Pretty Much all Done with Classes

Well, I just got out of my last engineering lecture of this winterim semester, ever!!!

I know, I know, I know, everyone warned me about how it'd start out slow and I'd be scared shitless of doing this, but then I'd just wake up one day and love it and wince at how fast my trip would come to a close...and here we are, staring at only four days between me and my homecoming. :|

Our schedule for each of the past weeks was four hours of German every morning, break for an hour lunch, and then a 4-hour engineering lecture in the afternoon. I mean, the schedule was much more sporadic than that, when considering day trips here and there. But, today was our last 'normal' day. Tomorrow is Thursday, and all classes are cancelled for the foreign exchange students because we are taking our last day trip/excursion to Udenhausen, a windmill farm, to investigate and learn about the energy-saving science behind windmills. The tour runs from 9 AM to 5:30 PM, so no German class OR engineering class tomorrow. :)

Friday is our last-last day, and we have our German final exam in the morning, the standard break for lunch, and then a vaguely labeled "Presentations" on our syllabus, for Friday afternoon. I am not sure what those are about, unless the art students (whom have been working on their exhibits this whole time that we've been in our matching engineering lectures) are going to be presenting their final compilations to us all?

Friday evening, we have our closing banquet ceremony and receival of certificates. It is supposed to be this big to-do, fancy hoo-ha, but I am sure it will all be fun.

Then, on Saturday morning, people start leaving already!!! Steve, Scott, Zach, Ryan, Jeni...they all take off, leaving Sara and I behind to explore one city in Germany of our choice on Saturday and into Saturday night, until we fly out on Sunday afternoon.

We are contemplating just staying with our host families for one last day of rest on Saturday; or traveling to Frankfurt and spending the day there instead, being ready to fly out of the Frankfurt airport on Sunday...or the one last idea that just came up today, to travel to a city between Kassel and Frankfurt, called Cologne. It is apparently a really old, classic German village that has some charming buildings and ritzy ol' castles that are ornate and stunning. We were thinking about going to see it and staying up all day Saturday, riding the train through the German countryside to Frankfurt overnight on Sautrday (sleeping on the train), and being ready to fly out of the Frankfurt airport on Sunday afternoon. We'll have our jet lag all remedied, too: we'll be dog-tired from only sleeping lightly on the train, so we should just konk out on the 9 hr, 50 min plane ride back to the States.

I don't know...I don't mean to sound so scatterbrained in this post, but I've learned with this trip, that in order to seize things by the moment, you have to be ready to be spontaneous and run just a little bit to make sure you get through on time. Plans change every five minutes, and that's because we're all thinking on overdrive to make the most logical, clever plans. It's just that, when you sit back and listen to us think out loud and contradict each other, we sound like complete bimbos.

But in the end, face it: we pull it off and we know how to take care of ourselves and live it up. :) Yay!