phew.

Well, that was exciting.

All the groups are home (more or less without incident), I'm back in Eisleben for a quiet little week of recuperation, and spring has come! [knock on wood]. Yep, that's right, although it snowed less than two weeks ago, I've been running around in shirt sleeves and skirts for the last three days. Well, running around may be an exaggeration. I've been wearing them. I haven't been running anywhere, and really haven't left my apartment much except to fraternize with my host family in the garden. I can't tell you how excited I am. I'm a little mad at myself for not sending more of my bulky warm clothes home with my parents, but whatever. It's like, 12*C!! Good times.

Hokay... Catch up.

Erfurt is pretty much my favorite place on earth right now. Alright, that's an exaggeration, but it was the only place I got to breathe for the last month, and so I have a little bit of an attachment. It's also just a cool place - big enough that stuff is going on, but very laid-back at the same time. Additionally, it has the best street art/graffiti I've ever seen. I actually "collected" it, it was so cool. Dang, I need to get that up on flickr.

With the UniLu group I got to go to Weimar, a place that everyone in this region raves about. It's been a center of German culture, art, and intellectual thought for a long long time, and in many ways is considered the "heart" of Germany. Buchenwald, a Nazi and later Soviet work camp, is just outside the city walls, which means less to us, maybe, than it does to Germans. It was a shock to many people, after the war, that such a thing was happening so close to an important city. In reality, much of that shock was probably about being forced to look at the things they had been ignoring for such a long time, and its proximity to Weimar was just the salt in the wound. Buchenwald was not a death camp in the way that Auschwitz was, and housed more political prisoners and dissidents (including Ernst Thälman and Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Elie Wiesel was also here, but not because of politics) and than Jews. I feel I need to write much, much more about the experience of going there, but it may be better suited for another post.

I finally got to spend an afternoon in Berlin, again with UniLu, but I still haven't gotten to see the things I wanted to go back for. Mostly, right now, I want to go to the Käthe Kollwitz Museum. But of course I still have time.

Travel plans: Prague/Dresden and Italy are pretty much certain, but I need to talk to Franzi and Jon about when. I could go to Sweeden with some people from the JG and Scott, but I don't really have any particular interest in going, and I think I'd rather spend my money seeing something I'm dying to see. Will invited me to Spain, but that'll be a matter of when he could host me. I'm currently toying with the idea of going to Barcelona and Paris, then to Ireland, and flying back. Dang I wanna go to Ireland so bad. Problem is that I don't know anyone there, and I really don't want to go by myself.

The job with BSC is definite. I'll be getting my contract in the mail soon, and then I suppose it'll be time to look for a plane ticket? Man, that's weird. I may have mentioned before that I have a Rosetta Stone program for Latin American Spanish, or maybe not. Either way, I do have one, and I've been feverishly trying to learn enough phrases to not sound like an ass when I show up on the border. It's coming along, only very very slowly.

Anyway, I've decided to stay home for the summer, unless something pretty serious changes. It's just too expensive to fly back here for two more months of wasting my time. If I'm in the states, I don't have to pay rent, I could maybe earn some money, and at the very least, I'm blessed with friends who enjoy having fun for free, something that doesn't work out real well here. Best case scenario, I can split my time between the mountains and the beach and I won't get sunburned too bad. Also, re-acclimating to heat is sounding pretty pretty good right now. The prospect of leaving 18*C for a desert is not so great if you ask me.