I've made it

Hi Everyone,

I've finally made it to Berlin and I love it. I'm living in the same apartment with one of my friends from the program with a 55 year old woman and her son. Our apartment is right off of one of the main areas of town, but it's in a neighborhood that seems very nice, quiet, and safe. The area I live in is called Charlottenburg, named after the wife of an old king. My apartment is right by the subway station and everything is quite easy to get to. My roommate and I have our own rooms. The lady I live with is named Yvonne and is extremely nice...she does our laundry for us even—she refuses to let us do it ourselves. In fact, when I came home tonight, all my laundry had been washed and folded and put on my bed. Plus I have a wireless signal in my room, but it’s very weak—it goes in and out a lot. But if worse comes to worse, I just have to take my computer into my roommate’s room and get on to his signal. So things are working out great. I really like Berlin a lot.

We had stake conference today, and that was fun to see so many other church members. The place was so full that I ended up sitting on the stage, which was slightly uncomfortable, but better than not having a seat at all. When I was in Salzburg, I was surprised at how much of the testimony meeting I could understand. But here at stake conference, the talks were a little more complex than the testimonies, so I understood a lot less. But I’m sure it will get better. Then later tonight, I went to a broadcast of Henry B Eyring’s address given last week at BYU, which was really good. All in all, I spent about 10 hours at the church today, and it felt great.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this in a blog, but about a week and a half ago, I woke up with a very sore tail bone. I didn’t think too much of it until two days later when I woke up in some of the worst pain of my life. Bending down to put my socks on was as uncomfortable an exercise as I can imagine. Anyway, to make a long story short, I at first thought I had just bruised my tail bone somehow, then I thought I had a spider bite at the end of my tail bone, then I thought it was some kind of cyst. Last Friday I finally went to the doctor to see what it was…turns out it was an in-grown hair that got pretty deeply infected. So tomorrow I’ll go to the hospital in the morning, have the infection taken out of my sore, then stay in the hospital over night and come home Tuesday. Kind of weird. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed in a hospital overnight before, but this will be pretty exciting. The doctor said that this is extremely common and that it’s a very simple procedure to fix—they just want me to stay overnight just to be sure that everything works out ok. So this will be good to finally have this fixed; it’s been pretty uncomfortable for the last little while.

I don’t start school at the Goethe Institute for another two weeks, so I’ll have to use this time wisely to get ahead of the game on all the other stuff I have going on. Our main, on-going assignment for the semester is a “research portfolio” where we have to write one-page papers on 100 different things to see in the city, i.e., six gothic churches, five paintings by Dürer, etc. It sounds like a lot—and it is—but if I can keep on it, writing a one-page paper every once in a while won’t be so bad.

I’ll post again soon. Lots of love,

Jordan

Again, here are some more pictures

Here I am with the Neuschwanstein Castle in the background


This is a picture of part of my group when we went to the top of the apls and hiked down. It was freezing cold! I liked this picture becuase it looks all misty and fairytail-like


This is the Doku-Zentrum in Nuremberg where lots of the Nazi trials took place. We went through the museum and it was really well-done. It's hard anytime you talk about learning about Nazi things, you can't say it was "good" because it's sad. But well-done works, I think. I thought it was kind of interesting that a fair was going on right next to it.


This is an original Luther Bible printed in 1524. I love seeing this kind of stuff. It's in a place called the Wartburg, a castle in Eisenach Germany. Luther was housed there for a while in order to keep safe from the Catholic Church.


This is a really pretty, typical southern Germany Alpine house.