random updates

Well, I'm going in reverse on the updating, but first things first - Amani is here! She got here on Tuesday morning and we've been having a great time together. She's in Germany (traveling a good bit) for 30 days, so she's not in a hurry to see every touristic thing right away, so we've been able to just chill and hang out together, and it's been awesome. I forgot how good it feels to chat with Amani (in person!). It's quite a treat.

Secondly, I visited another random city - Leipzig, which was the second largest city in East Germany (after East Berlin). It was a brief excursion for one of my classes, my "comparative history of East and West Germany" class, to see a new exhibit at the Center for Contemporary History on East and West German perspectives on each other. It was interesting. Afterward was lunch with the prof and class, then half the group went home and the other half stayed to visited the recently opened Panometer, a 150m circumference, 40m tall panorama of Rome ca. 300 A.D. Some other kids had heard about it and wanted to see it while we were already in Leipzig, so that's why we went. I went with that group and it was pretty interesting, though slightly awkward because I really felt like an outsider within the group (even with the prof, whose actually not a prof yet, just has his MA and is less than 10 years older than me). I think part of it is because those kids have a lot of classes together because they're the same major, but even still... I don't know, I guess I'm just "different" in some way. But it was okay. Mostly just interesting to observe the situation.

So that adds one more city to my list of European cities visited. Those are the main events that've happened in my life lately. Pastor's birthday was last Monday, so he had a big party on Saturday afternoon/evening after church, which was a blast. And little baby Heidi (almost 11mos!) can stand up now!!! It's so crazy!!! She's just a cute as ever though. =)

That's really all the "news" news.