Made it to Marburg... Barely

Well I am officially in Marburg, Germany after a long day of flights and train rides. Before my flight from Chicago, I made friends with another student who was on her way to Germany. However, she was on her way back to begin her studies after taking a year to au pair in Philadelphia and travel the states. She was on her way to a small university outside of Munich - only about 400 students in the whole school! While talking, she mentioned that she would like to study in the US for a semester or so but tuition is too much for her - she only pays 715 euros a semester for university. I think SLU should take a lesson from the German school system and revise their tuition to be along those lines... On the flight I was next to a German woman who was returning to Dusseldorf after visiting her daughter who was living and working in Orlando. After the flight from Chicago , I transferred to a second flight in Dusseldorf and eventually made my way to Frankfurt. Once there, I had to find the train station in the terminal, which admittedly was a bit difficult but that was most likely due to a lack of sleep. The real hard part was buying my train ticket to Marburg, catching the S-bahn to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, and once in the Hauptbahnhof finding my way to the tracks with the train to Marburg. Fortunately, there was a nice German chap who helped me out with buying my ticket (he was having trouble buying his also!) and then we rode together to the main station and he walked me to my track as it was on the way to his track. Sadly, once at my track, we realized that my ticket was to Marburg-Sud not Marburg-Lahn and I had to have a ticket to Marburg-Lahn. So, I had to buy another ticket but I am trying to think of that first ticket as a sacrifice to my year in Germany!

Now I am checked into my hostel and relaxing as I have absolutely no energy and nothing is open today anyway... sadness. One of the girls in my room is also participating in the IUSP at Uni-Marburg and she only has a year or so more German than me so I don't really feel that bad anymore about my lack of German skills. Anyway, I think that the rest of the afternoon will be spent enjoying the weather, reading my book, and preparing for tomorrow and the beginning of the program... and then I will follow that exciting afternoon up with a bedtime of 9:00 pm! Yay for trying to avoid jetlag!

Leaving St. Louis!

Here I sit, watching the hours pass and packing furiously, making final preparations for my trip to Chicago and Frankfurt. For the purposes of keeping a travel diary of sorts - and keeping you all entertained without my lovely personage in the US of A- I'm attempting my very first foray into the wonderful world of blogging. This blog will adopt a scattershot approach, covering a variety of topics in a semi-coherent manner, ensuring that anyone checking it out in search of any one thing will come away feeling wholly dissatisfied or, at the very least, somewhat disappointed.

That said, for the next couple of weeks, I'll mostly be writing about my integration into Marburg and German culture and the subsequent struggles with navigating a new and non-English speaking university bureaucracy. Some people travel to experience the world and its various cultures. Others travel to learn more about themselves and discover their true priorities in life. I travel to see how far out of my comfort zone I can get - and thus embarrass myself in new and inventive ways. That said, there will most likely be many times when my updates focus solely upon a single event in when I somehow display my complete and utter lack of knowledge about the proper German way to respond to a situation and instead act like a silly American. Or the posts could be about food. Really, really good food. Either way, I will try to keep it entertaining.

And if I can figure out how to do it (provided I can theoretically do it at all), I'll include some pictures to accompany said posts and liven up this blog a bit.