First week in Germany

So I'm finally getting used to waking up early every morning. I don't take 8 am classes due to the fact that I tend to sleep really late...and so I usually sleep through my first class, but I dont think that´s an option here. Our host mom makes us breakfast every morning, so that is amazing. I've already gotten really used to sitting down at the table for about 30 minutes in the morning, eating and talking. It's a great way to start the day. I don´t know what I´ll do when I don´t have someone to cook me two meals a day back in the states! It'll be really sad, because Heidi is an amazing cook. I want to take her back with me! She's so much fun.

This last week was alot of fun. I'm so glad I've gotten to know everyone in our group. The hospital on Thursday was really interesting. I really wish I had gotten to see the surgeries, everyone keeps talking about it and it sounds like it was amazing to watch. I've never seen a surgery before and Priss told me that he explained everything he was doing. We got to go to a research lab, which to be honest, the guy talked way too much. But the ICU and the medical devices were cool. I loved looking at the artificial heart and the L VADS. I just wish he had more time to talk about them to us. I would have loved to have learned more, I thought it was really interesting.

I had fun in Cologne too, and even though I'm incredibly scared of heights, it was awesome to be on top of the tower in the Cathedral; the view of the city was great. The winding staircases were crazy! I thought they were never going to end coming down from the top. I'm slightly clostrophic too, so I think they seemed longer than they really were. The Cathedral was beautiful...we probably took a million pictures.

We thought we would be smart leaving for Amsterdam earlier from Cologne, so we were going to get on the 6pm train, but it didn't come until 7pm anyway! We waited in the train station for about an hour. While waiting, we met "Stewy." Stewy tagged along with us the entire time in Amsterdam! I feel kind of sorry for him now because we weren't very nice to him in the end and if I were traveling alone, I'd probably want to make friends too. But he was annoying! Amsterdam was awesome. We went to the weed museum, the Rijks museum, the Heineken Experience, rode paddle boats, and went to the Anne Frank house. The Rijks museum was awesome. The last painting we saw was Rembrant's Night Watch, and they had a stage in front of it. They used lights to highlight certain figures on the painting, and it literally looked like there were people on the stage. They had music, lighting, rain, and thunder too. So it was like it was telling a story. They also had a separate room first with a video explaining what the painting meant. So that was something I'm definately glad I got to see. The Heineken Experience was really cool too. The bartender brought us free beers and we got extra tokens from some other people too. We also bought the Heineken glasses and had our names engraved, and bought some for friends too. We stayed on a house boat...that was an experience. The rooms were tiny! But it was alot of fun.

I`m glad the weather has finally cooled off. The first couple days here were horribly hot without air conditioning. People think that we're used to it because we live in Texas, but we have air conditioners! Anyway, I can't wait for this week!