I have been living in Germany for about 3 weeks now and I can honestly say it has felt like 3 months already. I absolutely love it here so far and I am so excited to have at least 3 more months in Europe. Anyway, before I get lost in all the things to come, I need to document what has already happened in this semester. So naturally, let’s take it all the way back to the airport in Dallas. My mom dropped me off the morning of December 29th, ready to send me off to Munich, to be in a whole new country to spend the beginning of the New Year. I’m not exactly an expert traveler (to say the least) but I adopted the famous saying from Friday Night Lights to reassure myself along the journey (Clear Eyes, Full Heart, Can’t Lose-if you haven’t seen this TV series, then do yourself a favor and start watching tonight)
So I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t exactly know my way around an airport and doing it all alone was actually kind of fun when I ran into a few challenges. The weight limit for my large red suitcase is 50lbs. I knew it would be a close call, but the suitcase came out to be 56lbs. Great, just what I needed. So to avoid an $100 fee, i took the hiking pack out of the suitcase and decided to just take it as a carry-on. So I get to the terminal, and soon see that the flight to Philadelphia is gonna be a tight one. This turned out to be a great thing because the airport officials started asking passengers to “voluntarily” check more of their bags (to save as much room as possible). So being the great noble servant that I am, I gladly walked up to have two more bags (my duffle bag and my hiking pack) checked for free! Definitely saved me a lot of money, and the issue was resolved.
Moving forward, the plane rides were fine and the international flight had a great selection of movies. So I actually didn’t sleep at all on the flight, and I arrived in Munich already pretty tired. Luckily a german couple that I met on the train helped me find the place to buy metro tickets. To get to the apartment I was staying at (Elizabeth Elliot-you rock), I had to ride on 3 different transit systems (The S Bahn, the U Bahn, and then the regular city bus). Not to mention I was practically walking into a blizzard going on in Munich and it was a solid 15 degrees outside. Whoop, especially because my tennis shoes were very well equipped to handle to inches of snow…Nevertheless, Munich was still a great time, and the German absolutely put on a show to start of 2015. I promise they were shooting fireworks for 3 hours straight and it was quite the site to see. So here is a glimpse of what a snowy covered Munich looks like.
After a few days, the next stop would be Vallendar (where WHU is located). It took an 11 hour bus ride, but I made it into Vallendar safely! So the apartment I am residing in has a very strange nickname that all the german kids use. I live in a 17 story senior residence center. This building is triple the size of any other building in Vallendar (which is good because not very hard to find my way home). Anyway, it was first established for assisted senior living. Now, they allow about 50 international students share these living quarters with them. So after some context, the german kids call it the the “Death Tower”. It’s mean, so you can imagine why they call it that. But my single bed apartment is actually very nice, and besides the very steep walk up the hill, I very much enjoy living here.