This week has been fairly uneventful. After two months in Germany, one of those in Wuppertal, and 2 weeks of which were regular classes, life has become a little more routine. In some ways it is good. My language skills are good enough to communicate with most people in every-day situations, and I feel comfortable enough with life here, that every day isn't always a new adventure.

A couple interesting things did happen this week.

Last Sunday I got a message online from Charles Schrag, a friend of mine from Bethel. He said he had a couple of days off, and was going to come to Wuppertal. I told him if he needed it, I had a floor he could sleep on. He showed up on Wednesday evening. It was kind of a surprise to me. I thought he was going to meet up first with Tobias Ruhle, a former Bethel-Wuppertal exchange participant, and possibly spend the night with him. But it all worked out fine, I was just glad I was at home at that time to meet him. That night we went to a little bar near the university, and caught up. Charle's German is really pretty good. He has been here for only 3 months, but he can understand a lot, and speak pretty well too. Charles has been here in Germany with Intermenno, a work exchange program, and lives about 3 hours away by train. He was here until yesterday. Mostly we hung out with other internationals in the evenings. I didn't really give him a grand tour or anything. I think he was glad to be able to spend some time with people more his own age.

A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from Bettina Hofmann, the coordinator of the Bethel-Wuppertal exchange, and American Studies professor at Wuppertal. She asked me if Rosie and I could say a bit about Bethel for her class. I said I could. That happened on Friday. I left my language course a bit early to go to her lecture at 12:00. Others were there to introduce schools that they had studied abroad at too. I got up and gave a pretty good introduction. (Since it was an Amerikanistik class the presentation was in English, so I kind of had the upper hand.) After the class, I went to go eat in the cafeteria. Since it was already 2pm by then, nobody I knew was there. I sat by myself, and half-way through my meal two students came up to me and told me that my introduction made them want to go to Bethel, and they asked me a little bit more about Bethel. So I hope I was a good representative. Giving tours this summer at the BC admissions office definitely helped. I was glad that some people were interested, even though we are a college of only 500 people in the middle of Kansas. Not what Germans picture when they think of America.

That is my little update for this week.

--Austin

me 'n charles
photo by: me