Pictures from our family trip

Here are finally two pictures from our trip with my family in September. Both were taken on the Königsee, close to the Austrian border.

The winter semester here in Tübingen officially started yesterday, and the seminar that I'm TAing on peacekeeping also met for an organizational session (divvying up the presentations, telling them what they are required to do, etc). Tonight my English class starts again at the German-American Institute, and in the next few days most everything will be getting back into full semester pace. The unfortunate thing is that, for the first time ever, I haven't completely finished the last semester before the new one began. I am still struggling with the last of my three papers and just really can't work up the motivation to get it done. The topic is interesting and I even have what I think is a good thesis, but actually sitting down to write...

Vienna!

Well, Mom, Dad, and David have come and gone, and we had a very nice week, if you don't count the weather. As I could have predicted months ago when Mom and Dad booked their flight, the weather turned from being relatively nice and sunny a day before they arrived to drizzling and in the 50s almost the whole trip. At least the last 2 days it didn't rain, and the very last day there was even sun!! I'll put up some pictures when I get some from Mom and Dad- we saw quite a bit while we were in Vienna - the opera, the Prater, the Lipazzaners, a tour of the city, the castle Schönbrunn, and of course ate the obligatory Wienerschnitzel at Figlmüllers and a slice of Sachertorte (although not at Hotel Sacher).

Now that they're gone it means that it's time for me to refocus on my work for this coming semester - and I still have one paper to write from the last semester. In just a few weeks the semester will be starting, and I need to have everything ready for the seminar I'm TAing by then. There are also quite a few birthdays coming up in Daniel's family that we'll be celebrating.

more than a month? oops...

It's been over a month since I last posted and I hardly realized it. Then again, this summer has been rather repetitive - teach English class, go home, work on papers. At the end of July I started a tandem with a guy from Jordan studying here, and it's going fairly well - we meet once a week and work on my Arabic and his English. He translates English and German poems into Arabic, so a lot of the help he needs is single words or complicated sentence structures in the poems. I, on the other hand, need help with just asking basic questions in Arabic. The four university semesters unfortunately just basically made me able to read and translate Arabic texts.
This week I also semi-officially started working as a TA for one of the professors at my institute. I've been unofficially working on the seminar since last March, but on Sept 15th I'll actually start to get paid. And since my parents will be here at that time, I'm starting a bit ahead of schedule. Although, like I said, speaking of an actual starting date is a little silly since I've been working on this seminar for several months already. The seminar is on multilateral peace operations, so we'll be looking at a lot of the UN peacekeeping and peace-enforcing missions as well as the theories behind them. I find it a very interesting topic, and my problem right now is just cutting down the required reading to a reasonable level. I think the students would kill me if I gave them everything that I've copied and found good so far!! But I still have quite a bit of time. The semester doesn't start until the middle of October.
As for my other papers, I've been slowly but surely making progress. I have 1 and 3/4 done with 1 and 1/4 to go... And since my first real class (by that I mean one that counts for my MA) doesn't start until Dec 12th this semester, I still have time.

I know this news wasn't all that exciting, but, like I said, nothing really exciting has happened recently. My parents are coming next Friday, though, so I'll be sure to take pictures of our trip to Vienna and other adventures.

Finally summer!

Well, you can finally tell that it's summer here in Germany. This week temps were in the upper 80s for the first time all year! I don't mean to complain when I finally got what I wanted, but did it really have to come during the week when I started teaching English classes in the very upper floor of a building with no air-conditioning, in a room made for about 10 people (there are 13 of us) in which we can't open the windows because the noise from the street is too loud? At least we have a fan. And, while I took on too much for this summer as usual, I am really enjoying the nice weather, and my class is a lot of fun.

But because I have so much to do, I've found myself really noticing how much time is wasted on things like waiting for the bus. Especially when I do something stupid like today and - not paying attention - get into the wrong bus. I noticed it as soon as it turned off of the path of my normal bus, but by the time I got out and started to go back to my bus's stop, I saw mine drive right past me. Lovely. And since it's summer the buses only come once every half an hour. So I had to wait just a bit longer in the hot sun before getting to come back to our cool apartment. I need to enjoy the apartment, as this is the one time of year when I'm actually happy that we get no direct sunlight!

ticket back to the us!

Since Daniel and I won't make it back to the States for Christmas this year, I'd been planning for a while to go back for a longer period of time during the next semester break. After talking with several East-Coasters that I've been wanting to visit for quite some time, I finalized plans and bought my ticket this week! Even though it's 8 months away, I'm already very excited and looking forward to finally seeing DC again, which is where I'll fly into. Then there will be visits to Baltimore, Raleigh, and VA Tech before driving back to the Quad -Cities, where I'll be for about 3 weeks. Maybe Beth and I can even make a trip out to Colorado, who knows?

In not so happy news, last night was the going-away party for everyone from my MA program who's going to be studying abroad next semester. Out of the 8 girls in the MA, only 3 of us will be sticking around Tübingen. I'm certainly going to miss everyone, but am looking forward to restarting our "girls' nights" when everyone is back in the spring. On that note, it's time to get back to work.

End of semester ball

Our end of the semester ball for our dance class was this past Saturday. It was great fun, and our formation went well. For anyone who wants to see it, email me and I'll tell you how you can watch it (we have it as a private video on youtube since people in our class didn't want it posted so the world could see it). Here's a picture of our class right after the formation (we wear "costumes" for the formation and then change back into our ball gowns when we're done).

Classes for my 2nd MA semester are also done now, although the work certainly is not. I still have 3 papers to write, one of which I am feverishly working on because I essentially need to have it done by Friday. I actually have until the Friday after that to turn it in, but starting a week from today I'll be giving intensive English classes every morning from 9-12 for four weeks, just like last summer. And since that means that the afternoons aren't actually free (the courses have to be planned sometime), I need to get the paper done now. So if many of you don't hear from me in the next couple of weeks, that may be why!!