Day 92 - Palm Sunday

Wow. I've been here 92 days. In only eight more, I'll be hitting triple digits. That means on Monday, I'll have spent 100 days abroad...and I'll be in Paris! How did my life get to be so fantastical? Anyway, for those of you how wanted to see pictures of the gardens, I'm sorry but I'll have to disappoint. The weather today was awful for walking around outside, and I still had signals homework to do for tomorrow. Instead, I woke up this morning and got ready for the day. Just as I was leaving my room, I realized I had forgotten my keys. Now, I don't know if I've gone into detail on this before, but the way my house/apartment is set up in that the ground floor is a shop. The next floor is where my family lives, separated from the staircase by a locked door. On the top floor is me, in what I think used to be an attic or storage space. That means that I need my keys to get in and out of the main living area, which is where I was sure I had left them. Also, the doors lock behind you when you enter the staircase area, so you really need a key to get in and out. So you see why losing my keys was so bad, especially when my family wasn't home to let me back in. Luckily, I knew that they were coming back that night, so didn't worry about it that much.

Instead, I walked to the bus stop to catch a ride into Bonn for mass. Over the weeks, I've gotten used to the German mass and can even say most of the common prayers in broken German. When I arrived, they handed me what looked like a clipping from a bush. I thanked them and looked around in confusion for what I was supposed to do with it when I realized that it was my "palm" for Palm Sunday. It cracked me up and I played with my "palm" the entire time, though not making palm crosses or braids because...there was just no way to make it work. After mass, I wanted to go to the gardens, but I took one look at the cloudy sky and decided that no, I didn't feel like shivering myself to bits in the cold wind with no sun to warm me up and went to AIB instead. It took a while to get in, but I eventually had the whole studio to myself. Don't worry, one of the Viz kids let me in. But do you know how liberating it is to have a place that's all to yourself that you feel like is yours? A place where you can sing as loud as you want or dance as crazily as you feel without the fear of disrupting someone else's studying. Alas, it wasn't to last and I was soon letting other people into my temporary sanctuary so they could try and scratch out a glimmer of understanding in our homework. Wow, those last few sentences were almost poetic. I must be subconsciously getting in touch with my romantic side or something.

My little "palm" from church

Anyway, I told the newcomers about my little "palm" and we had a great time laughing over it before getting down to business. The next few hours were spent in the middle of homework as we desperately tried to understand the steps we needed to take to get to the answer. There were a few stress relief breaks where I went into the next room to burst out in song. Can you tell I miss being able to sing freely? Ah well, I go home in only...3 weeks!!? It's almost over? I know I miss home, but Europe is pretty cool. Everything is so close, I mean, I was just casually talking about going to Paris for the weekend! Who does that? Wow.

In other news, I got tomorrows homework done as well as 2/3 of the next one done. I would have done the last problem, but I took one look at the work I would need to do for the problem and decided that I had done enough for the day. I went home soon after that in the hopes that my family would be back already and was able to let me in because I forgot my keys. When I told them, they got this alarmed look in their eyes and helped me look for it, but we couldn't find it in the main part of the house. I took another look in my room to see if it had gotten hidden at some point, and I found them, which is really good considering it's how I can get in and out of the house. I spent the night just hanging out with them before coming up to my room and working on this. Tomorrow is more class, but the day after we get to cruise the Rhein, which will be super fun.

This was just too pretty not to put in here. It's the view from my walk home

See you later!
Erin Z