Amerikaner in Deutschland: Long Time Gone

Please forgive my recent lack of updates. The past couple of weeks have been a bit hectic, but I'm back. I'm sure you've all been waiting patiently for another post.

So here we go.

As I alluded to in my last update, I received the awful news from back home of my great friend Bryan's passing. Bryan had been fighting cancer for little shy of a year when that damned disease finally took him. This is the second person very close to me (the other being my father) that has been claimed by cancer in the span of three years. Needless to say, I'm a bit sick (no pun intended) of the disease.

But rather than mope about, I'm reminded of Bryan's "Activities" on Facebook.

"Activities: Life.
That's my big one right now. It will probably stay that way forever. I do some other stuff, but I like to live mostly."

I know that Bryan would like me to continue to make the most of this opportunity, so I'm going to do my damnest to do so.

As I mentioned, the past couple of weeks have been hectic. I flew back home for a week after hearing the news in order to go to the services. It was nice to see my family and friends and get to be home for a while. It's kind of a unique opportunity for a student studying abroad to go back home only to come back a week later. Seeing how things have changed, and more importantly, how my view of things has changed since leaving the country a few months ago was important. It is impossible to not compare the different aspects and customs of your home nation and your study abroad nation. It makes you appreciate the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between both.

After returning to Karlsruhe and sleeping the majority of the day, I was back to work on my design project. My team was a bit behind on the different goals we needed to complete for the coming Monday's meeting. The weekend was full of hard work and attempted hard work. I say "attempted hard work" because various factors (servers being down, computer labs being locked) prevented the team from getting any CAD work done on Saturday. Sunday was spent drawing for about 10 hours and trying to ignore the blaring of car horns outside after Germany's demolishing of England in the World Cup. Monday, the team gathered very early and quickly attempted to finish as much CAD as possible. The final result was a scooter with an full drivetrain and chassis but no side panels. This seemed to not matter much, though, as our tutor never looked at the team's CAD. We still received pretty good grades, so I was happy. I was even happier that the project is done. I'll attempt to post pictures of the scooter sometime.

Wednesday brought about a visit with about 25 fellow ID students to Europapark. Europapark is an amusement park near Freiburg, Germany which is about an 1 1/2 hours away by train. Each area of the park is themed after a different European country from Germany to Iceland. The park was a lot of fun, though on my second trip on Silver Star, a tall and fast coaster, my cellphone decided that it wasn't comfortable in my pocket and jumped out. Zach apparently heard a crunch, so I'm assuming that mein Handy ist kaputt.