After making an outstanding dinner with Amanda, Curtis, Geoff and Hanif, we decided to go out to the famous ice skating place right in front of City Hall to meet up with a bunch of our friends.  Since the five of us did not want to go skating, we went inside the tavern to have a cup of Glutwein (hot, sweet wine popular in Austria’s winter).  After finishing our glutwein, we met up with the rest of the crew to go celebrate my birthday before midnight. I had no idea where we were going, I just followed my wolf pack all the way to Bendl Bar, which was not far at all from the ice skating rink.  While enjoying conversation and more glutwein, I was so amazed that I had 12 wonderful friends sitting all around me that I had known less than two weeks and already felt like I had known them much longer.  I looked across the room and I noticed that there was a jukebox so I decided to get up and look at the songs.  After perusing every song for about ten minutes, I noticed someone reaching across to put a Euro in the jukebox to play a song.  I looked up and said to him, “Excuse me, but I have not picked a song yet.”  He sarcastically responds, “You know you have to put money in the jukebox in order for it to play a song or else it won’t work.”  Flustered, I remarked that it was my birthday in an hour and I should be able to listen to whatever I want.  Since I had two songs in mind, I was thinking that maybe he would play one of them because of how classic they were.  Low and behold, Phil picked “Tainted Love” which was one of my choices that I wanted anyway.  Then he let me pick the next song of which I selected “Betty Davis Eyes.”  For some unexplainable reason, we talked all the way up until midnight when my friends started chanting “Happy Birthday.”  I invited Phil to my 21st birthday celebration that was the following night, exchanged phone numbers then joined my friends to catch the UBahn home.  It was just the beginning of something unexpected and wonderful all at the same time; stay tuned for my 21st celebratory in my next post

Everything we walked past was breathtaking and a true architectural wonder.  All of the frescoes, colors, edifices-I thought I was dreaming.  Some of the noteworthy sites that we passed were the double spiral staircase that was erected during the Middle Ages, the Cathedral, the Library (just wait till you see the picture), City Center and my favorite: The Lock Bridge.  Our tour guide was so kind and informative that it made the cold a little bit more bearable.  He told us that David Guetta wrote the song “I Wanna See You Sweat” on a hilltop that he pointed out during the tour.  Very cool, especially since I really like the song too.  I don’t have to say too much  more about Graz because the pictures really do speak for themselves.

I will tell you though that the Lock Bridge was INCREDIBLE.  Initials carved into several thousand unique locks that each have their own beautiful love story to tell.  How it works: the couple engraves their names or initials into the lock, lock the lock to the fence on top of the bridge then throw the key away into the river right below the bridge.  The symbolism of love being locked down is really heartfelt and gratifying.  Something so pure that can withstand all of the natural forces that present themselves.  You will see just a few snapshots of this beautiful tradition and like me, you may wish you were there right now to peruse all of the locks that have their own love story to tell and to inspire you.  As this was the last stop of the tour, it was now finally time to eat lunch at Graz’s famous Glock Brau.  Our group took up pretty much the entire restaurant while we dined on traditional Austrian fare complete with a corn succotash soup, schnitzel with rice and finally an awesome dessert (feast your eyes on the picture below to see what I mean).  After lunch, it was time to head to the Zotter Chocolate Factory where chocolate was plentiful and very piquant to the senses.

I was definitely overwhelmed when it came time to tour the factory because it seemed to stretch on for several floors with chocolate tastings in each room.  I was told to pace myself because as the tour went on, the chocolate was supposed to get better and better.  I cannot tell you how much chocolate I had that day but it was definitely an overload that I have never experienced before!  Since Zotter Chocolate as notoriously organic and based along the premise of free trade, it was hard to turn down samples to Cinnamon Banana, Caramel Apple, Caffe Latte and many more exotic flavors-even Red Hot Chili Pepper.  You will be able to see from the pictures just how much fun we had and all about the chocolate that became my staple dinner for the night.

At the end of the tour, it was time to head back to Vienna and catch some much needed sleep on the bus.  Everyone ate way too much chocolate and was very exhausted by the bus ride home.  Closing my eyes for almost 3 hours was so great and I cannot tell you how much I value my sleep here-we hardly get any of it

Till next time, you will get to hear all about Jade turning 21 in Austria.  Tschaw<3

Valentine’s Day is celebrated differently in Japan, and if you’ve ever watched a school-based anime or Japanese movie/drama, then you probably know the gist of it already.  In Japan, only women give men chocolate for this holiday, and there are many different types of chocolate.  For example, there is obligatory chocolate, as in for co-workers and bosses; chocolate for friends; and chocolate for love interests.  There’s also a reversal chocolate, which is chocolate given by guys, so it’s not the case that men don’t give chocolate, but it’s rare.

One of my teachers here at Kansai Gaidai helped explain all these different types of chocolate, and she talked about how it may seem like a lot of trouble for the females to be buying/making all this chocolate and then getting up the courage to give chocolate to someone they actually really like and want a relationship with.  However, she also told us that it’s just as hard on guys, because it becomes a competition for which is the most popular guy, a.k.a who gets the most chocolate from the ladies.  ;P

Our sensei told us that her younger brother wasn’t very popular so that he would always get chocolate from her and their mother, and sometimes, that’s all he got.  When her brother’s friends would compare (“I got five.  How many did you get?” “I got three.  You?”), he always was able to say at least he got two, although he never said they were from family.  So sad!  Poor kid!

The weekend before this chocolate-intense holiday, my shackmates and I melted bars of chocolates, put them in molds of hearts, flowers, and cute animal heads, and then we let them cool putting them into cute pink and red bags to hand out to all our friends.  It was pretty fun, and I really hope that maybe the custom of “making” chocolate will catch on in America.

Valentine’s Day in itself was also fun.  I gave chocolates out to friends, and I received some home-made goodies, too.  Homemade chocolate just shows a lot more personalization and time and effort than just buying chocolate, so I feel like I really got more out of it here then back at home.  I gave some love chocolate to Andrew, and he liked them, but I’m pretty sure there are leftovers still waiting for him in the fridge, ha ha.

Now I did give chocolate, friend chocolate, to some guys, but you see, I’m not giving the wrong message—I’m investing.  Another interesting thing about Japan that’s related to Valentine’s Day is another holiday, White’s Day.  White’s Day is on March 14^th, and on this day, most guys have to give obligatory chocolate to all the ladies who gave them obligatory chocolate, and if they liked a girl who also liked them enough to give them love chocolate, this is the day they can reciprocate and let the lucky lady know of his feelings for her, too.  Thus!  I am hoping to get some White’s Day chocolate in return…I’m hoping…heh heh.  At least Andrew better give me some since he was very Japanese and didn’t give me chocolate this year.

*Note:  The descriptions of the types of chocolates are very basic and not very detailed.

During the six days of Karneval, Germans dress up in costumes and drink loads of alcohol. The traditional Karneval costume is a 19th century French military uniform, which dates back to the French occupation of the Rheinland.  The Germans wore the military uniforms to mock the French soldiers.  At the time it was scandalous for women to not only wear the uniform but to couple it with a short skirt especially in February.  Today people wear all kinds of costumes.  Some of the most popular ones are clowns and cowboys.

There are parades called Karnevalzuege, where individuals throw Karmelle (candy) from floats. Thursday (Weiberfastnacht) and Monday (Rosenmontag) are the two most important days. Weiberfastnacht, roughly translating as women fest night, has its historical underpinnings from when the washwomen of Beuel-Bonn invaded the city hall in protest of having to work while the men celebrated Karneval.  This action is reenacted  every Weiberfastnacht. Rosenmontag is the climax of Karneval. The biggest Karnevalzuege is in Cologne on this day.

There is even special Karneval music.  Check out some of it on youtube like Hoehner’s “Schenk Mir Dein Herz” or “Denn wenn et Troemmelche jeiht” by De Raeuber.

As I take pictures I will up load them to my flickr account! Check it out! (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mnessy07/)

If you study in Bonn for either Spring or Fall make sure you are here during Karneval!

I hope that you are all well. The past week has gone by even quicker than usual; I can’t believe that it’s already Saturday! I actually don’t have a copious amount of things to catch you up on like usual, just a few highlights.

The first worth noting is that my friends and I went out to an authentic Italian restaurant this past Thursday. The ambiance was spot-on, our server was friendly as can be, but the only thing that was odd was the Spanish. The food was all written in Italian, with Spanish descriptions. Some things we still had to translate with a dictionary after we didn’t know their meanings in either language, haha. I ordered Italian gnocchi with pesto sauce and my favorite tinto de verano. I definitely want to go back again soon! [There is photo documentation of my pesto gnocchi, of course, but it’s on my friend’s camera and she hasn’t uploaded her pictures yet.]

Secondly, yesterday, I went on a field trip to the Roman Ruins of Italica with the university. We arrived a couple minutes early (or so we thought), but that ended up being over a half hour early, because, well, there’s such thing as Spanish time, lol. My friends and I got paired with a Spanish-speaking guide, but I’m happy that we did. He was very kind and was always willing to explain (albeit in Spanish) a word or phrase that we didn’t understand. The Ruins were very astonishing, and as our guide suggested, they became even more astonishing when I imagined what the place looked like when it was up and running with fully-constructed buildings and people. Here are a couple of my favorite pictures from the trip:

Mosaic flooring (GO GATA!)

Bebe Romans on a field trip who were SO CUTE

Road alongside the baths

So now for the title of this post. As many/all of you know, Spain’s economy is currently very bad. It is in a state of [Cree’-seez], as it’s pronounced here. According to a recently-published article—that I had to translate from Spanish to English a couple nights ago for homework—there are 5 million unemployed. Well, thanks to the UPO International Center, I now have a job babysitting/teaching English to two little niñas who are the daughters of an UPO professor. I was originally undecided about taking on a responsibility here, but I figured there’d be no harm in interviewing and just letting fate do the rest.

After a solid ten minutes of navigating through the labyrinth that is Building 14 of UPO, I met the girls’ dad, Ruben. My interview was entirely in Spanish, and while I thought bringing my all-English résumé was a silly idea, he actually seemed appreciative that I’d brought it (and hence, I was justified for standing in line at the Copy Center of Doom for a half hour waiting to print the stupid thing). I got the call that same night, roughly 45 minutes after the interview.

Wednesday was my first day on the job. The girls’ mom picked me up, and we discussed—in Spanish, ironically—how I was not allowed to speak Spanish to the girls, nor acknowledge that I understood them. This proved to be harder than I expected. It was fun playing with Barbies and drawing on chalkboards, but I just hope that I was convincing to the girls that I didn’t understand them. On the way home, the older daughter asked her mother if I could understand what they were saying, and I almost nodded my head “no” before I realized that in doing so, I’d be giving myself away. Being that we had to be convincing, the girls’ mom had to speak in English as well. Which brings me to my next observation…

In my Intercultural Communication class, we have been discussing cross-cultural differences, one of which being la distancia de poder (the distance of power). That is, how or to what extent superiors are actually superior to their subordinates. On the ride over to the family’s house, I was a bit nervous, mainly because I was with a superior with whom I was speaking a foreign language (and making a conscious effort to speak to her in the more respectful usted form). I felt inferior as she was rattling off everything she had to say with ease. On the way back to my house, though, it was a completely different story. She spoke in very basic English, slowly, and with uncertainty. For one of the first times since I’ve been to Spain, I was actually on the other side of the exchange.

Spain was once a culture where superiors were revered as such, but today the disparity is a lot less. It’s customary to call all of your teachers by their first names, which I do like (I still attempt to speak to them in the  formal usted form, but I haven’t mastered that yet). Anyway, my point to all of this is that I realized that there are two sides to this. Yes, I still have my bouts of discouragement when I can’t think of a vocab word or I mess up a verb tense, but my superior quickly becomes my equal when (s)he steps into my shoes. Even my very intelligent—and sassy—Literature teacher got very shy when she attempted to say something to me in English.

Language is everything. Put two people in a room who don’t know each other’s language, and regardless of social status or “power,” they will inevitably resort to communicating in extra-linguistic—and I imagine primitive—ways. I’ve always taken for granted how easy it has always been for me to communicate, being that I have up until this point only been surrounded by people who speak my primary language. This trip is definitely teaching me that communication is a gift, and I feel very lucky and blessed that I can say that I am able to communicate with millions more people in the world by learning Spanish.

Un abrazo, a hug,
Ally

St. Andrews is a small university town rich with history.  It was an important city during the Protestant Reformation.  There are abby and castle ruins.  It is also the home of golf. Moreover, it is where Prince William and Kate Middleton went to university and met. I had brunch in the small cafe where they supposedly met.  If you visit Scotland I would suggest to take a day to visit St. Andrews. Check out my photos on my Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mnessy07/).

Travel tip: When traveling around Scotland, I suggest taking busses rather than trains.  Both are expensive but busses offer student discounts where trains do not.

On the 23rd I will depart for a Spring semester in Porto Alegre, Brazil to study language and culture.

The anticipation has been a long process of working out many issues including: anxiety (mine and my parents), living arrangements, writing emails in Portuguese, Visa paperwork, excitement that keeps me up at night, and all that other fun stuff.

Luckily, endless yoga, along with this mantra (everything is chill) and poetry have kept me relatively sane. Oh, and coffee, too.

This extended winter break in South Florida has given me plenty of time to fill. Amongst the many hours of playing video games, watching movies, and traveling to and from yoga, I’ve had the opportunity to contemplate the nostalgia I feel for Gainesville. I’ve come to the conclusion that saudades will be a big part of this experience.

The important thing, I guess, is bringing home with you wherever you go. This is a lesson I will continue to learn.

Here is my tribute to UF and everyone who helps make this happen time and time again for many students, including myself. Thanks to everyone for the support, especially my close friends and family. The encouragement is priceless.

I hope that through this blog I can share the marvels and challenges I encounter abroad. I will try to write frequently – whether a journal entry, a poem, or a very descriptive piece about one thing (such as bananas.) Anything and everything. So any requests, questions, and/or feedback are welcome.

Obrigada, always,

Michelle

I was incredibly nervous when I first started. I remember my first few tables would look at me as if I was completely insane when my hand couldn’t stop shaking as I served their coffee. I don’t know what sparked my nerves so intensely but luckily my Parkinson’s tendencies have rubbed off! The biggest difference to me is how long I work for such a small amount of dollars, which is due to the fact that the gratuity requirement here is only 10%. On an average day, I make about R300 after working from 6:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. This is equal to about $38.00, which ends up being $3.75 an hour. At first thought, I decided I was wasting my time. Yet, after getting into a regular lifestyle here in South Africa, I realized that I can do a lot more here with R300 than I can with $38.00 in America. Everything is so much less expensive here, especially the food. When I go out to lunch here, I pay about $5.00 for a meal that I would pay about $12.00 for in the States. Therefore, I’m becoming more and more thankful that I can earn that cash each day for extra spending money.

It’s been quite an interesting experience getting to know all my co-workers. They all have such diverse backgrounds and it amazes me how so many different ethnicities and backgrounds can come together under one roof. Because South Africa has 11 different languages, including English and Afrikaans, you can find someone who speaks Sotho, Zulu, Tswana, Ndebele, you name it. Kyria, the bartender is from Congo and can speak French while Mitchelle, one of the waitresses, is from Zimbabwe and speaks Portuguese. At the beginning, there were many times when I felt out of place, especially when everyone would speak their native language to each other, and I couldn’t understand a word. It was the first time in my life that I felt in the minority. I remember they would all talk and look at me, wondering who this new white girl was with the strange accent. However, over the last few weeks, I’ve really gotten to know and love the waitresses and to me, the opportunity to hear their stories every day is much more valuable than making money.

The first few days, I got frustrated with the competitive atmosphere that would erupt when each waitress would quickly approach the customers to lead them to their specific section. There were even a few verbal fights when one waitress stole the other’s table. Yet after really getting to know most of the waiters, I realized that these few tips is what they need to survive every day that they have to jump at each chance to get extra money, even if they have to fight for it.

My favorite part about the job is when people hear my American accent and want to know everything about the United States. Their first question is usually, “Why would you move from America to here?!” I even got into a political debate one day with one of the customers about Obama. People are dumbfounded at the fact that I’ve lived in the States for the past 14 years and can still speak Afrikaans. That’s when I feel grateful that my parents pushed me to continue speaking Afrikaans, when they told me it’s in my blood, and although our residence changed, our heritage didn’t.

Although some days are long and frustrating, this job is one of those unexpected experiences that I’m sure happened for a reason.

So, as everyone looked at me with jealousy and shrieked excitedly about my new international life, I gulped and smiled and prepared for whatever would meet me in the frozen northern European nation that I had never so much as visited. Through my studies, I have taken numerous classes about Germany, wrote my senior thesis on Germany, and learned German. I had developed an obsession with the country, and I knew entering college that the one thing I wanted to do was study abroad. And I had somehow gotten chosen for a Parliament internship. What could be the problem?

The answer: Fear of the unknown. Once I got settled into my new international life, I came to realize that studying and interning abroad were not at all what I had anticipated. Not that I ever knew what exactly to anticipate anyway, but still. Being here, I have gotten to do things that I didn’t even know would be allowed. I have a security pass for the Bundestag and Reichstag, and I can come and go as I please. My German is better than I knew, which came as a surprise. Last week, for example, I attended a meeting at the European House that you must be a member of government to register for. The issue was the eastern European nation of Georgia, and the Georgian Foreign Minister was explaining why he believes Georgia should be given membership to the EU. Then, I went to an SPD party meeting in the Bundestag where the party was trying to create a common platform on the issue of Greek austerity measures. Following this, I attended an intern meeting with the former German foreign minister, who explained to us the changing German education system. I am receiving an amazing education on the EU and German government in my classes, and successfully completing the assignments. This weekend, I attended the opening of a Gerard Richter exhibition at a museum designed by Mies van der Rohe. Richter is the most expensive living artist, and he is the person that designed the modern windows in the Cologne Cathedral that I previously posted. I also purchased a sketchbook and pencils, because I’ve received so much artistic inspiration from Berlin that I needed an outlet. I keep in touch with family and friends, and the food is delicious. Next week, I will have an intensive seminar with my friend from Bonn and we will explore the DDR and Berlin Wall museums and learn about the period of divided Germany. Even things such as the protest of people with Syrian flags outside of the Russian Embassy next to my office’s window are fascinating and educational. I’m overwhelmed with education, support, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

So just remember, if you’re considering studying abroad, it may not be what you imagined. It may be much greater than you had any idea.

This past week has been so hectic for me. I’ve just been doing so much. Here’s a breakdown: riding trains/subways/buses/cabs to see the city and go to school, enjoying quite a bit of nightlife, making new friends, getting lost every so often and asking for directions, trying new foods and getting accustomed to not eating dinner until about 9pm, finding out how to take care of everyday tasks (such as laundry or grocery shopping), speaking profusely with Elda (“my host mom” at the Residencia I’m staying at), and trying to stay in touch with everyone at home.

I feel like I have a way better hold on things now than I did before, which is a big relief. I’m not going to lie: the first couple of days were just really disorienting. One scary thing I’m dealing with now is that money is kind of tight, and I guess I didn’t realize how much I spent since I’ve been here, especially with the different exchange rate and everything. It’s something that other students are also expressing, though, so I’m definitely not the only one who may have underestimated how quickly expenses add up. I think the bottom line is pretty much to be cautious, especially now that I’ve been here for a little longer now and I can better gauge the financial climate here. I highly recommend making a little budget plan, which is something I did for myself!

On a more positive note, I got in contact with a great sounding volunteer organization over here, so it’s only a matter of time before I get  involved in some serious volunteer work… I cannot WAIT .

So far, I miss home a little. I can’t really believe that I’ll be gone for four months. Nevertheless, Argentina still has more than enough to keep me happy and fully engaged, so it’s certainly not in vain.

Well, until next time! Ciao!