Entschuldigen Sie Bitte! Please excuse me!

Now that it has been just shy of an eternity since I last posted, I am updating this pathetic blog! Honsetly, I did try to write something around 2 weeks ago, about my birthday and whatnot, which I wrote in a Word document, and then saved, and never finished/posted. So here is that post first:

Wednesday, May 14th
Well, it has been 1 week and three days since I hurt my leg, and though it’s gotten better, it’s still pretty ouchy, and I still can’t feel my toes. I think I’m going to go back to the doctor tomorrow, and hopefully get some more advice. The good news is that if I can just figure out the bus plan, I won’t have to pay anything, because you only have to pay a co-pay once every quarter in Germany, which I already paid for my first visit.

Even though I’ve been pretty confined to the very near vicinity, my life hasn’t been all just sitting in my room—thank God!

On the Tuesday directly following my verletzte leg episode, I had my 21st birthday. It was just about as anti-climactic as possible, turning 21 in a country where everyone 16 and up drinks beer by the bucketful. Therefore, to bring the irony to its crescendo, I decided to have a 21st birthday party completely devoid of all alcohol.

So on Tuesday afternoon, Alex Becker, mocktail mixer extraordinaire, went to the local grocery store and cleaned them out of juice, soft drinks, and the like. That night, we had a huge shindig in my kitchen, followed by billiards, kicker (Fussball), and cards. All in all, a wonderful time, despite my hobbling.

The best part about Tuesday though was getting to open The Package. This was the package that had come a couple of days early, and that with great strain on my self-control, I had managed to avoid opening. In the package were a plethora of letters, a picture drawn by Mercy, and an amazing book. It took me about 40 minutes to open everything and read the book, and was just completely wonderful.

…………

That was the last I wrote, and now it is a week and a half later, and I am finally posting it. Terrible. In self-defense though, life has just become totally crazy lately, and so I haven’t had much time to write anything. Still, I apologize for the barren wasteland that my blog has become.

Since then, a lot has happened. Perhaps the biggest change since then is that I now have a new roommate. The David moved out into his own room, and last Friday, Yousif moved in. I must admit that at first I was sort of upset that David was moving out, because I assumed it was because he didn’t like living with me. I now know that is false. It’s actually been an interesting culture-comparison, how German students really don’t like living with someone else. Back at my College, the only people who don’t have roommates are RAs, don’t have any friends to room with, or are antisocial. Ok, so that’s an exaggeration, but the general thought process is that living with people is fun, and many people end up becoming great friends with their roommate(s). Here though, the most basic expectation for a room is that it is a single room. Double rooms are very rare, and usually only for married couples.

So now I have a roommate from Yemen (for those of you who didn’t take Doctor Thomas’ ethnic music class and had to memorize a map of the world, Yemen is a country in the Middle East, right under Saudia Arabia, and right next to Oman). The first day, he asked me which direction was West, which I was only able to tell him because I remember taking a picture of the sunset from my bedroom window a few months ago, and I remembered which building got in my way. He is Muslim, and five times a day, he roles out his little prayer rug towards the West, while I sit on my bed and pray for him. It’s a pretty interesting situation, but a really cool one too, and really awesome, considering I am leaving Germany in July to go to London to learn about missions to Muslims. I get a pretty phenomenal boot camp, I guess.

In other news, my classes are picking up, and I’m starting to panic looking at the month of June, because my workload is now enough that I actually have homework that takes more than 30 minutes to do, and I have a 5 page paper coming up. the problem is that I am going to be in Marburg a total of 6.5 days between June 1 to June 14. I will be traveling all over the EU, to Luxemburg, Paris, and Barcelona. It will be a blast, but also really intense, and my paper is due on the 17th. That pretty much gives me this week to get it mostly done. Eek.

That’s pretty much the summary, except for the Party. Friday night we had a party here in the Schloß. Each person who lives here was allowed to invite 5 people. I invited Alex and Ali, and then David, a (different from my old roommate) German student from my Fencing course who Alex and I have become pretty good friends with. He is pretty awesome, and the only German I know who doesn’t drink, because he doesn’t like the taste of beer. So it’s nice to hang out with him. Elias, one of the Italians from my Sprachkurs also came, which was nice, since I really haven’t seen him barely at all since the end of March. Luckily for me, my guests were tired out by like 1:30am, and went home, so I could go to bed. The party went on for another 3 hours or so, which would have made it hard to sleep, if I hadn’t been totally whooped.

Oh yeah, I guess I should give an update on my poor leg. Well, it’s better, but not all the way, which is worrisome. I tried to go back to the doctor on Friday to get it checked up on, but German doctors are lazy (ok, probably not really, but I’m bitter) and he wasn’t in, because it was a “Bridge day,” which means that since Thursday was catholic holiday, for which everything was closed, the ol’ Doc decided to not go to work on Friday, thereby having a 4 day weekend. So I’m going to try to go tomorrow morning and have him look at my leg and give a verdict.

My verdict is something may be wrong, because it’s been now exactly 3 weeks since I had the misfortune to come between an American who thought he was supposed to be playing rugby and the Fußball goal, and exactly 11 days longer than the doc said it would take for me to be back on my pins and feeling fine. I can walk without crutches now, and even scamper across the street if I need to avoid insane German motorists, but I scamper with a limp, and after a long day of walking, my leg hurts a lot. All that, and my pinky toe is still asleep, which can’t be a good sign. I would say it is no longer asleep, maybe in a coma or something. My main hope is that I don’t end up with a lame leg for the rest of my life just because I misunderstood a German doctor.

That’s all for now, though I will try very hard to do a better job at keeping this thing up to date. I also have some photos, which I will be uploading for your viewing pleasure.

Now I’m off to try and write a 5-page paper on a book I haven’t finished reading, and which I fully intend on leaving unfinished. Still, the paper must be written. Ah, the life of a student…