first day of classes. (or striving for un-originality).

Oh my gosh. I hate rain right now. If you think it rains a lot in Ohio, no, you are wrong. Ohio has NOTHING on Luxembourg. It can be completely sunny one moment and then BAM torrential downpour. An umbrella is necessary at all times, even if it’s beautiful outside. But you don’t want to hear about that, so moving right along.

Today was my first day of classes! I was excited to get into a schedule, but that also means a lot of work again. I don’t think I’ll be reading quite as much as I do in my English classes back at Miami, but it probably won’t be as easy to read as novels. I am absolutely psyched for my music class. I didn’t realize how much I missed playing the piano/listening to classical music until we did a quick run through of the music periods in class today with sound clips. Plus we’re going to Milan and Pisa for that class. Awesome. Introduction to the European Union has potential… it’s a lot of reading but if the prof can lead a good discussion it will be a fun class. I’m slightly less than excited about French now because the teacher talks at us like high schoolers… and I have the feeling the class is going to go very very slow since it’s so big and we have to stop every five minutes for her to go around the room and listen to each person repeat a phrase. I can’t remember much French from high school, but at this point I’m almost regretting not taking something higher than practical, conversational French with everyone who has never taken it. Almost. We’ll see how I feel when I start having work in my other classes.

It has been mild chaos as we plan our trips for these next few weekends. We’re probably going to Bruges and possibly Brussels this weekend, so tomorrow Aunna and Brad are going to check the train tickets. Unfortunately I have class all day and can’t tag along.

(I wrote this all last night and will probably post again about today... which is now the second day of classes. This whole not having internet at home this is a real bummer because I never think to write anything until nighttime...)

adventures.

To those of you paying close attention to dates, you’ll realize there’s something a little off about my first post… being that I got here to Lux on Wednesday the 25th… And that is because I thought I pushed the submit button on that post, but apparently did not. By the time I had free time in the chateau (aka free time with internet), I only had time to post it, not to add to it. But a lot of interesting things have happened since then.

First of all, we had our first confusion with public transportation! Aunna couldn’t quite remember how to get home, so Brad and I decided to ride the bus with her to meet her family and help her out. Once on the bus, we tried to follow along on the bus route on our map, and slowly realized that it didn’t quite match up to where the bus was actually driving. Long story short: we were trying to get to the outskirts of Differdange and ended up in a completely different city called Esch. Adventures! So we found the train station in Esch, caught a train back to Differdange, and then got pizza before Aunna and Brad tried all over again. Don’t worry; she got home that time. Come to find out, we had been on the right bus to get her home, but the buses and their routes change after 6:00. I decided not to tag along because we really had no idea what bus I would have to take back to the center of Differdange once we got her home. Moral of this story: ask the bus drivers for help when you get on the bus. They are very nice and helpful.

Today (Friday, as I write this once again in my room without internet) we had a few more orientation meetings and then ventured out into Luxembourg City for a scavenger hunt of sorts. I was in Dean LeTerre’s group and he was hilarious! He has only been dean for about a year, so he didn’t know the area all that well and claimed to be directionally challenged anyways. We started out pretty strong on the scavenger hunt part, but then we stopped for Magnum bars at a mini-golf course – not sure if these ice cream bars are Italian, but I had them in Italy so I had a little “aww I miss Rome… and gelato” moment here. Then there was a torrential downpour. It should be mentioned that it was absolutely beautiful, almost no clouds in the sky all morning, pretty much right up to this point. I was pretty much unprepared for any sort of weather because I forgot my sunglasses and didn’t wear a rain jacket, so I couldn’t see in the morning and got wet in the afternoon. Luckily I did have an umbrella. So after we finished our ice cream and were huddling under a shelter for awhile waiting for the rain to slow down, the dean finally said, “Well if we’re going to be waiting for the rain to stop, we might as well do it in a bar,” and so we spent the rest of our afternoon in a nearby pub. What a guy… So without much fanfare I tried my first beer. I’m not sure that it entirely counts because the kind I got was more like a cider and I didn’t even drink half of it because I hadn’t eaten much during the day, but it was pretty good. So… hooray.

After that we came back to the Chateau to have a BBQ with all the host families and that was really fun because I got to meet Aunna’s host family. I stayed afterwards to try to book train tickets in Italy (we’re planning a trip to ROME at the end of September… Plane tickets already booked – YESSSS!!) but there is some sort of problem with the site or my credit card… It’s very frustrating, but hopefully I can work it out tomorrow. I’m just so psyched to go back to Rome. On the way home from the Chateau I stopped for a few minutes to see a little live band playing out in a square. It was great because they were American songs, and it was a strange mix of country, blues, and jazz. Very fun… I soooo badly wanted to dance, but the only guy around who looking like he could do anything like a swing dance was this old Luxembourgish guy, and I wasn’t about to just go up to him and ask for a dance. That’d be a little sketch. Where are all my guy friends when I need them?

je suis au luxembourg.

So here I am in Differdange Luxembourg… pretty exciting stuff! I’m writing this in my quite colorful host room (which sadly does not get wi-fi), resting up before I go to register as a temporary citizen in Differdange. Our first day here was pretty uneventful… lots of traveling, meeting our host families, and trying our very best to stay awake until sometime vaguely considered nighttime. I made it to about 6 o’clock, putting my grand total of hours I had been awake to 28 hours. That’s right; didn’t sleep a wink on the plane. I slept for about 12 hours and am still sleepy, but I’m attributing that to a pretty crappy sleep schedule the past few days and not jetlag… because I usually don’t get jetlag and I don’t want to say I have it.

::(My colorful room)::

I’m living with a nice older single woman named Fernande in the center of Differdange, about five minutes away from the Chateau where we take our classes. That’s convenient! She lives in a four story apartment and my room is on the top floor, which certainly made bringing up my two 50-lb suitcases great fun. Fernande also has two cats named Lilli and Lutzi (pronounced like Lucy) who are very sweet and fat and funny. She runs a photography business out of the two bottom floors of the apartment and she showed me around yesterday. It’s a little strange with it just being me and her, but it will definitely give me a chance to brush up on my French. Not gonna lie… I just really want to get to my French class on Monday so I can start talking to people even a little bit.

We spent the morning on our first real day in Luxembourg at the chateau going through some orientation. I learned a little more about the paperwork I have to finish to get my permit to live here, IT and library services in the chateau, and met the student events coordinator. She coordinates some optional group trips we can take, or even just day trips to things like museums during the week. I really liked her and I’ll probably go on a few of those trips because they’re to places that are harder to get to by train or plane.

Not a lot has happened yet to be honest. It’s hard to plan things without cell phones or a concrete schedule. We just wondered around Differdange for a little bit to get our bearings and most people ended up at a bar that a lot of Americans go to called Das Boot… but it’s like 2:30 (or should I say 14:30 since I’m in Europe?) and I’m tired. So I’m being a party pooper. I’m sure there will be another time haha.

ten days.

TEN DAYS

Yeah. Oh man. I leave for Lux in ten days. I haven't even started packing yet. Typical. :]

I spent the rest of my summer after Rome in Oxford taking an incredibly boring Shakespeare class and working in sub-zero temperatures in the library. The combination of those two things led to a LOT of stalking the Ryanair (budget airlines) website for cheap tickets to exciting places. Obviously this made me really excited to go to Lux. I also figured out that it would be very hard to get to Rome on a weekend trip because of flight times our of our closest airport (you know, because I want to go back and visit my friends and all), so I'm aiming to get over there during one of our longer trips. Ideally my music class will take our field trip to Venice like last fall and then Rome is only a hop, skip, and a jump away by cheap Italian train. And I am PUMPED to see my friends in Rome.

I got to see my friend Andrea in New York City with Melanie this week. He and his sister Francesca are studying English there for about a month, and so we planned a trip to go up to see them. It got a little complicated with plane tickets and bus tickets and driving my car, but ultimately I got to spend three days there with them and some friends from Miami. We got some cheesecake in Times Square one night and then introduced them to Chipotle and hung out at their apartment the next. I don't know how watching youtube always seems to happen when people are sitting around a computer, but in case anyone was wondering, the double rainbow video is cross culturally funny. Boys will be girls is not. Since Andrea and his sister had classes in the morning, so we explored Manhattan a little while they were gone. Overall though, I was just so happy we got to see Andrea again! He was a part of the group of friends in Rome that we saw a lot, and it just kind of sucks having friends who live in another country. Praise God this worked out! We also got to talk to Andrea a little bit about what he believed which I never got the chance to do in Rome. I like friendships when people know me as someone who they can talk about spiritual things with, so praise God for that too. That's something I want to have more often.

It was a great last hurrah in America. Now I'm just gearing up for leaving again. I seriously need to start packing. And I want to plan our first weekend trip before we leave the States so we can get a good deal. And I'm going to go down to Oxford for move-in weekend to see the freshmen freaking out... oh and seeing all my friends. I'm excited. Can't wait to write all about it.