey rice krispie cereal with milk. (note- this is not my normal breakfast choice- usually I have toast or granola. I was just curious if the cocoa krispies were any good) Then I washed my hair and got ready for school. My host sister had forgotten her gym clothes so she called me to ask if I could bring them. I wasn't sure if I even had history today, but from the school website I found out that it was still scheduled, just in a different room than normal. The weather was so very windy today!!!! It was quite fun to watch the leaf tornados and walk in the wind on the way to school. In school our teacher had to do something so she gave us a quick assignment and left us to our own meanderings. (I'll be receiving the award for most clueless student because I really don't know what she had to help with. It may have had something to do with the fact that on Saturday there is a school open house and at some point there is also parent teacher going ons... ah well...) While we were really digging deep into the history of Deutschland's industrialization in the 1800's (not), we mostly talked about the news, and one of my friends told us about the work she's been doing with her mom in Naumberg, spending some time helping refugees learn German. Even without having been there myself, it's easy to ascertain from the way she talks about them that these people are incredible. They are full of life and appreciative of everything they have. Something that I wish everyone understood, they are just people. Just normal humans who are trying to build a new life in a new country. Sometimes when I hear about well off, influential people in the US condemning the refugee crisis, I can't help but feel a little embarrassed, and a little frustrated because that's not how I want America to be portrayed. I find the amount of ignorance I've seen appalling, and I cringe knowing that I haven't seen a fraction of it. Aside from that, I know there are also many intelligent folks out there doing good, and that makes me feel better about the world. I wasn't intending on writing about the issue here and now, but somehow it has found a way into this paragraph. When the stars aline and I can express my thoughts on the matter, I will write more about this and about everything that is continuing to happen rather close to (German) home in the news this week. So, leaving that for later, I'll go on with my somewhat boring account of today.
After history I decided to go home for lunch because I had a 2.5 hour wait between classes (basically a full hour of time to be at home). I spent most of it playing violin in my host family's incredibly (almost overly) resonant house. For lunch I ate a piece of homemade sourdough bread with ham and cheese, fresh carrots and kohlrabi, a banana with nutella, and I drank hot tea. Then I went back to school for Deutsch (literature class) where I kind of spaced out and started writing poems in my notebook. After school I came home yet again on the Straßebahn and drank another cup of tea. I should have gone running, but it was already starting to get dark out and I wanted to work on a sketch I started the other day. With the help of Bee Eaters recordings playing while I worked, it's close to being finished now that there's only some layers of watercolors left to be added. For Abendbrot (it's like a snacky dinner) we had fried brie with cracker sized slices of bread and tomato/mozzerella salad. Now I have a little bit of Spanish homework to do, and then I'll go to bed after I proof read this.
here's an album of black and white pictures for you. some are new, some are not.
thank you as always for reading!
Mila
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