Fear not, for I am back. I hope that you are sitting in a comfortable seat, for I should have quite a bit to write here, but it really is just up to my motivation. Right now I just really want to eat, so I will try my best not to summarize too much.

Last weekend in Horba was quite nice, and I spent time working on the parking place again, and moving around huge rocks. Not quite as much fun as it seems, but Jörg, Daniela's dad, actually started to ask my advice about things, and for once I was able to start using words instead of using wildly insane hand gestures.

On Monday was my first day of classes, but I only had one class, archaeology. It seems like it will be interesting, but it is hard to tell from just the lecture. One cool thing is we will go to Berlin for the class and go on a nice tour of something. The next day I had my new German language course that is actually going to teach me grammar. The gigantic drawback with the program is that it starts at 7:30 a.m. On a scale of coolness, this is certainly horrible. In fact, Tuesdays in general really suck a lot. I am essentially busy from 7:30am-9:00pm. Not cool. Anyway, after German I have geology with a professor that seems interesting (he is a hydrogeologist so I guess levels of excitments are quite low in his world. Seriously he gets his kicks from water, which though essential to life, is not what I would call something to write home about). He did manage to bad mouth America for about five minutes saying that we couldn't pay for disaster relieve. He even spoke with me after class about how Chicago is polluting Lake Michigan, and I quite sagely corrected him with the information that it is the bastards in Milwaukee. I am having trouble remembering my schedule after this, but I believe I had Stratigies for the Conservation and Preservation of Natural and Cultural Landscapes. Or in short, my Iraq class. Indeed the entire class is about a people known as the "Marsh Arabs" which were a culturally secluded group from the marshy area around Basra, Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers come together, that had been untouched from the outside world for 2,000 years. This all changed during the Iraq-Iran war in the '80's, and now the people are dispersed all over Iraq, and their culture, language, and way of life is supposed to vanish within the next twenty years. Our job in the class is to talk about how we could save it, and preserve part of these peoples heritage, and the coolest part of all is our teacher wants us to go to Iraq and visit the area. But, as he mildly put it, "I believe that it might be a problem, since I guess there is still some conflict their, and apparently everything is blown up." This class was followed by Intercultural Communication, which is a funny class to take since everyday I have to interculturally communicate with the people in my program that are from all over the world. I think I will just have to have some beers with people in my class instead. At the end of the day, I have a "coaching" class and from what I understand of it, I will basically just suck up to the program director by showing up.

On Wednesday, I was really bored. I had just two classes, Introduction to Culture, because evidently I have none already, and World Heritage and the Theory of Culture, which they claim are different classes. The first was held in a lecture hall that is normally designed for about 50 people, but around 200 showed up. One even brought a dog. Not like a seeing eye dog, or anything like that, just you know, your average Fido. The class is open to people other than WHS students, so all these Germans were there, but they may divide the class, so that we can actually see the front of the room. The other class was more of the same, but more detailed, and sounds a lot more interesting, and is more about what culture means to preserving world heritage. It was a very non-eventful day, and I felt so exhausted, even though the previous day was longer, yet I still got my party on that night, and as it was the official partay evening for my university, Daniela went out to see what was going down. We ended up in town at a place called Stuk, along with Ona from Colombia and Eche from Turkey, and a German guy. There was some live jazz music, and it was fun.

The next morning sucked, since I had only gotten about four hours of sleep and I stumbled into my language class five minutes late. Luckily, I was not the only one, and there was a steady trickle after me. The teacher also thinks my German is really good because I can kind of speak it, but she decided that it would be a good idea to tell the class that I speak perfect German, which is about as far from the truth as one can get. I took a very badly needed nap after this, then went to some other class that I cannot remember now. After this I had an inane tour of the library, then I was off to Archetecture II, not to be confused with the first one, which we haven't taken. That night was the official international student welcome, with champagne, African singers, Sorbish dancers (the Sorbians are an ethnic minority from the Cottbus, or as they say Chosebuz region, and speak a dialect of Polish) followed by free food and drinks.

It has been an exciting week and I have been extremely busy, and I will probably update again on Monday..............