A Long Weekend..Well Sort Of.

So this is my first attempt at changing what/how I'm going to be writing/posting things here on my blog.. Right now it's Sunday, about 3PM. I'm in the school hall/auditorium doing sound for a group of my friends that are going to be preforming with a famous Korean Saxophonist tonight.. So far this weekend has been good.. we had home-basketball games on Friday/Saturday.

 Friday night I was at the school watching basketball and helping Sono-Libero (a student literary magazine) with one of their fundraiser coffeehouses, after hanging around for a while, me and about 6 other people decided to check out a concert at the nearby German High-school.. We didn't really crash it because they did invite BFA to come, but we ended up being the only people to attend. One of the bands was "Yournextboyfriend", they were a punkish/hard rock band, sounded somewhat like Greenday or something similar, mostly predictable pop-rock sounding stuff, but the singer did throw in some growls and they had some metalish sounding parts too, all their songs were in English.. They weren't that bad.. The next performance was by "DJ Slayback, he did some cool mixes of mostly Pop stuff.. but nothing too special, it was still fun.

Saturday wasn't very interesting either, woke up pretty late, had breakfast and biked down to school for practice.. Not much else.. did some homework and went to bed.

Today has been good so far.. this morning, instead of going to church in town with everyone else, me and another sophomore, Max, went to a German church called G5, I liked it A LOT more than the normal church that pretty much all the BFA people go to. Even though I'm only in German 1 and I've only been in it for like 5ish months or so, I was surprised by how much of the service I could understand. What was really nice was that there was headphones with someone translating the sermon. I really wanna go back there.. it was really cool because on the walls either side of the stage they had "Wilkommen Zuhausen" which means "Welcome Home". Well that has been my Sunday so far.. hopefully I can find some time to do my homework and call my parents!

10PM Sunday:
Well it's all over now, I'm super tired and I have a headache, but the whole night went really well and I'm glad I got to help with it. I'm finishing an English paper right now, but after that I'm going to rest and hopefully I survive Monday.

-Zach

--Didn't end up as short as I thought it would be.. :P

Sorry For the Wait?

Sorry for the long wait, hopefully someone out there actually cares that I haven't posted in awhile. :) But wow. It's really been a long time since I've posted anything. I've finally found time to write, my homework is done and I am in the mood to write! A lot has happened in the past two months! It really feels like it's only been a couple of weeks. I'm finally adjusted to the schedule and flow of the school and dorm life, it hasn't been too hard.. but lots of stuff has been going on. It's really hard to be bored here! There's always something to be doing, or something that you could participate in.

I really don't know where to start.. For one thing, my schedule is reealy different than last year.. I don't stay up till 2AM or sleep in. Bedtime is officially 10:30 for Underclassmen.. I'm usually in bed by then. Some nights I have so much homework I'm up till 12. I wake up at about 7, 6:45 or so on Fridays because I help with sound at chapel. School starts at 8:50 and ends at 3:50. That's a typical day at school..

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Here today, gone tomorrow.

So today I started the real journey, right now I'm on a plane over the British Isles; its another hour or so till we reach Franfurt.. from there we'll rent a car and drive about two hours to Ludwigsburg, Germany where we'll be staying with some friends for a couple days, then we drive another two hours to Kandern, Germany -BFA. I found out what dorm i'll be in, it's called "Maugenhard". Unlike most of the other dorms, it's in the town/village of Kandern and it's about a kilometer (about half a mile) away from the school itself.

Todays plan is fly from Detroit to Frankfurt, drive 2 hours from Frankfurt to Ludwigsburg.

This plane ride (Detroit-Frankfurt) has been not bad, pretty empty so I get two seats to myself. The food was okay.. it was a lactose-free one which for some reason means it has to be healthy or something, the main course was a vegetable dish of some-sort, with rice and instead of a brownie I got fruit, no bread, just a rice cake..  I'm not against healthy food or anything, but the differences are interesting. The only sad part about this flight was saying goodbye to my Grandparents and my Sisters.

Breakfast is being served now, it's 6:46(AM) in Germany and 12:46(AM) in Canada. So far I've watched  "Mr. Fantastic Fox" and "Iron Man 2" I honestly don't know why I watched Iron Man 2 again.. Mr. Fantastic Fox was pretty good, exceptional as far as stop motion goes. The story was pretty good.. it reminded me of Chicken Run in some ways. Yippe yay.. it looks like breakfast is a vegetarian breakfast burrito/tortilla with a couple pieces of mellon and applesauce. What?! I get like 3 pieces of mellon and my Dad gets strawberries and kiwi?! How do they have milk in them? Haha -the wrapper on my burrito thing has three different "special meal things, VGML-Vegan Vegetarian Meal, VLML-Western Vegetarian Meal and NLML-Non Lactose Meal. Apparently western vegetarians aren't true vegetarians.

The other funny thing is, everyone addresses me in German.. like the guy was offering me coffee and then even when I replied in English, he asked if I wanted sugar or milk in German, same thing happened when we were in Switzerland. It'll be interesting when I get to Passport control because I'm entering Germany on my Swiss passport (because I can stay unlimitedly because even though Switzerland isn't in the EU, they allow Swiss citizens to have the same rights as an EU citizen) hopefully they won't question my Swissness because I don't speak German.
So I just had to show him my passport.. he said thank you, have a nice day and I just said "Danke" -thanks- back.

More, after the break:

Lots of things going on..

So this last week I did a lot.. It was my last week here in beautiful Oregon. First we went to the Art Gallery in Portland, one of their main exhibits was the entire book of Genesis (from the Bible) in graphic novel form.. I don't want to say "comic book" because it's more illustrated than cartoonish.. It really portrays the book of Genesis without leaving anything out.

On our way to the gallery we passed an organic food market which is where we had a very tasty lunch, after that we just walked around Portland.. we went to the river, then to a main square. Something totally different was passing this group of 20somethings sitting on the sidewalk smoking weed, right in downtown Portland with lots of people around.. You'd be executed or jailed/deported if you were caught even possessing drugs in the UAE. Portland is a very interesting and fun city.. Im sure it has "dangerous" spots.. but from what I've seen it's cool!