Good news and bad news

Like the title says, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that posting videos might have to be put on hold for a while. I'm having trouble getting YouTube to upload videos for me. Also, my batteries for my camera are losing their charge too fast, so I can't take pictures at the moment. Hopefully I can fix this soon.

The good news is that everything else, aside from what I mentioned above, is going great. I'm having a blast, even though we haven't really had the chance to do too much. Today (Sunday) was pretty relaxing. Some of us went for walks around the city and on a bike path that runs along the river here. I was able to take a few pictures before my batteries went dead. Later we hung out in the lobby with some of the other international students. One of the best parts about the trip so far is that everyone is trying to speak as much German as possible. Antonio, an international student, said that the group that was here last year spoke almost no German and that it was nice that we all spoke as much as possible. If anything, we are learning a lot and speaking German makes something simple more interesting.

Tonight I had my first "adventure" with Jolli (from OU). We wanted to get food, so we tried to order a couple of pizzas and to have them delivered. I called and was able to order the pizzas and tell them where to deliver the pizzas, but we ran into trouble when they needed a telephone number from us. I tried to give them the number that I have, but I must have been doing it wrong because the person on the phone seemed annoyed and then got angry. Basically he said that he needed a phone number because there are over 350 students and he needed a number to call when the pizza was delivered and that when I understood this then I could try ordering a pizza again. It was frustrating, but also really funny. There were three of us in the room who were able to hear the conversation and none of us knew what to do. I was so close to success, but I guess that I will just have to ask about how to give a phone number here and then try again in the near future. Instead of pizza we ended up going to a Chinese restaurant down the street and that went a lot better than ordering the pizza did. We were able to speak in German with our waitress and ordered our food without any problems. We even carried on a conversation in German for almost the whole meal. They brought out a warmer for our food, and after we were finished with the main course they brought us some fruit for dessert and some Flauwein (weak wine). The wine was served warm (not room temperature, but actually warm), but it still tasted pretty good. While we were in the restaurant, the two of us even asked questions to other people in the restaurant. This seems small, but it was good practice for us to talk to and be understood by others outside of our OU group.

That was day 2 in a nutshell. It's hard to believe that classes haven't even started yet and that we aren't in the swing of things since everyone seems really comfortable already. I'll be writing again soon and hopefully I can have better luck with videos and with my batteries as time goes on.

That's it for now. Feel free to leave comments and make sure that you give out this blog's address to people that don't have it.