The first week of classes has already ended. It went well, and I like my classes so far. All seem really interesting, though we do have a lot (and by that I mean a lot) of reading to do. Since I have not been in the mood to read since February or March, I never made it past the first 60 pages (out of 760) of the book by Leslie Marmon Silko we are reading in my Am Lit Hauptseminar. Luckily, it seemed that the professor did not actually expect us to have finished it, and we will be reading it together in the next six weeks. The two American Literature Proseminars (1 & 2) will be a lot of work. I am not taking them for credit but out of interest, and I am very excited to learn more about these topics, but it will be a lot of work. The professor is using Moodle, the elearning platform of my university, and I think it is really cool that we can access all course material online. I did not even know we had that portal, who would have thought Heidelberg University would actually try to catch up with the 21st century?!

On Thursday I handed in my Erasmus application for Barcelona and Granada. I really hope I will get accepted. I saw that UB also accepts short-term students from abroad (independently, not through an exchange program), so if I do not get an Erasmus scholarship, I will look into that. I would have to pay tuition but here I do too, so it would probably even out (I would not pay tuition here during that semester).

On Monday, I cleaned the hallway and bathroom. It took me three hours, but now it is really nice and clean plus I made €30. I would not have thought it would take that long, but I was very thorough, I cleaned literally everything in the bathroom. I spent the next 24 hours with a headache from all the cleaning detergents, but in the end it was worth it. The bathroom is clean and Nicole is now moved out for good, so there is no one to mess it up again. She never came back to clean her room, but she sent her keys in the mail saying she has no time to clean (yeah right) and to keep the deposit. How lazy can someone be?
The most unbelievable thing is she seriously left her cat here! The poor thing has probably not had a lot to eat in the past two weeks. How cruel and irresponsible! The landlords are feeding him for now, but they will call the animal shelter soon to have him picked up. I feel so bad for the cat and I do not understand why she got him in the first place; she didn’t even have him for a year! And how can you just move and leave the cat behind? That is really beyond me!

Yesterday I was finally done with taking my medication. I have an ENT appointment on Monday, so I will see then how things are. I am just glad I no longer have to take three different medications every day. I called the blood donation center here earlier this week, and they told me I cannot donate blood for four weeks because of the cortisone I have been taking. I want to start donating thrombocytes and for that you have to do a regular blood donation first, and then a plasma donation, and then if you qualify for all the criteria, you can donate thrombocytes.

Other than that I have just been working, hanging out with friends and enjoying the beautiful weather. On Wednesday I met up with Tamara who I know from LiveJournal. She is from Brazil and moved to Karlsruhe last summer. We went to the Marstall-Café and had a really good time talking. I was really impressed with how good her German has gotten in the short amount of time she has been here. I hope that we will be able to meet again sometime soon. She is a really nice girl.

Well, I will end this here now. I am thinking I should get started on the reading for next week, or maybe I will watch a movie. Speaking of which, the other day I watched Los Amantes del Círculo Polar with Bea. I don’t know if I had mentioned it here before (as I had seen it before), but it is a really good movie, beautiful, romantic and tragic. You should see it.

P.S. Congratulations Tanja & Sean on the birth of your son Finn Alexander!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 23:42 and is filed under Books, Friends, Life, Movies & TV, Roomies, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.