Been a long time

Hi everyone,

I've been sort of M.I.A. for almost 5 months now- Here's a rundown of what I've been up to since July:

I spent my first two weeks at home without a job. So, I did a lot of sitting at home depressed and trying to figure out what I was going to do with myself... I drove myself a little crazy.

Then I went out to Seattle for 2 weeks to visit my good friend Jeremy (some of you met him when he came to visit me in Cottbus). We went backpacking and to a 3-day outdoor concert in Portland, Oregon. We also explored Portland a bit, because at that time I planned on moving there. I have since changed my mind-- to be explained shortly...

Once I got back, as many of you did, I heard about what happened to Juliane Kraus. Though I didn't get to know Juliane as well as I did some others last year, the news of her passing away was really difficult for me to cope with. She was one of the first people to go out of her way to greet me and talk to me when I first arrived. She was very cool, and very talented, and much too young. My heart especially goes out to all of you who were close to her.

It was around this same time that I started working... a ton- generally between 50 and 60 hours a week. Since August, I've been working part-time at a garden center in my hometown where I have worked off and on since I was 16, and full-time for General Electric (GE) Money as a customer service representative.

I hate working for GE. It is a huge corporation where no one really knows anyone, and all I do is sit at a desk for 8 hours and pick up the phone over and over. No one who calls me is happy. I get yelled at a lot. Then I'm supposed to sell this product at the end of the call that I think is a rip-off. The building has almost no windows. Luckily, yesterday, I quit that job.

I quit, because I just recently got a job for a local company called Boston Stoker. They are a Dayton-based chain of coffee/cigar shops. Starting December 3rd I will be a barista/manager trainee, and I couldn't be more excited.

Also, I've recently begun dating my best friend. His name is Dan.

So, because of Dan and this new job that I think I'll love, and my family and other friends, I've decided against running off to Oregon. I'm very happy with this decision.

I know I'm not doing things that obviously seem to be related to my background, but I'm hoping to use what I've learned in more indirect ways- Maybe I'll get to speak German with people from the German company that Boston Stoker deals with. I'll use my teaching methods later on when I'm training new employees at work. Who knows what else.

Although I've settled in here, I do miss a lot of people. I miss teaching. And I miss hearing German. I wish I could just come visit for a couple of weeks and teach classes and live with my roommate again. With my new job, I will be working closer to 40 hours a week, and I hope to use my new-found free time in part to get back in touch with a number of you reading this- so watch for email and snail mail and the like. And please feel free to drop me a line any time. Take care, and check my blog for updates about once a month or so.

Later!

Meghan

P.S.- My pictures are from my trip to Washington and a Halloween party I went to- the guys in the costumes are Dan (as Rastafarian Frankenstein) and Mick (as an American Gladiator, which is a t.v. show we all watched as kids)... I don't actually know the other guy, but he had the best costume there.

Also, Thanksgiving is this week- so for anyone who would like to celebrate here's a link for the recipe for my favorite dish for the holiday- you'll have to make some adjustments to make it over there, but it's definitely worth a try-

Green Bean Casserole:
http://www.campbellkitchen.com/recipedetail.aspx?recipeId=24099

Here's just a few pictures from spring break (Hamburg, Flensburg and Denmark)...about to go to bed, so I'll write about them later and add pictures from Prague.

Happy Easter

Since I last updated, Dan came to visit, the weather was nice for about a week, our new roommate moved in, and my spring break started.

Dan flew into Frankfurt and I met him there for a long weekend, and it was really nice for the most part. It rained quite a bit, but we still managed to take in a play, go to the Frankfurt zoo, and walk through the weekly flea market along the Main river among other things. Also, Dan took a number of "guerrilla photos" of me, in which he tried to snap the picture before I had the chance to notice and hide. For the most part I was able to avoid the camera, but, as you can see, not in the elevator filled with mirrors. The picture of the city was taken from a cafe on the top of a high-rise building.

While the warm weather lasted, I rode my bike a lot, started jogging again, and began bleaching my hair out. It's not quite blond yet, but not far from it.

Our new roommate, Ayhan, is really nice. But the poor guy must think that moving in here was a mistake. The first day he moved in our drains got clogged and water leaked all over the kitchen. And then our landlord also told us not to use the shower, because water was leaking over the side and through the floor and then the ceiling of our downstairs neighbor's apartment. So he went to the home improvement store and bought this vinyl stuff which we caulked to the side of the tub where the old caulk had come off...it looks awful, smells weird and within a week there's going to be all sorts of mold behind that thing...but at least we can shower temporarily.

Kristin, Adrian and I colored Easter eggs today after Kristin's parents took us out to eat Chinese. As for the rest of my spring break, I'm going to be job hunting/applying and traveling. I'm headed up to Flensburg on the Baltic Sea and then Prague, and I'm really excited about both of those. I realized the other day that I only have three months left, and that I had better hurry up and go visit as many places as I can afford. Some other definite plans I have are to Munich and Salzburg when my parents are here at the end of the month (!) and Warsaw with one of the teachers at my school.

Hope you all have a good Easter! Take care, I'll update this after I get back from Prague.

Garden Project

Kristin and I have extensive plans- blue prints and all- for a flower/herb bed. I'm using some serious Wengerlawn skills (we're propagating ground cover), we already started most of the seeds inside, and we've been stealing rocks and bricks for a couple of weeks. I'll post more about this later once it's farther along.

London and Berlin

Fulbright set us up in a very nice hotel for the annual conference. But for most people, the set up wasn't exactly ideal though, because the rooms must be for couples- the doors to the bathroom and shower were see-through, and in most rooms there was only one bed, or two beds pushed together. So, most people were spooning with someone they didn't know, and one person would have to leave the room when the other wanted to go to the bathroom or shower. Fortunately, my roommate never showed-- I hope she's ok and all that...BUT...I was more than happy to have a room with an awesome view (2nd and 3rd pictures) to myself. The one of me on the bear looks all weird, cos it came out blurry, so I just changed the pixels to make it look neat- that looked better than blurry-- I was promptly reprimanded by an old man for climbing on this bear-- but not before we got a couple of pictures. Finally, the last picture is in front of the Tower Bridge in London-- I took this picture because mom requested that I actually be in some of my pictures. You can't really tell, but I'm getting pretty rained on in this one. It was taken right before I had 15$ fish and chips for lunch (with nothing to drink)...London is expensive. But it was good to visit my friend Kyle from high school. This weekend Dan is coming to visit! So I'm making the trip down to Frankfurt again...should be fun....pictures and stories about that in the next posting. Take care!

English Camp!

I spent last week in Burg teaching 6th graders at an English camp. The other teachers told me that Burg is about the size of Berlin, but basically all country. There's a 25km bike trail between there and Cottbus, so I think my roommate, Kristin, and I are going to rent bikes and ride out there and camp when it gets warm.

So at the top are some thatched-roof houses, which this area is kind of known for. The next picture is of some students walking out to the hedge maze, which the following two pictures are of. Then at the bottom, take note of the difference between the boys and the girls at the dance on the last night.

I got a new camera and have a lot of cool things coming up (including London next weekend!), so I'll be updating more often. Take care!

Frankfurt, Film Fest, Christmas Decorating

Been a while since I updated this, so there's a lot missing, but I'll try not to ramble for too long. The pictures are chronologically backwards.

First is my christmas tree. I went out and bought it yesterday. It's a live tree-still in a container, so it's heavy, and I got some funny looks hauling that thing back to my house...more funny looks than normal. I decorated it with Kristin's extra ornaments, stuff I found outside, things I cut out of magazines, then I got a strand of lights for it....oh...and I topped it with a Cottbus Film Festival pyramid...it's cute.

Second is a picture of the pavement during the week of the film festival. They painted these lines all over the city, and you could follow them to the various theaters where the movies were playing. They also changed a number of light bulbs in the city to blue, which I guess is tradition. I ended up seeing 12 movies during the festival. I liked 1. There were some others that were okay, but the only one I really liked was called The Wedding Chest. It won the audience prize at the end too.

The next 6 pictures are of my last hour or so in Frankfurt. The pictures look exactly like it looked that day. The sky was really dark gray, then the sun came out and made it look really eerie.

The next is the Frankfurt main train station. It's a good-lookin' train station.

The next pic is of the only building in Frankfurt that was built by a Japanese company. It's also the only building in Frankfurt that's earthquake proof....which wouldn't do it much good in an earthquake considering the high rise buildings surrounding it would probably tumble down on top of it.

Look close at the next picture, and you might be able to tell that most of that building is actually a picture. They are doing construction on that building, which isn't particularly attractive, so they blow up a big picture of the building and put it out front...clever, eh? We saw them do that in Berlin to. I like it.

Then an opera house.

Then a cool statue.

Then a statue of justice. Notice that she doesn't have a blindfold on. This was intentional, because she faces the townhall, and it was supposedly so she could keep an eye on the lawmakers....not because Germans don't believe that justice should be blind.

Next is the only wooden house that survived WWII. All of the houses in this area used to be so close together that people could basically reach out and shake hands, so they knew that if any part of this area was bombed that fire would spread to all of the houses. So they dug tunnels between all the houses, and the plan if bombed was to run through these tunnels to this designated house, where they would pump water from the Main River onto it. It worked. Lots of people were saved as a result. I'm not sure what their plan was if that house had been directly hit.

The final two are of the Frankfurt skyline by day and night. It was strange to see high rise buildings; that seems so un-European. But our tour guide explained that Frankfurt has these buildings for a few reasons. For one, the city can't expand outward, because it's bordered by mounatins on one side, and on the other sides by cities they haven't been able to annex- so they have to expand upward. Additionally, Frankfurt has been funded by a lot of private investors who want these sorts of buildings for prestige and what not. There's also a law here that says that all offices here have to at least one window to the outside.

I had a really good time in Frankfurt. It was good to meet up with OU alum and our tour guide was great. It was also good just to get out of Cottbus for a weekend.

For Thanksgiving I had a traditional Polish meal made by my friend Monika. The Christmas markets have begun. I went to the one here in Cottbus, and I was hoping there would be ornaments, but they mostly just had glühwein...a hot wine that they make for the holidays. But I'm going to Dresden's Christmas market with Monika and a teacher, and I've heard the market there is much much better.

That's plenty for now. Thanks for the comments, and hope everyone is doing well!