I am not good at coming up with titles

Whew, a lot of exciting stuff has happened since the last time I posted! The two big things: I had my first language class on Saturday morning, and I had my first cooking class on Monday night.

Language class: it's pretty much an integration class, so that all us newbies can integrate into the German culture. Fortunately, that means that everyone speaks fairly good German, so I think it will be right on my level. Also, I am the only American and the only native English speaker. Here are the native countries of the people in my class (excluding me): Argentina, the Ukraine, Russia (x2), Dominican Republic, Brazil, Romania, Japan. It's pretty cool though, because that means that we won't all just lapse into speaking English. And there are two other aupairs in the class! Finally! The Dominican Republican (is that right? I don't care) and the Ukrainian girls are aupairs, in Giengen and Sontheim, which are both nearby towns. They both said that they don't know any other aupairs here, but I found out later that Katja (the Ukrainian one) met a French aupair who lives in Heidenheim. Anyway, after class ended I walked around Heidenheim a little bit with Katja. We were going to ask Dianny (the Dominican one) to come with us, but she had already left. There was a market set up on the pedestrian zone so we walked around there for a while. It had mostly tacky stuff, but there was a crepes stand, so of course we ate crepes! The market was PACKED though. The stands were all set up in front of the stores so there was less room to walk than usual, but there were also a gazillion people there. And no one was polite and said "Excuse me" or anything, they all just pushed right through. Anyway, a little later Stephanie came into the city to go to the craft market which was up in the castle, so she picked us up and we went with her. That market was actually really nice. There were a lot of nice craft things, and I bought a turtle made out of bread. (That should not have been one sentence; those two things are unrelated.) I also bought some peppermint candies, which on the bag are called "peppermint pillows", hahaha.

Cooking course: Monday was the first time for that, but it starts at a really inconvenient time. As I'm sure I've said before, the buses here suck. So, one leaves at 6:15 and arrives at 6:40 for my class that starts at 6:30...which is no good. I think I'll prob have to take that from now on, but Stefan said that today I should be on time. Which meant that I took the bus that left at 4:30 and arrived at 5:00. Whatev, it was nice to walk around for a little bit before the class started, and it was a really nice day. The class ended up being good. I was hoping there would be some people my age, but they were all older. There were two old men (like, 60, hahah) and three younger women, but the youngest was prob 30. Oh well, no BFFs for me in this class. But yeah, we made salads and soups, and I made one called Karottensalat (carrot salad), which was made from 500g of carrots (aka A LOT) and one apple, with yogurt and vinegar used for the the dressing. It ended up being pretty good, definitely different than other things I've eaten. All of the salads ended up looking kind of like cole slaw in that they all had shredded ingredients with the dressing mixed in. The other salads were: Greek salad, wurst salad (which had sausage and ham and onions), and something with sauerkraut and some other junk. We also had tomato soup and carrot soup, which were pretty good. I don't think I'll be taking many of these recipes home with me, but at least after this class is over I'll know how to follow a recipe.

Hmm, I guess that's all that really happened. Today is a German holiday (reunification, I think) so of course everyone has off today, and tomorrow and Friday for good measure. It's nice because I don't have to work, but it also means that nothing is open. Oh well, I am looking forward to relaxing. And maybe tomorrow I'll go into Heidenheim and buy the books for my German class (woo woo...can't wait).

So, I was thinking about this blog and how I wanted to keep it to remember what's going on...but I realized that my messages to Jonathan probably more accurately document what's been going on in my daily life. I write a lot more stuff in those messages, plus I write them more often. As long as Facebook's server doesn't explode, I think I'll have a pretty good record of what I did here in Germany by the time I leave.