Hotel Restaurant Cafe Sonnenschein Pfalzgrafenweiler

So first of all the good news is that I passed my final German exam on Friday with a 2! (about a B) That means I dont have to take the placement exam next week when my friend Erin is visiting! I finally figured out where to do my laundry and I built this closet thingy I bought a while ago. I'm putting up some pics of my room so you can see wher...

So this week has been pretty busy. As you know Sunday was my birthday and I think it probably would've been a bit different if I was back in the U.S. but it was still fun. On Monday my whole day was consumed by school and the task of getting my bed. Selena told me her father could pick it up and bring it here for me at 5 Monday night. So around...

Sorry about how long it's been since my last entry! So this week I started my German class. It's from 9 - 2:30 everyday. There are people from EVERYWHERE in the class. It's pretty crazy. Also, I'm the only native English speaker in the class. Everyone else speaks two languages already.... so I feel a little stupid but oh well. The rest of my ti...

So last night we went to the Carnival party. At the train station we see a couple who are obviously going to the same party and they told us it was for people 30 years old or older.... We had our train tickets so we decided just to try and go anyway since we got costumes and everything. We thought the town hall was right next to the train stati...

So tonight I'm heading to a little town named Ersingen. It's the last night of Carnival which is a celebration that I don't really know anything about except people dress up in costumes. I forgot to mention that when I was traveling from Stuttgart to Pforzheim I saw lots of people dressed up. It was really weird at the time but I was just focus...

So I'm finally in a hotel room in Pforzheim and its so cute! This morning I walked around Stuttgart a little bit more but NOTHING is open here on Sundays. It's weird. Eventually I made it on the train heading to Pforzheim and everything was going smoothly. However once I got off the train there were quite a few inches of snow which makes it hard...

International exchange can be a beautiful thing. When I was in high school, I was fortunate enough to share a neighboring chair in home room with a one Christina Lenhert (K then L …get it). Christina was a German studying abroad with hopes to have a true American experience… well, let's just say that King high school was a real Ameri...

The last couple weeks have been pleasant but not the most outlandishly exciting. I don't have a lot of great stories or anything; I've just been working and hanging out with the host family. Last weekend I went to Tuttlingen, which is the capital of the region I live in, because there was a big Stadtfest (city festival). Lots of music, food, dri...

Many years ago, just after I had received my first MA (I'm now up to 5 advanced degrees), I spent two years in Stuttgart, Germany working in a German congregation of the Grace Brethren Church. During that time I got to know and then lived with a wonderful family in the church. A few years later when I spent a year studying at the Eberhard-Karls ...

We are sitting in the gardens of the Tubingen Youth Hostel overlooking the Neckar River. It is a beautiful sunny afternoon after a cold and rainy last day in Stuttgart and a sunless morning. We have spent most of the day doing a walking tour of the old town. Tubingen is a lovely old university town, nicer than Heidelberg and less touristy. We ma...