[Recap] Getting my sea legs

So. I haven't been posting properly like I should have. Good times, good times. The good news is, I am now pushing as hard as I can to not only get caught up but make sure I don't fall behind again. Fortunately, this is basically self-inflicted corporal punishment. It was a pretty serious mistake on my part, but I can guarantee I won't be forgetting this any time soon. My fingers are already crying.

I'll be making one post for each week I missed. Looking over the calendar, that's ... seven weeks.

Here we go.

My arrival in Germany was fairly uneventful. Most of the adrenaline I'd built up about not only leaving the country but the entire continent for the first time burned out about halfway through the plane ride. Sitting really still for eleven hours will do that to you. Even better, I only got about two hours of sleep. It was a rough night.

When we first got off the plane, my first thoughts were pretty groggy, but they went something the lines of, 'Huh. This ain't so different.' Then someone started to speak to me in German. 'Wait wait wait, no, this is very different.' That, combined with the blast of cold air as we left the airport woke me up (Somewhat literally. I was very sleepy.) to the fact that I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Or, Texas. You know what I mean.

After a two-hour bus ride from Frankfurt to Bonn and a short introductory meeting, I met the first member of my host family, the son, Soren (pronounced more like 'Zuren'). Very friendly guy, and he speaks excellent English. A mechanical engineering student, we quickly bonded over making fun of other, less important majors on the way out to my new home. There, I met my host parents, Ulf and Imi. After exchanging greetings, they showed me around the house and my new room, and told me dinner was at seven. I sat down on the bed to check my email, blinked, and woke up around six thirty.

The rest of the week was very quiet, which was very nice. The most exciting thing to happen was the Mayschoss excursion, where we went out to a small wine-producing town and had ourselves a proper German wine-tasting. Personally, I'd never had any sort of alcoholic drink before this, preferring to avoid it for personal reasons. Gotta say, not a fan. That being said, hiking up to a mountaintop ruin and snarfing down a literal pile of delicious meat, bread, and cheese made it more than worth it to suffer through a few sips of fermented grape juice.

*So when I wrote my first blog I thought I was going to do something clever with song titles and blah blah blah. Don't really feel like doing that anymore, so I'm just going to put the name and artist of whatever I'm listening to when I finish writing.

Rocket Rave, Draconiator