I have made the move - I'm now here in Berlin with my new host family! Berlin is an enormous and happening place and my family is fantastic, so I'm off to a great start. My host family consists of a father (a lawyer), a mother (a doctor), and a 9 year-old, 15 year-old, and 16 year-old. Like me, they like music, bike riding, and sports. We live in a calm and tree-lined section of Berlin called Friedenau, which is not far at all...

Read more »

Today marked our second-to-last day of language school! I've learned an incredible amount of German over the past 2 months, but it's still scary to think of how much I will be relying on it from here on out - I'm far from fluent but my university courses will be in German.  We also presented today our final project for the language school phase - an individual presentation on a topic of our choice, in German of course. As...

Read more »

It's official - I'm moving this Sunday the 29th to Berlin! I can't believe my awesome time here in Cologne is already over, especially since I'm still processing everything that I've experienced - and blogging about it. Oops. So as for the week of August 18, on Monday we headed out after class to  the botanical gardens to see some serious foliage and enjoy the not-so-great weather. Lots of cities here in Europe that we've...

Read more »

Before I continue my attempts to catch up this blog to the present, some news: my time here in Cologne is almost up. On the 30th of September I'll be moving to the Friedenau district of Berlin, which is where my next host family lives. They have already contacted me, and they sound great! I'll be sad to leave my current host dad, in all of his motorcycle-riding, super-healthy, super-environmentally conscious glory, but I'm...

Read more »

Slowly but surely, I'm catching up to the present day in this blog.... sort of. Let's take a quick look at August 7-14. Almost every day after class we take the opportunity to explore our city, which always inevitably leads to me taking photos of whatever we're seeing. Our host mom also led Sarah, the fellow program participant who also lives with my host family, and I on bikes to a local bar, where we had a chance to talk about...

Read more »

So much happening in so little time! I'll start out with a quick update - I officially found out I will be living, come October 1, with another host family in Berlin! I will be there for the rest of the program, and from October to December I will be attending Freie Universität, one of the 2 major universities in Berlin, to study Politikwissenschaft. These past two weekends I've been to 5 castles and 4 new cities in Germany!...

Read more »