Still having trouble..

The internet still isn't working, but hopefully within the next week it will be..

I've been having an awesome time here, the school is really impressive and dorm life is really fun! The weather however, has been sunny one day then rainy the next.. today it was freezing and its still August!

Internet Troubles..

So I'm here at the school in Germany.. First day of REAL school is tomorrow. So far it's been really awesome, rainy but its not too cold yet. Unfortunatly, some students used the school computers/school internet to download music illegaly so the internet access has been restricted for all students. Im not sure what kind of access I'll have, but hopefully I'll be able to post occasionaly.

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!

I'm Back..

I had a very fun few days, biking, playing tennis, fly fishing and relaxing. It's like a vacation from my vacation, it was my families vacation for the summer, but it was like vacation on steroids for me. On our first fishing expedition, we trolled for a couple hours but all we got was a couple "chubs" -supposedly they're not good for eating- it's funny because in Gulf Arabic "chub" means shut-up. I did however manage to get my knees sunburned, because I didn't bother to put sunscreen on my knees but the other parts that I did remained un-burned.

Driving up to the vacation home was boring as usual.. Something cool that I've gotten to see over the past few years is the recovery the forests have undergone since a massive forest fire decimated huge amounts of the forests in the area.. that was 7 (i think) years ago. Now a lot of the area has been re-planted and stuff but there's hundreds of acres that are just burned trees..

Oh yeah.. something that made me feel stupid was that I forgot my battery charger and battery in Canada. So I couldn't take any pictures with my dSLR.. >_<

A Trip To the Coast

I can't believe that Paul the Octopus was right. Holland lost the World Cup. I honestly think the final game was one of the worst of the whole tournament, there were 14 yellow cards!! Before the winning goal was scored, the ball should've been in Dutch possession because the Spanish goalkeeper hit the ball, but they got a goal kick instead and if they hadn't had the goal kick, they wouldn't have scored, the game was also more of an acting competition, but thats just the way life -or soccer/football is.

A couple days ago my family and I went to the Oregon coast to visit some old friends. We had a fun time there. The coast is really beautiful, also cold! We went for a long walk along a beach and we had lunch on the beach as well. There was supposed to a cove that you could get to during low-tide but it was high-tide so I, being the only adventurous one, managed to get to it, without getting too wet; but I was rewarded with an abandoned and beautiful beach, unfortunately I had decided not to take my camera (a DSLR) but I had a pretty good point and shoot with me.. Here's some of the pictures I got:

Thoughts on a Plane

Today is the 4th of July.. Happy Independence Day. Yay.. [it was actually the 5th.]
Dang. I forgot about Canada day (which was on July 1st) but that shows you how little I consider myself to be Canadian or American for that matter. I'd say I'm mostly American/Canadian by passport only.. which is funny because in some places you can get a passport by owning land or just investing money and besides almost anyone can become an Canadian. Well.. I could ramble all day about citizenship and passports and how I don't know where I'm from.


I'm bored.. this plane ride is like 3 and a half hours long and I really don't feel like sitting and doing nothing. There's internet but checking Facebook or reading articles on Wired or Lifehacker isn't worth $15 and my battery isn't fully charged, so even though I'd have internet for the whole flight, only part of the time would I even be able to use it.  [I thought it'd be cool to write what ever comes to mind and then share those thoughts with the world on my blog.]