We arrived in Madgeburg and were greeted by Bo, a grad student working for Hendrik. He lead us from the train station for a few blocks until we arrived at the youth hostel. We were assigned our rooms and roommates and given street car passes good for the whole month. I was assigned to a room that shared a bathroom and shower with a second room. My roommate hadn't arrived yet, but Chris and Dustin were the two staying in the adjoining room.
We unpacked our stuff and started exploring the town, we were meeting back at 7pm I believe. Our hostel is in between 2 large malls so I walked around for a bit exploring them, but because it was a Sunday, everything was closed and the streets were relatively empty. I ran into one of the other students, Regina and we decided to ride the street cars that stopped near us and see what we could find. We rode around for a while and saw the town and discovered that street cars are incredibly hot in the afternoon. We stayed on it until we reached the last stop, got off, and got back on it once it turned around.
Later our group went out to get something to eat and afterwards Jay showed a few of us a nearby park. The entire time we were walking around I was wondering where all the people were, a sunny Sunday in Greenville would mean everyone and their mother would be at the park downtown. We saw a few people jogging, riding bikes, or having a picnic out in the park, but you would think the town was a quarter of its sized based on the number of people we saw. The park was very nice and I have been back there several times in my first week here.
I got back to the room to find my new roommate already there and half asleep, TJ. We got up the next day to eat a similar breakfast to what the hostel in Berlin had offered: yogurt, cold cuts, cereal, bread, fruit, milk and a juice mix. We met downstairs for our first trip to school at 7:45. We took streetcars to the Fachhochschule and there met our teachers. I was assigned to the B1 level group and so my teacher is Frau Weber. She is very nice and has a good sense of humor. She does a good job at keeping us awake for our 4 hour classes starting at 8:30am.
Our first week of school was fairly tough on me because I didn't have as many semesters in German as the others in my class. I have been able to keep up though. We just took a test on Friday.
On Saturday we took a day trip up to the mountain town of Quedlinburg and explored the town and the castle within. It was a nice quaint little town and they were having their market in the down center. The architecture was what was most impressive about the town, very authentic.
I saw many artists sitting on the side of the road drawing the winding cobblestone streets and buildings. The castle was not huge, but it was very interesting.
After touring around a bit we traveled a bit further down the train tracks and visited a place in the mountains that was famous for being the meeting grounds of witches, where they would copulate with the devil. It was funny to see how light hearted the German's made the attractions surrounding the tale.
There were lifesize statues of a witch and the devil positioned on rocks that formed a circle, presumably where the “copulation” actually took place. There were many giftshops and a good view of the valleys below the mountain.
It had been overcast all day, but it began raining in the late afternoon and suddenly we were running back down the mountain to catch a train in the cold rain, we all got pretty soaked because not many people brought umbrellas. We were in good spirits despite the rain, but we were all looking forward to getting back to the hostel.
And that pretty much catches you up to the day that I wrote this blog post :)
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