One More Month

Wow, only one more month here.  I can't tell if it's gone by slowly or quickly, just like I can't tell if I'm excited or disappointed about going home.  I've had a lot more free time than I'm used to, especially with having no job and most classes only once a week.  Not having much money has also been a big strain.  It's disappointing to have so many travel opportunities but not being able to afford much.  If I do come back here after graduation and get a job, hopefully I can fix all that.

It will be nice to go back to the States and see my friends, my family, my favorite TV shows and food, and of course to be around English speakers again.  I'm also dying here without Fitrec or a gym of any sort!  I'll be super busy next semester with a full course load and two jobs, but I think I'll be happy with that.  Of course I will miss all of the time for naps that I've had here!  I'll also miss my friends here and of course Oli.  He thinks he can come visit me for a week or two in Spring, so at least I'll have something to look forward to.  It'll definitely be hard to go from a 4 hour long distance relationship to an opposite-sides-of-the-world LDR though.  At least we have Skype!

My family is coming to visit me tomorrow and staying for a week.  I'm looking forward to a chance to go to München (Munich.)  I think we might go czech out Prague too! (get it? lol)  I'd better clean my room tonight.  I still haven't figured out where to find a good, working vacuum in the dorm.

I just finished writing my first Referat (research paper) in German.  Wow, talk about a brain wipe.  I had to do research on the different kinds of Composite/Compound Words in German, and then find 10 examples in student newspapers and translate them into English.  Doing the research was probably the hardest part because I had to look up so many words and try to paraphrase what the book said.  Usually I paraphrased into complete sentences because I don't know how to take shortened notes in German, so all I had to do was copy and paste a lot of my notes into my paper.

Finding and translating the words was fun, especially since I found some wordplays (Last-Minute-Weihnachtsstress - Last Minute Christmas Stress) and some words that couldn't be translated into English without long accompanying explanations (Glühweinlotse - lit. Mull Wine Airport Controller, but it was referring to the Student Council's use of Glühwein to bribe students into voting in the S.C. elections.)  I also got to draw binary structure trees for each of the words, which is normally pretty easy, except that now I had to do it on the computer.  One of my Ling professors in Boston sent me a link where I could draw trees, but it was all done in open- and closed- brackets.  For example, this is what I had to program for the Glühweinlotsen tree: [Wort [Stamm [Stamm [BM [glüh]] [Wurzel [BM [wein]]]] [Stamm [Wurzel [BM [lots]]] [WBM [dat.pl.-en]]]]],  but this is what it turned out as: stgraph.png.php.  Sorry I couldn't get the picture in here directly.

It was cloudy out this morning when I went for a run and came to the library, but my Dashboard is telling me that it's currently sunny outside (hard to believe when I'm two stories underground.)  Guess I should go check it out!