... photos of my first week of Freiburg

Above: A view of Freiburg, Germany

Munster Cathedral before sunset

Left: A view of the ruined Staufen castle and vineyards

First Week in Freiburg!

Week of 16.02.2011

After an exhausting few days of winter weather and cancelled flights, I made it to Freiburg, Germany on January 12. There was a whirlwind of paperwork to catch up on, introduction to the dorm, tram station, and more. The first night I arrived, my 5 roommates and I had a delicious pizza with sweet corn, ham, salami, and mozzarella.

All of my roommates are Freiburg University students around the ages of 19 and 21, studying medicine, Islamic sciences, engineering, history, and more. Total there are four girls and two boys. The room setup is very different from that of Wofford. We share a small flat with a common room, kitchen, and table. Three people are assigned to one of two bathrooms (I actually share a bathroom with two boys, but they are the cleanest people I have ever met). We all have our own large, white room with a small safe, closet, TV, and large window. It’s a nice set-up that seems to work well for everyone.

The next few days consisted of catching up what I missed from orientation, configuring the internet, buying a German phone, figuring out the calling service, and, the most fun part, exploring Freiburg!

I walked around Freiburg to understand how it is laid out. Freiburg is located in the southwest region of Germany near the Black Forest. It is a beautiful university town of 200,000 people and about 30,000 students. It boasts a charming, upbeat city center near the Munster Cathedral that with plenty of cafés, bars, clothing stores, appliance stores, bakeries, and more. The city streets are lined with shallow streams or canals that were designed to keep fires from spreading. It is a walk able city and very “green.” Trashcans are sectioned for paper, plastic, and everything else. The stairwells of buildings, in particular the dorm room buildings, are not lit throughout the night, only if you trip a sensor. There are plenty more bikes than cars and there are even small plots of land one can rent to tend a garden.

My first weekend, IES took a half-day trip to Staufen, where there is a ruined castle and small quiet city center. The ruined castle is surrounded with vineyards, as the Rhine Valley region is known for its sweet wines made with Riesling grapes. A great stop was the kaffee and kaufen (coffee and cake) at café Decker. I really enjoyed my cappuccino and black forest cherry cake! I learned from Ms. Karin (she is in charge of housing and pretty much everything expect academics) that bakeries are required to use kirchen or cherry schnapps when baking the famous cake or they will be fined.

Our classes don’t begin for another week, but we started an intensive session about the EU and German language. We’re cramming in as much as we can before our trip to Berlin and Prague on Monday!

Hello, Portugal, Soy Sydney

I didn't expect Portugal to be quite so awkward. By this, I mean that I didn't expect to feel so awkward in Portugal. The only reason I say this is because whenever I was spoken to in Portuguese, my natural reaction is to respond in any language but English (the language that they apparently prefer). Luckily, I broke myself of the habit of responding in Spanish by the end of the first day. (Reasons for why this is such a good thing are to follow.)
Anyway, for the nitty gritty details: overnight buses, no better than overnight planes. No worse, but no better... actually maybe they are worse: the buses going from Granada to Lisboa do not have onboard restrooms. Gah! So that means that we had to get out at the coldest bus stop in the world (an exaggeration, I know) while our driver had a smoke and coffee.
At one point the change in the veolocity of the bus alerted me that we were stopping. It was dark, I had been sleeping, was not wearing contacts, and was curious about where in the world (Iberian Peninsula) I was. I looked out the windows, saw some buildings, and couldn't read the signs. So, I put on my glasses, looked out the window, saw some buildings, and still couldn't read the signs. We had arrived in Portugal.

Huelga General = Grand Stink

I know that updates have been thinner than Twiggy, but I have a fantastic explanation that will be given after I have updated all of you about the life and times of Sydney Fogle.
So, the 29th of September, the entirety of Spain went on strike (or so we thought). In actuality, the numbers that the government give and the numbers that the press give when talking about the number of strikers differ (Qué sorpresa - my host mom tells me that this is not uncommon). The program was telling us that we should be prepared for strikers outside of our internships and even that the bus systems would be unreliable. All of this was true, but not to the extent of other places. As soon as midnight struck on the 28th and began the 29th it seemed like a completely different place (even Kabab King closed its gate!). There were very few people in the streets and walking home felt very strange. The morening of the 29th came and I had never realized how smelly trash can get, especially when the afternoon heat comes in and makes life miserable. Yes, we had picketers. Yes, it smelled. Yes, there was graffiti. No, we did not have random outbreaks of violence like in Barcelona (and now in France).

UIM

During my time here in Spain I have an internship at La Unión Iberoamericana de Municipalistas. Honestly it seems like the organization does everything under the sun. Mostly though, it is promoting better communities. They have departments that range from schools with English classes to urbanism and sustainable development research. Mostly I've been doing office work (understandable since it was my first week), but the director recently asked if I wanted to help with the English Immersion courses. Of course I said yes! ONe of the more interesting things about Spain is the amount of breaks they take during the day. This is not to say that Spaniards are lazy. On the contrary, they work just as many hours as we do per day, but they get breaks where they can shake the stress off during the day. For instance, second breakfast does exist. It tends to occur between 10:45 and 11:45 (sometimes noon). I normally just have a coffee or bring a piece of fruit from home, but many people go out, get a coffee and toast and relax for about 10 - 15 minutes. Then there's the best descanso (break) of them all: the lunch hour. This term is misleading since it lasts between 2 and 3 hours and also includes a 10 - 40 minute siesta (doctors say that 30 minutes is best). However, work goes on here until 8 in the evening. Oh, my life is just so hard right now.

Fight Songs and Social Gaffes

Last Sunday I was given the chance to attend the local soccer team's game. Los Cármenes are ranked fourth in the Second Division. Translation: they're not that great, but they're also not the worst. I had heard that they did not have many fans, but there were about 15,000 people at the stadium and about 12,000 of them knew some pretty awesome fight songs. I wound up telling my host sister and her boyfriend that sometimes the fans were more exciting than the game itself. I could even spot the "student" cheering section thanks to the flags and rude chants.

I'm going to start this next section by saying that in Spain it is customary to greet someone with two air kisses to the cheek, starting on the left. Now I'm going to tell you that it is not typically my first reaction to air kiss my sister's boyfriend. Having said this, I met him today and was on the way to extend my hand when he leaned forward slightly to his left and after a long-enough pause for the two of them to realize that I had forgotten social niceties we exchanged greetings. Then we all had a good laugh at my expense... luckily, I thought it was kind of funny, too.

Carolina Meets España

So, this little nugget of writing is to inform everyone that I am in Granada, Spain studying Spanish and oddly enough, Arabic. Who'd have thought, right? Orientation here has been just as harrying and hectic as freshman orientation was at Wofford. So, to all of you freshies who might be reading this... it isn't over by a long shot.

After a 20 km - yes, that is 12ish miles - (many portions of which I tried to remember if I had signed a release form) we arrived and passed through many beautiful coastal views in Cabo de Gata, a national park in Almería.

Interesting fact: many of the films that you believed were filmed in the American desert... not. They were filmed in Cabo de Gata: Laurence of Arabia, Clint Eastwood films, and the Indiana Jones movie that had his father in it. Sorry, I can't remember the name, but luckily I'm too far away to hunt down with an angry mob.

The views were beautiful and very close thanks to our part mountain goat guide. Luckily, I haven't been living as on the edge since we got home... luckily. And did I mention that it's fantastically beautiful here?