Arrival and Settling In

After being here for nearly a week, I have finally gotten internet access in my room, so I am finally able to take the time to give everyone an update without having to worry about paying 1€ per fifteen minutes or hogging the internet station at the café for longer than might be justified. Yay Internet! Anyway, here is the story, starting from the plane ride, since I suppose I should start there:

being in three different planes and airports for about twelve hours blows chunks. After that, I arrived in Berlin. Rather than staying and doing any sightseeing (or anything that did not involve the public transit system with the intention of leaving Berlin, for that matter) we (the other guy from Bemidji who I am here with. Also, I will probably end up using "we" most of the time, since it is usually both of us who are doing things) headed to Magdeburg. Although we will eventually have to go back to see parts of Berlin that are not the airport, the inside of a bus, or the train station, I can't imagine that we could have done much more than pass out from exhaustion, had we tried to do anything. Although coffee can make my body forget that it thinks it is 6am for short periods of time, it eventually wises up to the coffee's tricks and feels tired again. Anyway, after dozing through the hour and a half of train ride (I assume that Derrick was doing the same thing that I was doing), we arrived in Magdeburg.

We arrived in town too late to accomplish anything meaningful (which we found out after we went across town to the school), so we ended up staying at the hostel next to the train station. The next morning, we went back to the school, where there was still no one. Not entirely what I had expected, but things happen. After that, we went to the other school in town (where our dorm is) to check into our dorms. The man giving out keys told us that our keys were at the International Studies office in the first school, so we went back (luckily, dragging suitcases all over town is made much easier by the existence of streetcars).

This time, there was a person! A student worker who had the misfortune of showing up to work that day. Little did she know that we were going to bombard were with large amounts of confusion and work. She told us that two of the women from the office were on vacation and the third one was sick. We told her that our keys should be around somewhere (they weren't there, it turns out). She tried to contact anyone who might have some sort of idea where the keys might be. Of the many people she called, only a few of them answered. And of the few of them that answered, all of them didn't know anything. She finally contacted someone who could get us some spare keys that we could use until we found the first ones. After about four hours of trying to get into our dorm, we were finally able to put our suitcases some place and rest.

In the interest of trying to keep this a reasonable length, I think that I am going to end here, so that it can be manageable for the reader. Hey look! A picture!

This is Die Grüne Zitadelle, a building designed by Hundertwasser. More to follow later. Tomorrow, perhaps.