Ich lebe noch!

Things that have taken place since my last post:

• Germany lost the semi-final to the eventually victorious Italy, in a disheartening but mercifully quick series of end-of-game goals. I didn't bother to watch the final.
• The Göttinger Uni-Chor und Orchester had a successful Summer Semester concert, consisting of a really well done Shostakovitch Cello Concerto and Mendelssohn's Lobgesang. We got to sing in the Aula on Wilhelmsplatz, which is a beautiful hall despite some acoustic issues and the oppressive heat, which required the opening of multiple windows and even more acoustic issues. I still haven't done much research into choral opportunities for non-music students at Northwestern, but I'm fully convinced that I need to find something if only for my own sanity.
• I didn't have a goodbye party per se at Studentendorf (I didn't really give my dorm-mates enough warning before my departure to arrange another Karaoke party, which was fine by me because they had threatened to start using the German pop songs and even the playing field!) but I did have a nice evening making sushi in the common room. I had been intending to try out my sushi supplies earlier that month but never got around to it, so I ended up using a whole pack of seaweed paper at one go just to use it up. Result: two humongous platters of sushi. I had a good time fobbing off individual pieces on everybody who came in to use the kitchen, and then invited Katha to help me try and polish off the rest of it. She brought out a bottle of plum wine and we made an evening of it, which was very nice for my last night in town. The next day I checked out and called my cab to the Hauptbahnhof, but before I left she and Peter gave me a going-away gift: more gummy candy, a book, and a burned CD. So nice!
  
• I went to Frankfurt the night before my flight home, treated myself to a final dinner in Germany (at least for this year!) at a nice restaurant close to my hotel. Hauling two giant suitcases (20 and 30 kilo, or 50 and 70lbs, respectively) plus a huge camping backpack and my computer case... was less than fun. I left the bigger suitcase overnight in a locker at the Frankfurt Hbf so I didn't have to walk it to the hotel, and navigating escalators to the S-bahn and in the airport the next morning was also rather horrific... but I made it, as did my belongings.
• The flight was fine, and I randomly met my high school gym teacher (famous quote: "Girls, men are pigs and they'll only try to take advantage of you.") on my layover in Chicago. He was taking the same overbooked flight back to St. Louis on his way back from a student trip to Amsterdam. Wierd, but kind of neat.
  
• Within a week of coming back home, my family and I went up to Michigan for my cousin Sarah's wedding. It was so much fun to see everybody again! The weather was perfect and the ceremony was lovely, as was the bride of course! We also had time to run around the beach at Lake Michigan, which is always a blast... oooh, next year is going to be fun.
• Speaking of next year, we left Michigan after the wedding and headed down to Chicago to find me housing for next year. Argh, stress... plus probably some residual jetlag. Driving around Chicago is a ridiculous proposition to begin with, and driving to look at places in the western suburbs from our hotel in Rogers Park on the north side was a chore. Plus, most of the places we found in the newspaper and online were in rather downtrodden neighborhoods. Janet had another scare as well, blue screen of death and everything. She has since resumed functioning, but lack of computer access also didn't help the housing search much. In the end we focused the search on the neighborhood around the hotel, which had been recommended by students in my program. It's between the Evanston and Downtown campuses on the Red line of the El, and the place that I found is right on the lake. It was actually across the street from the hotel we were staying in, and I called the number on the sign outside initially to get a basis of comparison for the price range of the neighborhood... besides the location, the apartments have been freshly renovated, and it was decently affordable. It's further from Mike in DeKalb than I would have hoped, but even with Chicago traffic it's a heck of a lot closer than Gambier, OH and Lawrence, KS. Not to mention St. Louis, MO and Göttingen, Germany.
• My folks headed home later in the week, while Mike and I rented a car and stayed in town for Jen (my college roomie of two years) and Marc's wedding. I had agreed to serve as an usher but was delighted to have the opportunity to "help out" in other capacities as well... making her late for her final dress fitting, working with Jessie to oraganize a scad of friends to decorate the Love Machine (TM) for their departure from the church, dancing like a maniac to the great swing band at the reception, and giving her brand new husband vaguely salacious hotel lobby backrubs to name a few. She definitely appreciated my presence! Actually, it was a great opportunity to reconnect and I for one had a blast seeing so many Kenyon friends again: Tim, Jessie, Robbie, Becky (and her bro), Ginger and Sean, Rachel and Uri.
• Getting back to St. Louis from Chicago was another adventure... Mike and I returned the rental car and rode the El and a bus down to the Museum of Science and Industry, where we mostly looked at trains. Due to my sleeping in a bit, a busy rental place, and delays on the train we didn't get to the museum as early as we had hoped. We got back to Union Station to catch our bus home just in time... and then had to get our luggage out of the locker we had stowed it in that morning, which was a technologically advanced piece of work - piece of something, at least - which asked for thumbprint verificiation of our unlock code. Thing was, the dratted machine had never asked for a print when we got the locker in the first place, so it had nothing to verify it to. The man in charge of the lockers took his sweet time getting there to help us, and I was convinced that we'd miss our bus. Ha. Ha ha. Luckily for us, Megabus was running about 2 hours behind schedule. This is a discount bus company, so they had passengers to at least 3 or 4 different cities waiting out on an unmarked sidewalk by the train station in the hot summer sun. The bus finally arrived, but the AC was barely functional and made a constant dinging sound, which apparently was a warning that the transmission was having issues. We had a break at a rest stop before Springfield, which was fine... then we loaded up to leave. The driver went around the back of the lot to get back to the roadway, but didn't notice the gigantic crater-sized potholes in the gravel. Long story short, the back end of the bus wound up axle-deep in a gravel pond. We disembarked again to see if the lightened load would do any good, and stood around for almost an hour until a kindhearted trucker chained the bus to his cab and yanked the bus to safety and solid ground. We were supposed to arrive at 9pm, and actually got in sometime after midnight. Whee.
• Elizabeth (funny that I still think of her as "Elizabeth from Leipzig" even though she's originally from Arkansas) and most of her family were in town for a weekend, so I met up with her on the 6th. We had fun commiserating the mortifying process that is the Fulbright end-of-year report. ("How many publications and public speaking opportunities have you had over the course of the year? Are you famous yet? How do you intend to become famous and credit your success to the Fulbright program? Give fascinating examples of how you, personally, forged an indelible cultural bridge between the US and [Insert Host Country] which will persevere for the rest of recorded time and possibly save the world. VALIDATE TO US THAT WE HAVEN'T JUST PAID YOU FOR A YEAR OF VACATION, FER CHRISSAKES!")
  
• Last week, I had a visitor from out west. Beto came to St. Louis to visit and see the sights! In about 5 days we wound up fitting in Six Flags, the St. Louis Zoo and a bit of Forest Park, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, the Arch, Missouri Botanical Garden and its current Chihuly exhibit, the Central West End, my high school, the Cathedral Basilica, the City Museum, and the MUNY's closing-week production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which was awesomely cheesy in all the right places. We also hung out with Therese, and she and Beto were both huge hits with one another. I am now honor-bound to make time to get out to Sacramento for a visit at some point in the future.
  
• Janet is officially getting pensioned off to whatever uses my folks can have for her. This is actually the first post I've written on a new addition, a brand-new shiny MacBook. So far I'm calling him Statler, but when Boot Camp is on and Windows is up and running he'll also be Waldorf. Get it? Dual OS? Aaaaah, the wittiness of it all. I almost blew a gasket yesterday thinking my family's wireless connection was incompatible, until I remembered the old "dollar sign" trick from H-drive access in Kenyon's mac labs. Silly, silly, nonintuitive Apple tricks!

Which (finally!) brings us up to the present, minus some unfortunate gaps particularly in the "family vacation in Deutschland" area. I've been buying stuff and making a pile of things to bring to Chicago, although the serious packing and sorting through old stuff has yet to begin in earnest. I'm meeting a bunch of the St. Louis crowd tomorrow night, and then heading to DeKalb for the weekend with Mike and his folks to help him move. I'll only have until the following weekend to get everything in order for my move, so time is actually rather short. I guess that means I should quit typing and do something useful with my time. I hope to get internet access set up at my new apartment as soon as possible, but if I dissapear for another while that might be my excuse. Tschüssi, all!