The Adventure Begins...

The impetus for this blog: I met a guy in the park whose last name is Bach. How crazy is that? (P.S. On the German-language keyboard, "y" and "z" are switched, so I guess it's pretty crayz.)

Anyway (or anzwaz), I'm here. I'm finally here. After years of dreaming of living in Germany, I'm here. Boarding Lufthansa flight 417 from D.C. to Frankfurt, my heart was fluttering. I've flown internationally before, but this time I knew I wasn't going to -- after a few weeks of ooh-ing and ah-ing at beautiful castles and cathedrals -- simply return to the land of we-don't-have-castles-except-in-Disneyland-but-that-doesn't-count. I slept nearly the whole way (naturally) and, after landing and being picked up by the CBYX team, slept another couple hours on the way to Budenheim, a small town near Frankfurt. There, we spent our first night in Germany here:

Now, our plane landed at 5:35AM. And we were strongly discouraged from napping. So my first day in Germany, I felt like I was in a dream. Not a silver-lined, warm-fuzzies dream, wherein I have unlimited access to ice cream and Audrey Hepburn lends me her wardrobe from Funny Face. More like a state of half-awareness, a blurred perception of reality, a twilight zone where SO MUCH HAPPENS but only five minutes have passed. By some miracle I hit the sack at 10:40PM.

The next day we boarded vehicles for transport to our language school, which in my case, was to Cologne. By the way, said vehicle was a Mercedes-Benz.

Granted, it was a bus for 40.

First day of school is on Monday, but already I've spoken so many consecutive hours of German, chock full of mistakes, that I've come to this realization:

I'm not here to become fluent in German.

I'm here to make lots of mistakes.

:)