My Room, Littenweiler, and the Past Week

First, I have created a public photo album here. I'll upload the same pictures on Facebook, too, and maybe Flickr after I edit them a bit.

This week has been consistently cold and rainy, except for a few hours Wednesday afternoon, but I didn't have my camera with me, so no city pictures yet!

I do have a picture of my room, though:

It is large with nice, big windows and IES even gives every student a TV to use (so far I have watched the Simpsons in German and a soccer game). We took a trip to IKEA last week with IES to buy things to spruce up our rooms, but I opted just to get a little desk lamp. Later on I might hang up my map of Freiburg or something, but I am fine with mostly bare walls and plain sheets for the next five months.

I live in an apartment with two other people currently, but the apartment holds five people total. The university is on semester break now, so I expect other students to move in as the month goes along. I have not really gotten to know my other suite mates too well. They keep to themselves, and I am often not home at the same time they are. There is also no common area save a tiny kitchen, so there is no real place to hang out except your own room, which doesn't help with getting to know them.

The part of town I live in is called Littenweiler; it's about three miles east of the city center. I like Littenweiler so far, though I have not yet had a chance to explore much of it. My dorm is on the campus of the Paedagogische Hochschule, or education school, and I am about a three minute walk away from a mensa, a five minute's walk away from a bakery (open on Sundays!) as well as a Deutsch Bahn train station, and a ten minute walk from a street train stop. The hills of the Black Forest are very near my dorm, and once the weather gets better I intend to explore some of the trails that lead into the forest. Here's the view from my dorm window, so you can see both the forest and how poor the weather has been for the past few days:

Normally you can easily see another row of hills/mountains behind, but it's too grey and misty these days to see that on camera!

Let me fill you in a bit on what I have been doing in the past week. Last weekend, on Friday, my housing tutor had all the IES students who live in Littenweiler over for some German food, potato salad and fleischküchle, basically delicious hamburger-like meatballs. Saturday I went snowshoeing (see my previous entry), and that night I went out to eat Italian with some other IES students and ended the night at the Freiburger Bierhaus, a venue offering over 300 varieties of beer. I tried malzbier, found it disgusting after about three sips, and then a weißbier from Frankfurt (see picture), which was very good. Sunday I played pickup ultimate with DISConnection, the Freiburg team, in a park west of the city. It was the first time really doing sports in three months, so I was tired at the end, but it was fun to play again. I haven't been able to go back to practice with them this week because I was very sore for about two days after Sunday (like...the most sore I have ever been in my life) and then too busy to sort out where to find them afterwards, but I hope to play with them again next Monday.

This week, as I mentioned in my last entry, the language courses have started. So far we've toured the city museum (see this entry if you're interested), explored a neighborhood of Freiburg called Vaubon that really deserves its own entry, and got a brief and very interesting tour of the Münster that also deserves its own entry with pictures. Today we had no field trips, which was fine with me because it was even colder and wetter out than earlier this week. I like the class a lot, both the teacher and the students. Tonight I am going out into the city again, and tomorrow we're going to Colmar, France for museums and Alsace region wine-tasting.