Arrival in Germany- the beginning of my year!

Here is my first real blog post from Germany! I am in Jan's house currently. Jan is a friend of my cousin and agreed to pick me up from the airport this morning.

The flight was tolerable- I hardly got a wink of sleep, and there was some definite turbulence- Clara, you would not have liked it ;) But, nonetheless, Lufthansa got me to Frankfurt. As Brittany commented, 11 minutes late- but who's counting when you lose all sense of time? I had no problem getting my baggage, and after a little wandering around Jan and I met up. At the airport, they have luggage carts that fit onto the escalator. I had 2- 50lb suitcases, a carry on duffel, and a bookbag. Let's say it was good Jan and I both held on to the cart as we went down the escalator! We walked a good while inside the airport to the parking deck, where we managed to fill his Audi with all of my belongings. It was really hard to pack for a year with such restrictions!

We drove to the Dreieich-Buchschlag train station. We were supposed to meet a current Fulbrighter, Elizabeth, who has been so kind to offer me some of her things before she leaves for the US in 2 days. We could not contact each other by phone and could not see one another at the train station, so Jan and I decided to go to his house, where I proceeded to CRASH! I think I slept 2 hours. But, most importantly, I was able to skype with Mom, Dad, and Will. I essentially gave my parents a 5 AM wake up call, right before their alarm went off. Later on, Jan and I went back to a different train station- this time in Darmstadt. We finally met up with Elizabeth and off loaded 2 large bags of bed linens, towels, baking pans, and who knows what else. I was too tired to even look in the bags. We had a funny encounter at the post office when we tried to explain we wanted to ship all of this. They found a REALLY big box, and shipped it to Aachen for almost 10 Euro-that's about 14 dollars. I was expecting the rate to be much higher.

I came back, skpyped again (which has become my most recent hobby it seems!) Please let me know if you skype! It is such a good way to keep in touch for free! Now I am waiting on Jan to wake up- he was really tired today from partying all weekend... HaHa.

I haven't really spoke much German here- I get really shy about speaking since I don't say all the grammar right or speak fast enough. However, I am sure within the year I will have no problem.

Tomorrow I leave for Marburg.

Thanks to all of you for showing your support and thoughts through your phone calls, notes, emails, and facebook messages. I really appreciate having such a wonderful support network, even across the atlantic ocean and 6 or 7 hours time difference!

Tschüss!

Rebecca