Traveling

Sorry for my bad grammar and spelling. It is getting difficult to think in two different languages. I've gone though and edited, but there still might be a couple of problems...

hey y'all!... I've been traveling around quite a bit the past few days. I've learned some interesting things and seen even more things that interest me. Saturday I took a little (4 hour) train ride to Bielefeld, Germany to visit Maria, another fortunate Rotary exchange student from Upstate New York. On my way down I met up with Marie, a french girl who also on exchange in Germany. She lives in Osnabrück, about the southernmost city in my district. We had a wonderful time walking around the market and then grabing a bite to eat at a Cafe. Once in Bielefeld, I learned a lot about public transportation, and of course the city. It is a good sized city, big enough that it would take 40 min. or so with the street cars to get from one side of it to the other. We met up with some other exchange students (all spanish speakers... Mexicans are so cooooooool!!!!), I learned a little spanish, visited the almost non-existant old city (it was bombed out completely), saw a small castle on a hill (visited it too), ate Pizza Hut (YEA!), and watched some rather unterrifying horror movies. As well, I also laughed hystarically at the fact that when one lives in the city.. one gets to know the homeless by name... yea... ''the russian lady lives on so and so corner'', etc. What surprised me was the number of hadicaped people in the city. Now coming from a background where many hadicapped people have graced my presence, even this was a bit unsettling.... and they all come from a hospital in the area, the largest hospital in Germany for the handicapped.

Bearly making it home due to late trains and stupid time schedules, less than 12 hours later I was back on the train in the direction of Bremen with the 11th grade class. I met a lot of new people and had lots of fun. We first went to a museum about Monet and his work as a portrait painter. There were tons of originals from Monet with a few from Degas, Renoir, and Manet for comparisons of the era. Later we went shopping and I even found the statue of the 4 traveling musicians from the Grimms Brother's fairy tale that I watched almost every day on video as a child.

Today, as tired as I was a year ago (especially after throughly not recovering from my two weeks of vacation), I traveled again, only this time with my history class, to Bremerhaven, the port city of Bremen. There we visited a museum about German Emigration. I found it very fascinating to trace the time periods and events that happened at the same time my german Volzer ancestors left Germany. Besides being very happy that everything was in German AND English, I was in for a big surprise when I found a database on the internet. The Museum had kiosks with full membership privalages and I found out information about the Volzers, including ship names, port towns, and current locations for Volzers across the Western world (from Russia to France, to Texas and to Colorado). Wow, what a cool find! I then met up with another exchange student in the lobby (we had talked before hand about meeting) and we hung out for a half an hour before I had to go. That was definately cool.

Yea, so I'm really tired and I have tons to think about. I found a copy of The Jungle, a famous mudraking book in America in the late 1800's in my hostsister's room (in english) and so that kept me occupied during most of my traveling time, almost 20 hours since Satuday! I've had a headache from sore muscles most of the time as well, and it is really cold here, so I am off to snuggle by the fire and watch Nirgendwo in Afrika with my host mom. Tchüss!