Quick update before bed

I am quite settled into my routine here now. I have been in Germany for over one month already! Since I last posted, a few interesting things have happened:

1) I went up to the top of the famous Fernsehturm (TV Tower) at Alexanderplatz to view Berlin from up high.

2) On Friday night I went out to a club with some people from school, and the club had a silent disco room - it was great!  For those of you who don't know what a silent disco is, everyone wears headphones and can choose between different stations to decide which music they want to dance to (while everyone is on the same dance floor). It's hilarious because it's quite common to sing along when you're really into a song, so if you take your headphones off, you hear random words being shout out (off key of course), and everyone is dancing to a different rhythm. Not the best environment for dancing "with" others, but it was great fun. I thought of it like driving my car alone, when I can change the radio station as many times as I like when I'm getting sick of a song or just want to check what is on the other stations ;)

3) I went on a nice bike ride with Barbara and Lutz last weekend, and it was basically a long English lesson on wheels :) 

4) On Sunday morning, I went to Jakob's soccer game and froze my toes off! They lost (and didn't play very well in my all-sports-knowing opinion), but I know he was glad I came to watch.

5) On Monday after school I hopped on the train for a little historical adventure. I visited Checkpoint Charlie, which was the famous crossing between the East and the West during the time of the Berlin wall.

 And then I went to the Mauer Museum (Wall Museum).  It was an overwhelming collection of floor-to-ceiling texts and pictures from the time of the Wall. There were also displays and videos showing the various escape attempts from East to West (people hiding in car hoods, homemade hot air balloons, tunnels, squeezing into speaker boxes, and even a welding machine!). 

6) On Wednesday after school I went to the East Side Gallery, a 1.3 km-long painted stretch of the former Berlin Wall in former East Berlin. It is the largest open-air gallery in the world with over one hundred original mural paintings by artists from around the globe.

In addition to the things listed above, I have been staying busy with school, going to the gym, trying to teach English, and homework. I'm aware this is quite a superficial post (void of any described sensations, perceptions, or opinions), but I am really tired and wanted to be sure and post something before I fall asleep :)

Tomorrow I am taking the train to Erlangen, a city in Southern Germany, to visit my friends Stefan and Sara. Stefan studied at MSU in Mankato all of last year, and Sara was an exchange student there last fall. Stefan is German and Sara is Swedish. I am excited to see a different region of Germany and also visit the university in Erlangen where MSU has an exchange partnership. I'm also excited for the high-speed train :) Getting there is half the fun!

Next weekend I'm going to the Netherlands! I will visit my friend Hylke who studied on exchange at MSU last spring. Therefore, I will also get the chance to see the university in Arnhem (NL) where MSU has an exchange partnership.

Brace yourself: I'm also going to Vienna at the end of November! My dad has a friend who lives there, and he and his wife have generously offered to let me stay with them for a weekend. I have a lot to look forward to :)

School is still pretty hard, but I am learning so much every day. The content moves very fast! I am proud of how far I have already come, and I still have 6 weeks of classes left.

I've also been trying my best to research my ancestry and piece together my family tree. It turns out that I have great-great grandparents on both my mom's and my dad's side of the family who were born in Germany! If really want to know more, but I'm waiting on some responses from people (attention: Grampa and Dad!).

Thank you so much for following my adventure. I am going to bed now. I love sleeping :)  Gute Nacht.