It's Been A While

I've been a bit busy.

I mean extraordinarily busy. I've gotten less sleep per night this week than probably any stretch in my life, which includes road trips, finals weeks, weeks leading up to finals weeks (which in my case are always a lot worst, at least sleep-wise), and even the week of my play this year. That's the only one that comes close, but I think I have it beat.

Rest assured that it is a very, very good thing.

A lot of the students have been getting done with their studies so there have been all sorts of end of semester celebrations and going away parties, which have kept me out late every night, and work has kept me up early every morning.

I was drafting a blog post to attack about a week's worth of my absence, but it has strangely gone missing, and with it all of my work, so I will now post (with some embellishment and explanation for those less familiar) a recap of two weekends ago, when I was in Ludwigsburg, where I spent three months during summer 2005. (It comes almost directly from an e-mail I sent to my mother, so if it's a little disconnected or strangely personal and familiar in tone, you now know why.) This will hopefully kick off a series of (hopefully more common) shorter blog posts, which (why didn't I think of this before!) will be a lot more manageable for both author and reader alike.

It was the most comfortable weekend I've had in recent memory. I got in Friday afternoon and went right down to the school, where Geli and her friends were still gathered following a champagne reception in honor of their final tests being finished that same day. We went back to see the family and walked around the town for a little bit, and Geli had dance lessons in the evening, so I was able to sit and talk with the family, especially Manfred, Geli's dad, about all sorts of things. When Geli got back, we then spent the evening with a number of Geli's friends, most of whom I could remember, celebrating their effectual graduation and watching a crazy soccer game. The game went through half an hour of overtime and then penalty kicks thereafter, so it was almost midnight by the time they were done; we ended up scratching the plans we had to go to a club in Stuttgart afterwards when everyone appeared fairly drowsy by that time, not the least of which was I, who had left Vienna shortly before 7 that morning for 8 hours on the train.

Saturday we slept in a bit, then met up with Simon, Geli's boyfriend of a couple years, and a couple of her friends from the night before to drive out to a mountain where there was a high ropes course. While telling me on Friday about the plans, Geli described the ropes and platforms high up in the trees, where you're dangling fifty feet in the air with just a harness to support you, when she turns to me and says, "You don't have a fear of hens, do you?"

I was a bit confused and asked, "Is that even a fear?"

She just kind of looked at me blankly and said, "Yeah, for sure."

We were both kind of confused. I could only imagine how hens figured into the high ropes course. I saw a bunch of people with helmets and harnesses swinging through trees and running around on the forest floor being chased by crazy German chickens. "Fear of hens?" I asked her again.

She laughed out loud. "No," she explained, "fear of heights." The word for fear of heights (Höhenfurcht) is very similar to the made-up word for fear of hens (Hühnerfurcht). So it kind of loses a bit in translation, but she and her friends kept making wisecracks about it the whole afternoon, so it was pretty memorable.

I had done a few crazy things on a high ropes course for the LeaderQuest program at the U, so once I was reassured of the security of my harness and carabiners, I was again free of any latent fear of heights I may have adopted from my dad. It was pretty fun once we got up to the more challenging courses. The course was pleasent in the shade and not extraordinarily tiring, though some of the stations could be strenuous, both physically and, despite my confidence, in coping with the heights. The most difficult station was one where you had to clip your harness to a rope, swing down and grab another rope, hang there and transfer your clips to the second rope, and then swing over to the opposite platform. I was luckily the last of the five of us, so I had the opportunity to learn from everyone else's mistakes.

We accidentally stayed too long, not having our cell phones for clocks up in the trees, and ended up having to scramble to try to get in the rest of our plans for the evening. Geli, Simon, and I went to meet up with even more of her friends I had known from '05 at a Biergarten where we had gone on my second day in Ludwigsburg (I still remember it very clearly) and we just visited and watched the soccer game, another upset in overtime. When ordering one of my drinks, the barkeep gave me a scratch-off game coaster, with which I won another half liter free. I ended up talking with Nico, one of the guys we had gone to Munich with right at the end of school, about his CAD work for Mercedes. He said he's going to do a little bit of training at their plant in Tuscaloosa and I couldn't come up with where that was. I took some pictures and we headed out for the night.

From back and left to front and right, Simon, Winnie (a student who spent a year in Michigan), Geli, and Nico

Sunday morning Geli had tennis so we said our goodbyes a bit early, then Marina and Manfred took me into church (which had been rennovated since I was there last, the pews replaced with seats and the walls pulled in a bit to make the whole space a lot smaller, though it is now shoulder-to-shoulder instead of being sparsely half-filled) and through the palace gardens. Marina incidentally made my favorite Swabian dish (Maultaschen) for lunch, and I also gave them the bottle of Viennese wine I had brought as a gift. It didn't come close to making up for their generosity, though, since besides putting me up and feeding me they paid for my public transportation, the admission to the ropes course and palace gardens, drove me around and back to down to Stuttgart that afternoon, and paid for anything else that they could. I had told them that I was disappointed to find there were no Laugen-bread rolls in Vienna and Marina said that was because they were a Swabian specialty, and that she would buy me some to take with for the ride back. After walking around the pedestrian center of Stuttgart for a little bit, they took me to the train depot, and when I tried to wave off Marina's offer of buying me the rolls, she insisted, and so I asked her to just buy a couple. She just shook her head and brought back seven, so they lasted me until Tuesday. Not that I minded...

Plans are to cook something mysterious but sweet with our IAESTE reception officers tomorrow night, but I'm hoping to update everyone on how my very busy last week went within the next couple days, and I still have some general posts on the soccer championship (which Spain unfortunately won over Germany on Sunday) and the work I'm doing here. Not to mention that I have a lot of traveling planned for July, and Vienna Weekend (with over 200 IAESTE affiliates from around the world signed up) will be taking place this upcoming weekend.

Thank you for all the comments, e-mails, and Facebook notes I'm receiving. I do my best to stay up with private correspondence first and foremost, and I'd really love to hear from all of you, even just to drop in a note every once and a while.

Bis dann!