A Little of This, A Little of That.

Today is Saturday and I am very tired. Last night I went to a birthday party of another exchanger. I didn't really know what to expect and I don't think that the birthday girl did either. Turns out her mom took it more seriously than we thought and when we got there she had the table all made up with fancy plates and napkins. The that food we had was similar those Pudgy Pies we would cook over fires back home except these were the fancy version sans meat and inside.

On the way home I noticed that magically overnight the trees had shed another layer of leaves onto the ground. Autumn seems to be taking forever. I feel like in Grand Marais fall went a lot quicker than this. Back home it's like one minute the leaves are green, then a startling array of reds and yellows and oranges and then just like that they're all on the ground. Yet here, to me it still looks like summer outside. The leaves on the trees are still a deep green, the sun is shining. Only difference is that it's now getting chillier.

I realize that I haven't been extremely diligent about posting in a while. Oops! Well to begin, my school and the rest of the state of Brandenburg had their two-week fall holiday during the first two weeks of Oktober. For the first week of break my host mom, dad, and I drove 6 hours to an island in Denmark called Römö to visit my host mom's sister and brother-in-law. Römö is populated somewhere close to 95% with Germans so you could pay with Euros and speak German and still be understood everywhere.  The beach on the island Römö was really something else. It went so far out into the ocean it was incredible. You could drive your car way out there. The shells were present in the hundreds, thousands, etc. There were also dead clear jellyfish that washed up on shore the siye of dinner plates. For being called jelly fish they were still pretty firm.

On the second or third day there we went inland to a town that I do not remember the name of. There was a market going on that day (so it must have been Sunday I guess) and there were heaps of straw all over the cobblestone roads from what I assumed was a festival the night before.It was very cool but every time that I heard Danish my brain would try and interpret German and Danish just sounded like crazy.

The next week I was able to go to Berlin a few times before school started again. Berlin really is such an amazing place full of incredible new things, history, opportunities, a vast variety of cultures and languages. Back home in Grand Marais we don't have homeless people and when I first came to Germany I wasn't used to seeing.. Im not quite sure how to phrase it... I'm not used to seeing that level of poverty that is present. I think that in the 80 days I've been here I have already just started to blur it from my vision, ignore it. If I could give an euro to every homeless person I see begging for money, or to every s-bahn musician, or to every young child or pregnant woman that asked me if I speak English, I would be very broke right now. It makes me so sad. I wonder "how did you get here?", "where are your parents?". What is their story? What are their lives like? What is so terrible in this world that they would have to resort to doing this? It makes me feel so selfish for having food in my stomach and wasting my money on stupid stuff like postcards and eis when they sleep in the corners of train stations at night.

On a happier note, I'm an Aunt again! My sister had a baby girl two days ago. Her name is Autumn Brule and I am so excited to see her beautiful face in 9 months (:  I thought that it felt weird when my school had homecoming last weekend. I had that weird feeling like it wasn't actually happening for real because I wasn't like, there. It just felt so weird, like I should be there with my friends with our dresses and stressing over homecoming dates and eyeshadow colors and deciding where to eat dinner. But hearing about my new niece was definately way weirder by a longshot.

In two weeks from now I will be in Paris! I am so excited because Paris will be incredible and I love my other exchangers to death and so it will all-in-all be amazing! I think that this last week I had a little “click” with the German Language. I couldn't tell you exactly how I am better or specifically which words I now know, but it's all of a sudden easier to understand and it just seems more natural to speak. I have also been trying to perfect my German accent when I speak Englisch. I am told that it sounds like a Russian/French/German mix but I think it sounds super cool. I was at a friends house this morning and she was talking to a friend on skype and I pretended to be her German friend and he totally fell for it and it was hilarious(:

That's all!