Spring Break

Hey Everyone, Sorry I have not written in a while!

Time has been flying by the last few months, and my year here is coming to an end. Over spring break I went to Berlin and met up with some friends and stayed about four days. We went to the Hard Rock Café, Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charley, and some other tourist things. We did most of it on bikes with Fat Tire bike tours in Berlin.

It was pretty cool and I would suggest Fat Tire to anyone in big cities in Europe! After Berlin I took a flew to Milan, Italy and met up with another friend Craig there.

It was really crazy arriving in Milan, because I didn't get to the city until about 1:30am when all the subway systems have stopped and only a few buses are running, not only that but I don't speak Italian, and the people that were out at that hour didn't really speak English either. After about an hour and attempting to communicate with a bus driver with various hand signals and what not I ended up in a finding my hostel and it tuned into a pretty fun trip. Milan has a lot to offer and we ran around there for two days taking in the sights, enjoying wine and pizza, and relaxing in nice parks. From there my friend Craig and I took a plane to Rome.

Rome was pretty packed with tourist because it was spring break and holy week, and about every one had the same Idea to come see the Pope.

And yes we did see the Pope on Good Friday. We also saw the Colosseum, Pantheon, Parthenon Hill, the place where Julius Caesar's body was burnt, where Rome started and all those fun things. It was pretty eventful, and I want to go back and have another look at Italy.

And about a week after I got home from Italy my parents showed up for a visit. It was supposed to be a surprise, but I wasn't very surprised! We went to Bremen, Hamburg, Netherlands, and other cool places together and just hung out for a week. They left a few days, so now I am back into my normal schedule, and I have time for things again!

I was also able to get a few pictures up from my year here, check them out:

http://gallery.me.com/rich.hall#100070

Tower Of Power

I started my dance lessons a few weeks ago! We have lessons every Monday evening and at the end we have something like prom, but we actually dance have some idea of what is going on! I'm pretty excited about it and its a pretty good time. Last week was the "middle party" so we were dancing for something like three hours and learned about five different dances! It good stuff, I enjoy it.

Also in the last few week my host Brother had his 18th birthday, and in Germany that is a pretty big deal; it means you can drive, buy hard alcohol, and vote. So here we its always a big party, I would say we had four parties for the one birthday! First we had a small party with the close group of friend, then a party with the extended family, then one with the road bowling team, and last we had on with about 75 people with a DJ, kinda of an all out deal! It was pretty crazy, my host brother got a used car from his parents and I got him a pair of carbon-fiber racing shoes to go with it!

And last weekend I went to Hamburg to hang out with some other exchange student friends of mine. The friend that I stayed with lives out side the city but we take a subway from his neighborhood to the city center and we can meet up with people from all over and just go to a café and get something to drink and relax. Its a really cool reeling to be able to do that too! Saturday evening we went to a "Tower of Power" concert. They are a pretty cool band from California that was working there way threw Europe before moving on to Asia and Japan! The played some pretty heavy funk beats, a little James Brown style!

Into The New Year

Well its been awhile since Ive added anything to my blog, so I thought Id give and update on the last month or so and the festivities that I have taken part in!

I had a pretty fun Christmas, on the 6th we leave our shoes out and they get filled with candy and what not. Then alittle later in December I went Christmas shopping with a friend of mine in the next city on the 23ed and then on the 24th its a family day. Normal Germans go to church gather as a family, and eat strange things... Then in the evening on the 24th we exchange gifts with each other, and that's not really any diffrent than in the USA. The one real difference that I noticed was that people here don't put up a Christmas tree until the 20th or later. On the evening of the 25th my brother and I went to party, it was about 10,000-15,000 people in a big disco.

New years we celebrated alittle smaller, my brother and I partied with a few girls in may class, we did some fireworks, and partied until the morning came!

Over break I was able to meet up with two of my friend from the USA and we had a good time together. One lives in Hamburg and another in Oldenburg.

Now I'm back at school and were rapping up the end of this half year, and were getting our grades... not to exciting because the first part I didn't really get, but maybe the next half year Ill get some good grades!

Deichkind Concert - Bremen

On Saturday I went to Bremen with some friends for a pretty crazy concert. It was pretty awsome, we were seven girls and two guy, so I had to look out for the ladies! We took a train from Ocholt, a small town a few miles from where I live, to Bremen. On the weekends the trains dont drive all the time like weekdays so our options were pretty limited and we took one that got us there at about 7:00pm, with enough time to get a hamberger and check out the a little from the christmas market. It is one of the many christmas markets poping up all over germany.

After our quick hamberger stop, we took a bus to the concert. We rode on a pretty big bus, with about 120 seats, but there were about 200 people on it! Its a completly diffrent look into the youth of germany when 200 excited people are in an extremly small area! That wasent really all that bad, the worst part I think was the entrance to the concert. We were about 4000 or 5000 people waiting for opening, and as soon as it opened it because pretty crazy. The people were packed in so tight, I could jump in the air and stay there because the pressure of the people around me would hold me up!

After the crazy entrance nonsense it was pretty awsome. The band came on at about 10:45pm and played untill 12:30am. They are a pretty crazy group, the play hip-hop/techno music. They all were waring trashbags with fluorescent colored tape and paint all over. And between trampolines, bungee ropes, and croud surfing in inflatable rafts it mad for a pretty intresting evening.

After the concert began an intresting jurny. We ended up not being able to find a taxi because we were to many people, and the 5000 other people also wanted taxis. So we ended up walking across Bremen at 3:00 in the morning. It was not very eventfun, but everwhere were party because of the soccer game in bremen that night. But the people you run into on the steets at 3:00am are pretty cool, and just happy that their team won a soccer game.

After walking though Bremen, we ended up waiting at the train station untill 6:00am for the next train home. But it wasnt to bad, we got a chance to sleep alittle, and watch the soccer game. It was pretty crazy evening, and I was home just intime for breakfast!

Thanksgiving

This weekend was pretty fun! In germany they dont have our thanksgiving, but my host mother thought it would be cool to make a thanks giving dinner that we ate on sunday. I had a friend over that day too, so he got to experiance thanksgiving dinner aswell! We ate some hog, and pumkin pie! So I was pretty satisfied. It was a fun time, and enjoyed by all!

Also on saturday there was a piano even for the childen at the music school that I take lessons from, and the piano teacher is a friend of my mother and he asked me if I would come and make a video. So I spent saturday afternoon filming children playing piano for their parents. It was pretty crazy to see some 12 year old kids playing Bach and Beethoven. There is going to be another thing similar to the one on saturday later in the year, or the start of next that I will play in.

Ive been working at piano for about 6 weeks, and Fritz, my teacher, said that Im learning at a faster than normal rate, so thats pretty encouraging. Ive been pretty good at understanding the theory, and Im getting my plaing skills tuned in now. About two weeks ago I found a friend with a keyboard collecting dust, that I took off her hands and Ive been practice almost every day. It pretty fun.

Life

After the week in Latland, and the few days in Byern, I started really geeting in to the flow of things. Ive been pretty busy with what does not seem to be a whole lot of anything now that I look at it! I go to school everyday, and after school I end up with a good chuck of homework. On the weekends I try to keep my self intertained with partys, going bowling, playing cards with friends and things of that nature.

Last weekend was Holloween, but here the people know about it but they dont really do anything. The kids from the town where I live did a walk around the town with laturns with the fire department and what not. I was told the they do this ever year and that it hast nothing to do with Holloween and it just happend to be on the same day this year.

I wrote my first class test last week, and that was pretty tricky. The concept is pretty straight forward, we get an tast to write about and we write. Its the same idea in every class, writing in math class I can try and kindof get my ideas across. Last week we had one in German, and I got pretty much no where on that one because we had to read a text and analyze it, wich is alittle over my level at this point.

Life goes on, and Im still enjoing it!

Bayern (Bavaria)

Because the schools in Germany have a shot summer break they have longer breaks during the year, like fall break! So directly following the exchange program with Latvia was the start of fall break, which is two weeks long.
During the first few days of fall break my family and I drove by autobahn to Bayern (or Bavaria in English). The Autobahn(Highway) was the real start to the adventure, I had only been on the Autobahn once or twice before and for only a short time. We left at 05.00am so we could avoid traffic, and we did exactly that! In the no speed limit zone we were able to hold about 200KmH(about 125mph), and we were mostly in the slow lane. It was pretty fun.
Bayern has a beautiful landscape, and it was really cool to see. We were in the Bavarian Forest in a condo type thing. Im not really sure all that we did, we tryed to see alot of things in only four days, I ate some strage food, saw some historic churches and buidings and also a castel city. so I took alot of pictures of the old citys and historic things. We spent a day at a glass factory I guess you could call it. I got a chance to blow some glass, and buy some cool things, like a beer boot! It was really cool to watch the people work with glass also, there were people hand crafting things before my eyes. We also went caving one morning which was also fun.
Hopefully I can get a few pictures up soon.