A shade of German: lets do a catch up then i'll move on hey??

Having travelled 7 hours in 'Autobahn' revitalisation (i.e. freeway construction) induced traffic from Berlin, I arrived slightly erratic last night in Cologne. Am currently here on the great Rhein river to undertake an Intership at the Administrative Court of Cologne (and neighbouring suburbs!).

Had a fantastic first day, if a bit of an information overload - but before we go into that I think somewhat of a CATCH up of the last um... 2 months (oops!) is necessary.

I think where we left off was Stockholm ja??

So in the middle of may Jeremy and I and his parents, Louise and Reg (who came to visit for the occasion) made the long trip (9 hours in the car!) from Berlin down to South west Germany - Saarland (best name for a state ever) - for the lovely wedding of the daughter of an old friend of Louise's.

Was really great fun, we were slight celebrities at the reception - everyone wanted to meet us and exclaimed about our German Language ability.

From Saarland (close to french border) we managed a day trip to Luxembourg City, in Luxembourg (um obviously!). The city was quite grand and very clean. It gave the impression of wealth, however i later met an exchange student originally from Luxembourg and he explained that they don't have any universities there which I thought was quite sad for a country!

The next weekend (not a sleep in in sight!) Jeremy and I signed up for a student trip organised by our uni down the Rhein river to two of the oldest cities in the country - Koblenz and Trier. Both were Roman-founded military cities and hence have an extensive rich history.

The highlight though really was all the friends we made on the trip, people from Taiwan, Italy, Georgia, US, Austria, Spain, China and more. Our two leaders from the exchange office at uni too were fantastic and there was a lovely group atmosphere - especially when people (jeremy and I included) were running seriously short for time to make the train home (we were admiring Karl Marx's birthhouse on the otherside of the city!) half the group waitd for us at the entrance to the station.

Now with semester over and the summer holidays in full swing many of our friends have gone home, but hopefully we'll visit a few in the next few months.

A day trip to Dresden with Stacey, Matt (both exchange students from our German Faculty at Monash uni) and Veronika (stacey's housemate) occurred sometime in June too if I can remember clearly... great warm weather. Dresden is such a grand city, I'd been last time I was in Germany, about 4 years ago now but was more than happy to return.

After Dresden were exams and our last classes :(. They were a bit sad as I'd grown to really enjoy some. After a semester you get to know the people (who regularly turn up!) quite well. My favourite would have to be my linguistics class where our lecturer called us all by our last names - i.e I was Frau Thompson - but managed to make the class very funny and witty. A group of us always had lunch together afterwards and I really made my first german friends during those lunch hours!

After end of semester Jeremy, Marion (visiting from Melbourne!) our Friend Michelle and I ran off to Hamburg for two days to check out the biggest harbour in Europe (or something similar - was huge!). Along with a world reknown Harbour though, Hamburg also has an enormous prostitution quarter of the city. I found it incredibly confronting, women were literally chasing men down the street to find customers. We three girls created a bit of a fort around Jeremy, it's a bit hilarious now but was quite unbelievable at the time.

Following those two days an old friend, (well known to my family!) Fanny joined Jeremy, Marion and I in Berlin and we decorated the apartment for long afternoon Birthday lunch. The tricksters took me out to breakfast (!!) then lots of friends from different places dropped in to share falafels in bread, champagne and ice cream cake.

Afterwards a group of us headed down to Potsdamer Platz, where they show the original version (that means without German dubbing!) of current movies, and we saw the latest Harry Potter movie - great in my opinion! Michelle was of the opinion that it was a tad slow, however I only realised halfway through that I'd actually read the book (!) and so found the whole movie rather enlightening.

Here are some photos of the mentioned events and trips - shall continue story of Prague trip in the next entry.

love! xx