After being prodded for days about this whole “blogging” thing, I have now officially caved and am writing out my life in digital format to be hosted at an invisible location somewhere in this maze of nonsense call the “internet.” I will try to be as concise as possible, keeping your precious screen real estate free of any unnecessary syntactical fluff, grammatical decor, or useless rhetoric (this is a lie).

If you:

1. have lots of time on your hands
2. have no life
3. have nothing better to be doing
4. actually care about what I have to say or
5. are avoiding homework and facebook has run out of things to offer you (impossible)

then by all means, read on. If you do not fall into any of the preceding categories, please click here, and continue to the website of your choosing. That having been said, let’s get started.

Background:

1. This semester (Spring ‘08) I am living in Düsseldorf, Germany, a city of 580,000 located on the Rhein about two hours West of Paris and two hours South of Amsterdam.
2. This is exciting.
3. ich spreche Deutsch nicht (I don’t speak German)
4. I love adventure.

They love me here. I should start putting an umlaut in my name.

Start: Informative section of post.

On Thursday Jan. 10, 2008 Gavin and I left Dallas for the Great Unknown, a.k.a. Brussels (that’s in Belgium, for the geographically challenged). We spent three days there, and took a day trip to Antwerp (see facebook for photos). We saw a few old churches, urinated on one, went to the modern art museum, ate waffles, saw Manneken-pis and of course, I bought a soccer jersey for my collection. Check.

*For more information on this subject click here*

On Monday Jan. 14, 2008, we caught our high speed train for Düsseldorf. These trains have assigned seats, a tidbit we did not know until we had already boarded… the wrong end of the train. Out of necessity, we proceeded to walk the entirety of the train in search of our seats while carrying 60 pounds of luggage, producing lots of rather angry Europeans. Oops. After locating our backsides’ temporary abode, I pulled out my book, The Witches (yes, I know it’s a children’s book), and read the whole way. We arrived in Düsseldorf, and caught a bus to the hostel we booked the day before, only to find a sign reading “Hostel closed for holiday.” Awesome. Now what? Start walking. Long story short, tomtom shows us the way, we walk about a mile to the AIB (our school), and ring the doorbell. Luckily someone was there. Selene, our new best friend, shows us around, books us another hostel, shows us where to get some food, and lets us use the internet. That worked out well. So we spend our first night in Düsseldorf in a rather nice hostel hijacking internet from the neighbors.

Jan. 15, 2008 we get up early (not by choice) and decide to walk the city. We spend 4-ish hours just roaming through parks and pretending to be German. At noon we go the AIB and meet up with our friends (hooray) . Our host families come to pick us up, and we say goodbye.

This post is getting too long, goodbye.