Merry Christmas everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ok yeah so I wait until Christmas until I write in my blog again, I'm pretty slack sorry. But christmas is done a bit differently with my bavarian/polish family. Today is indeed the 25th of December but the 24th is the big day when we do everything christmassy and today seems to be all about relaxing, sleeping and eating - BRILLLIAANTTT. Alex is currently doing a bit of study so I thought why not write a bit of my blog? A month has passed by so you can imagine I have a lot to say but I will try my very best to condense it.
Well first off I'm gonna write a bit about my birthday which was actually AWESOME! Thanks so much to Gina my NZ friend in Konstanz who dedicated herself to making my bday so much fun. I woke up and completely unexpectedly opened my curtains to find the whole of Konstanz covered completely in snow for the first time since I'd been there! It was so incredible - I ran around my apparment squealing and jumping and actually, consequently my bed has been broken for a month...still need to fix that.
Anyway so I opened pressies and then checked out the snow which is so light and fluffy here. Not the cold hard stuff I expected. I have now come to adore the snow EVEN THOUGH it has almost killed me so many times. Seriously the roads are so dangerous because of the snow but what is even more dangerous is simply walking - it is so slippery and I have to walk down a small hill every morning. Needless to say I've embarassingly face-planted a few times in true Jessie-style. Anyway, my birthday...I then went into the city and had spaghetti ice cream with some friends - it's ice cream made to look like spaghetti bolognese - sooo yum! Then we checked out the traditional christmas markets which are all over Germany and had only just begun. There they sell Gluehwein (mulled hot wine) which is just essential in the winter and have cute little stalls all decorated in lights and german food and the Konstanz one is directly on the lake shore - so cute! They even have a ship that is all lit up that you can go on. Ahhh I never thought I'd say I love winter but here, I really really do :D
Anyway, I'm not succeeding well on this whole shortening my blog thing. So, after spaghetti Eis I met Matt and Gina at Uni where we went mad and had a snowball fight while the germans judged us and our foreigness as usual. Gina and I then did a mega sprint up to the highest building at Uni for a gorgeous view of all the snow. Gina, Matt and I get the BW scholarship and my birthday was the day of the networking party in a town about 3 hours from Konstanz called Boeblingen (we immaturely found this hilarious). We took a massive bus there (such awesome snowy scenery) and to be honest, we thought it was going to be lame. But it wasn't at all!!! We got there are they gave a us plenty of Gluehwein, some goodybag things and took us into the venue which was a fancy smanzy hotel where every room strangely had an old classic car inside. Anyways, we soon found out the whole evening was about the open bar (very convinient on my birthday!!!), meeting other exchange students from all over the world, eating tonnes of food from the buffet and doing cute christmassy things like baking xmas cookies in little ovens. We went kinda crazy on everything mentioned and consequently slept off a premature hang-over on the bus ride back. We got back at 12 at night and Gina convinced me that on my birthday we NEEDED to party and she was right - twas mean azz. So we went to my room, had some sneaky gin, sung 'loyal' and nz hip hop songs all the way into town and hit the 'disko' Blechenerei which involved me and Gina arguing with the security the whole night over a drink bottle, going to Maccas with some random germans and getting baloons and curly fries, encountering some not so pleasant people on the way home and finally crashing at Ginas.
On a less interesting note - I was swamped with Uni work all month. Drew, Natacha and I had our international human resource presentation in which we talked about cross-cultural communication for over an hour. I also had to do some work for aid and development studies and we did a simulation of how a UN conference might operate which lasted 4 hours and was very intense. My group represented teh EU which was good because the EU is doing well aid-wise so hardly anyone could attack us. America and Japan got ripped to shreads.
Speaking of Natacha, she has once again been holding some lovely french parties with genuine french cheese, dishes, wine etc :) Diana has also held some great polish parties with typical polish dishes and vodka and recently, Faye held a Greek party with ammaaazing greek food and a really strong alcohol that most of us couldn't even stomach.
As an aside, I must mention how awesome the christmas period is in Germany. Everything is lit up, snow everywhere, the street decorations are pretty lavish and it is impossible to escape the christmas spirit. Yet, I will admit, I did crave the NZ summer christmas quite a bit last week. It is a strange feeling, all my life I watched american and european xmas movies and songs about 'a white xmas' etc and it seemed to me that that was how a 'real' xmas should be but nope, I've come to realise that a real xmas for me is the beach, jandals, a bbq, BYC and the smell of sunblock. I'm lovin xmas here but realised that even though it's different in NZ, we have it damn good too! The other day Chandni, her friend from England and I made our first snowman which we named 'Wolfgang', we then watched miracle on 34th St which I'd never seen :D Oh yeah, a few weeks ago we had a big xmas dinner of a lot of the exchange students at an italian restaurant in Konstanz, I hung out on a table of mostly Irish folk and it was lovely.
Ok so I'll write all about Germany in this post and Portugal in another. Aside from uni work, I've mostly just been hanging out in Konstanz. I attempted a mental health weekend of no travel and no going out but Gina and I had one terrible night in which we intended on going clubbing but both ended up not making it to town, both fell down seperate flights of stairs and were covered in bruises the next day (skype is required for this story). On a more positive note, we watched how I met your mother the whole next day (my new addiction) which was good fun...if not still painful to even sit down. I went to Berry's for the first time a few weeks ago (which means nothing to you lot but I'm writing it for myself to reflect back on later). And then last Monday of term we attempted to go to two different clubs but both had lines that were ridonkulous - pretty much like the lines to get a teaparty ticket but more mosh-like - bloody impossible! So we ditched and hung out at one of the girls apartments.
Ok that's enough on Germany for now. I'll write about Portugal and Strasbourg, France next time which were just AMAZING!!!!!!
Yes...so I wrote this a while ago and still have spain to write about now too. I'll TRY! Love you all xox
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