26 Juli

Ich möchte euch über meinen Tag sagen, aber ich habe nicht zu viel Zeit. Heute hat mein Deutschkurs begonnen, und er gefällt mir.

(( I would like to tell you all about my day, but I don’t have so much time. Today, my German language course began, and I liked it. ))

I’m pretty proud of myself for constructing those two sentences there. Wow, it’s odd that I’ve been here for more than two days now. Hopefully (höffentlich) I will be able to post this to the internet soon; I am still waiting to find out if it is even possible for me to obtain access from my dorm. So I am sitting in room 4410 of the Evangelische Studenten Gemeinde (ESG), which is on the fifth, not fourth, floor. In Germany, the first floor of a building is not referred to as the first, but rather the basement or ground floor. So up and down five flights I go each day, usually more than once. What great exercise living in Germany can be! The ESG is, translated roughly, the protestant student union dormitories. Where I live is a fifteen minute walk from the Hörsaalgebäude (the campus building where all of the ISU action takes place), which is very close—some of the ISUers live in dorms more than 25 minutes (by bus!) from the campus. And campus is the wrong word. The Philipps-Üniversität Marburg is spread throughout the main part of the city, separated by many streets and mixed in with various other buildings, restaurants, hotels, cafés, etc. Just about zero of these buildings have air conditioning.

Das ist alles für jetzt!

-BW