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 from both my university and the middle of the city.

Some of the other program participants and I met up today with a German guy our program has hired to be our "tutor" for our time here in Berlin, and he was nice enough to show us around the city (by foot, of course, it's Europe) for a few hours. There is a ton to see here! I can't wait to get the photography started.

Speaking of photography, I have pictures from August 30, when I went with my friend Amy to the  Schlösser Brühl - or Brühl palaces. Brühl is a city just a short train ride away from Cologne, and it has a really fantastic palace complex that we knew we had to see. 

First up was Augustusburg Palace, which was the favorite residence of Cologne's elector and archbishop Clemens August of Bavaria (he had 19 others to choose from). It was built from 1728 to 1768 in a classic Rococo style.

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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 you might have noticed from the endless pictures of historical architecture on this blog and the detailed captions that accompany them, I like old buildings. So naturally I spoke about Cologne's most historical structures.

And now for the usual blast to the past, since I'm still about 4 weeks behind on pictures - on August 23, a number of us in Cologne traveled to Frankfurt to crash a CBYX (our program) alumni barbeque. We met some real live Germans who just came back from their stay in the U.S. (which they all loved, if you had any doubts), including one who briefly lived with a host family in... FOOTHILL RANCH! (For the uninformed, Foothill Ranch is a part of my small hometown of Lake Forest, CA). What are the chances? She legitimately enjoyed our suburban paradise. We also met the U.S.-German Consul General for Frankfurt, Kevin Milas, and his wife. It always feels nice to get some recognition from the U.S. State Department, which is our program's ultimate administrator. 

I love a good group picture

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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 visited have botanical gardens, and Cologne's garden is one of the very best. The plant lover can find everything from cacti to old, thick trees to tropical plant life in its enormous grounds. But the gardens do more than just provide plants for a place to grow - they are also fertile grounds for great pictures!

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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 definitely looking forward to the big move. 

And now - for the events of August 16. Many of us students headed to Maastricht in the Netherlands for the day. Maastricht has a rich history and many historical monuments, and you can get a sense of just how old this city is just by walking down the cobblestone streets and admiring the medieval architecture. These days, it's a major shopping destination - all of the streets in the city center were dedicated to fancy stores of all types. Many Germans come here just to shop. But we aren't German, nor were we there to shop - we had some exploring to do, and just a half day to do it before it was time to head back to Cologne.

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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 travel plans and language school auf Deutsch.

The Fernsehturm (TV Tower) in Cologne from Media Park. Cologne is a major center for the media industry

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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! And I have officially taken 3600 pictures since being in Germany, and almost 5000 if you count pictures I took during in Washington, D.C. at the start of this adventure. So there is a lot to go through.

We'll continue with August 6, when after class some friends and I scaled one of the tallest buildings in Cologne, the Triangle Tower. It's only 103 meters high (30 stories), but there isn't much competition for the "tallest buildings in Cologne" category. (As I mentioned before, many buildings in Cologne are subject to height restrictions in order to protect the view of the cathedral). 

We took an elevator up to the top and were rewarded with quite the view in every direction. 

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