It's Time to Start Traveling

After being in Bonn for three weeks, I'm beginning to feel like I have the whole system down. I can figure out when its faster to take the subway or the train, and how to tell which of the two bus stops I need to be at so I don't end up going in the opposite direction, and most importantly, I can wander around the city to places I've never been to before and manage to find my way back to familiar territory. Now that I've established some roots, I believe I am ready to venture out into other parts of Germany and Europe.

For this coming weekend, some of us have planned a trip to visit Amsterdam. I have similar feelings for my first trip out of Bonn as I did for when I left the US, just not as strong. We haven't made any plans yet aside from where we are staying and how we are getting there, so I suppose I'll put some time into planning during this week.

Other than trying to figure out what we will be doing over future weekends, much of my time has been spent hanging around Bonn with the other AIB students, as well as spending time with my family. Most days we have class until early afternoon, and then I work on my homework until around dinnertime so that when I come home I can talk to my host parents and brother for hours rather than have to worry about doing more homework. A couple of times this past week, my host mom and brother have spent some time after dinner teaching me how to play songs on the piano. They have a Steinway medium grand piano, and are both incredibly good at playing it, so it has been fun to learn from them. My host family is pretty awesome, honestly. They all have the same sort of sarcastic and dry sense of humor that I have, so we have a good time every evening at dinner cracking jokes and whatnot.

I learned last weekend that my host sister learned to unicycle about 15 years ago, and that my family still had the unicycle. After two weeks of not being able to ride, I was going through withdrawal, and so it was great news that I now had access to a 15 year old unicycle that I could ride to my hearts content. On Wednesday I rode it from the Hauptbahnhof to the AIB and received more smiles from the locals than I had in the prior two and a half weeks combined.