Italy during Germany on way to Great Britain

So, another month or so has passed and I am finally posting the third stretch of my trip to Europe. My friend Nicola had invited me to stay with him for a week in my old home town Vicenza, and of course I seized the opportunity. Even though it is not exactly easy on my pocket, spending time in Italy is not only good for my soul (I so love it!) but is essential for my language skills which are the only assetts getting me jobs in Germany during the summers.


So, without further ado, here are some stunning pictures of a trip that started out rainy and then turned sunny. My trip also started in Vicenza, to Venice, to Milano, to Vicenza... It was great!




It was kind of funny, though, because I had packed the wrong clothes, again, and had to borrow jeans and sweaters from Nicola's mom Natalina. It was she and I who talked a lot after dinner while watching TV, which gave me the practice I needed! How exhausting and exhilarating at the same time! They are such a lovely family...

My Exciting / Expensive Trip to Europe Continued

I cannot believe another full month has gone by before I find the time to continue my blog on what happened BEFORE I returned to Texas... Well, I promised I would fill you in and so I do. Just bear with me and enjoy the excitement of having to wait on updates! (Now that's what I call Positive Thinking!) So, here we go.




After Freiburg, I worked at the tradeshow called DRUPA in Duesseldorf for two weeks straight. That's right, no weekends off or anything. I was really lucky to have found this job, though, that allows me to work in one long block instead of breaking up my summer into tiny little hectic pieces of working as a hostess, waitress, promoter or the like for two to four days in a row interrupted by continual searching for more employment to save up for the return flight's fare... But still, two weeks straight is stressful. Especially, if you stay with a friend and her 70 year old mother in a villa surrounded by a gate and the unusual schedule of that friend waking up at 5 a.m. to go to back to sleep at 10 p.m. I am really grateful she let me stay with her, considering that the trip from Moenchengladbach was supposed to save me commuting time to Duesseldorf, whereas Gerhard's place in Cologne/Rath would have supposedly taken me longer. In the end, I am not so sure that it really helped a lot (since her place was located at the end of the following itinerary: train from Duesseldorf to Moenchengladbach, train from Moenchengladbach to Rheydt, bus from Rheydt to house, walk to house for 10 minutes) and I certainly felt continuously bad about messing up Claudia's schedule and ringing her out of bed at night just to let me into the house...





Often, there were no buses running anymore and I walked from Rheydt trainstation to the house or vice versa, if it was a weekend... I felt like I was back in highschool with a curfew and no vehicle. However, she and her mom were lovely hosts and spoiled me whereever they could and I am very grateful for that! Often though, I chose to spend the night at my colleague's place so that I could go out with him and my other colleague without having to worry about waking Claudia. Overall, it worked out just fine and it was a fun two weeks!




This fun was mostly due to my colleagues and I going out every night and enjoying the pleasures of German beer! I indulged pretty much every night, though with Alster (a mix of beer and Sprite), as to save up the taste to last for another whole year in the States! I also tried to eat German every day and that might be why I have not really lost any weight while I was there, despite my irregular meals.




After that stretch of work and before setting out for Italy, I met up with my long friend Sarah Mueller with whom I used to share a horse in Braunschweig. It is incedible how small the world is, but we actually ran into each other one night before even managing to meet up after the show to catch up on things! She and her boyfriend were riding their bikes while I was going for a walk with Frank along the Rhine... Which is something we did every night, by the way, because neither of us knew people there and would have spent the evenings pretty much alone otherwise. This way, we got to hang out around Germany's romantic spots, such as the ruin of Friedrich I's Barbarossa Burg in Kaiserswerth, for example. For some one as tradition-hungry as me, that was great, of course! That is me in the picture standing in the castle...

And on a sidenote: If you think the dog that Claudia is depicted with is normal-sized, think again!


And just some more images from beautiful Germany...


Kaiserswerth Old Center:

Bathroom Art:

My Exciting / Expensive Trip to Europe

So, I have finally finished my extremely stressful spring semester, taken off to Germany, freaked out about return flight prices, worked a trade show, brushed up my Italian in Vicenza, seen my godchild and family, flown to Wales and London to present at conferences, and returned to summer session II in Lubbock, which by now is also almost over. In light of all this, I apologize for not keeping up with the blog... I hope you understand.



I promise to fill you in, though. Let's just start with the end of the semester and my one-week rest, only interrupted by my daily outbreaks of panic about skyrocketing flight prices versus no secure summer employment. After finishing my endless paper on Sweeney Todd and the Gothic, a topic I could have written much more on if I had had the time (Dr. Whitlark made me stop at 25 pages!), I had one week to get everything ready to leave for Germany.




After flying in to Frankfurt where I could only stay with my friend for one night and had to leave her house again at 8 a.m. the next morning, I shared a ride to Freiburg, where I stayed with my friend Tanzbaer (Allison knows him, don't you?!).






There, as mentioned before, I tried to read, sleep, and not kill myself about the prospect of having to stay in Germany for not being able to afford the flight back home. Everyday I looked online, the prices for plane tickets had risen yet again, but I could still not book my return flight back to Germany in 2009 far enough in advance, making the situation absolutely impossible. Everyday I researched, freaked out and finally went for long and beautiful walks in the Black Forest. Tanzbaer lived in Horben, which is a tiny town outside of Freiburg on a mountain from which you can see to France and Switzerland, while still being in Germany. So, to distract myself, I climbed on trees, which was really fun. I had not done that in years, mostly because there are hardly any trees left to climb in nowadays.




I also had some interesting experiences with the German small town bus service of our glorious public transportation system. Every time I thought I knew when the bus left and I hiked downhill for 20 minutes to catch it, it turned out that the time was only valid for a weekday, or for the morning, or whenever school was in session. In other words, I spent a whole lot of time running to catch the bus just to have an extremely long wait ahead of me anyway...




After Freiburg I went back to Frankfurt for one day to see my mom, before sharing another ride to my friend Gerhard, the minister, in Cologne. But more of that next time around.
Some last impressions of Freiburg... Now that Tanzbaer has moved on to South America...

The Monumental Heap

For the end of March, I do not have much to report. It snowed and it turned summerly warm and then it snowed again a couple of times. The photo is out of my office window counting snowflakes. The other one is out of the English Department's bay windows...

I am apartment shopping, but evidently wasting my time, because it is hard to find an affordable place with a similarly nice view!

Easter day was more productive than the other days of Spring Break, but it was terribly lonely. I don't like being lonely on Easter.

One of my major papers is done and presented, but I don't know how I feel about it.

Talking papers, my article "Ben Jonson's 'To Penshurst' - The Artifact of a Divided Mind" will appear in the University of Bucharest Review 4/2007 issue this May. The announcement is on our department's website: http://www.english.ttu.edu/, in case you want to verify the news.

Other than that, I am fighting a stalking nightmare who still has too much power over me. See photo below for an attempt to direct my anger towards something inanimate yet symbolic. The relics of the "orange book." Maybe I should repeat this cathartic shredding of pages until this from borderline personality suffering being is purged out of my system for good.

Albuquerque, New Mexico

It is interesting how you can work so much ahead only to return to total chaos and the realization that you are now behind on everything... Time truly is relative and our actions in the world even more so...

New Mexican roads stretch long and I suggest driving them at night, when the peril of breaking down with your 15-year old truck is less striking!

The conference was fun! Despite the fact that the hostel dorm was overly heated and therefore gave me trouble sleeping, which resulted in a relapse of my flu, it was worth while. Although the conference was on popular culture which is not directly my field, it was awesome to see what all is out there! There were over 1,200 presenters and the amount of panels so immense that it took hours to browse through the program to figure out a daily schedule!

My own presentation on Willa Cather's My Antonia went well, although I had to cut the paper down to less than the regular presentation length of 20 minutes to allow for extra coughing breaks. I am not sure if people could still hear the last paragraph read in a voice that had completely vanished at that point, but the feedback I got overall was good.

The chair of the gender panel in which I presented, Mrs. Gypsey Teague, did a great job as chair and hostess alike. It was incredibly interesting to meet her and Marla. I can only hope to be working with her again in the future.

My colleagues and I had good conversations with just the right balance of business and small talk to make the conference a truly wonderful and valuable experience. To top it all off, the keynote speaker was Joy Harjo, who took the role literally and performed her poetry accompanied by music on the stage on Friday afternoon.

After the four days of input on the Grateful Dead, the unacknowledged rise of HIV infections within the heterosexual swinger communities of the US, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre movie adaptations, I walked around Albuquerque's Old Town to absorb some of the city's atmosphere outside the conference hotel and the hostel. It is a cute little part of town and definitely worth visiting! The people there are very friendly and enjoy talking with you to initiate you into the lore of the city that otherwise remains unheard.

Once everything was over, I proceeded to go snowboarding in Sandia and Santa Fe. New Mexico, though very different from Utah, is fun to snowboard at and I thoroughly enjoyed my days out! Thus, I was prepared to face the trouble my students have caused for me with my supervisor during my absence and I had the stamina to survive that crazy week after my return! A big thanks to Ryan Thorpe and Jessicca Vidrine for covering my classes, too! Without you two, I would have not felt good about leaving my "kids" behind.

Sorry, I'm late...

Happy New Year, everybody!

I realize I am rather late with my blog post seeing that 2.5 months have passed since I last updated it... Hmm... Well, things have been crazy at the end of the semester with another visit to the dentist in Mexico, finals, and a break that was WAY too short! We only had three weeks and the first week did not quite count because I was still running around at school taking care of stuff. I did not even get into Christmas mood and had to force myself into it by wearing my Santa hat and buying my Christmas tree that by that time was already on sale... It only helped a little bit.

The real relaxation began with my trip to Salt Lake City, although my friend Allison really kept me busy there! I slept in a couple of times, but we basically went out every night. She introduced me to a bunch of her friends, all of whom are great! We also did a lot with her family, which was also much fun! They are all wonderful people who welcomed me warmly into their midst! So that week consisted of family movie nights, eating out with friends, going window shopping at the mall, snowboarding at Solitude, partying with Mormons, and basically falling in love with Salt Lake! It is such a wonderful city and totally different from what I expected! If destiny sweeps me that directions, I seriously will not mind anymore! What else can one ask for? There are wonderfully open-minded people, health food stores, the mountains with snow, and newly made friends! I was really sad to leave...

The rest of the break I spent trying to read ahead for the semester but was mostly side-tracked by my turbulent love life... Therefore, no news on that front.

January 8th, school started again. I feel already overwhelmed and behind in my work, mostly because I am normally ahead of things. Not anymore...

Now this month is almost over and I am preparing my trip to the conference in New Mexico in February. I will be presenting a paper on the gender panel and I will keep you updated on how it went.

Well, the only thing that keeps me sane right now is the memory of SLC. I cherish it and think of it whenever I need a boost. Thank you, Allison, for everything!

PS. Salsa dancing is picking up again, so that is good, too!