Quick Update

Hey everybody!

Today our group headed to Augsburg, the 3rd biggest city in Bavaria (pop. ~260k), which is about 2.5 hours southwest of Regensburg (when you take the slow trains). At this point I'm pretty tired from that venture so this update is going to be short. I'll try to get some pictures and commentary about Augsburg up within a few days.

Things here are going pretty well. This coming week will be the last real week of our language crash course, followed by a week of tests, coinciding with my birthday. After that, I'll be off for about 3 weeks, one of which I have to be around for course selection related things, but the other two I'll be traveling (provided I can actually afford to). My plans at this point are distressingly vague, but making my way back to Normandy seems to be in order.

In the meantime, I'll be heading to Munich tomorrow for St. Patrick's Day festivities. I was initially rather surprised to hear that Munich even posesses an Irish community but, nonetheless, Munich seems to make a big deal of the occasion and that's all that matters. It looks like a large part of our group, along with a good chunk of the rest of the English speakers studying at the Universtity (including a few genuine Irish people) will be going. We'll see if I post pictures of that.

As an added bonus, I got a new flat/suite mate this week who, thankfully, is actually German (everybody else in our apartment is an international student, so it's nice to have a native speaker around to help the rest of us out). She just got back from a year working in Guatemala so she's in the middle of transitioning back to thinking in German - thankfully this seems to translate into her speaking slowly enough that I can follow.

That's about it, I hope you guys are all doing well. I would, however, like to leave you with a general bit of information I just learned: 10 min rice cooked for 50 minutes is still surprisingly edible. Setting a timer still remains a good idea.