Update on the Germany situation.

So, very exciting news which most of you already know: I've been placed in Dresden! Weee! I've been hoping to be placed there since I applied for the Fulbright, so I'm very very very very *deeeeeep breath* very excited to actually get it. It's a very cool city - one of the larger cities in Germany, and very old, and lots of history. It was bombed out in WWII by the allies, but a lot of the old buildings are still there and a lot more have been rebuilt.  



Pretty, no (click it to get the actual picture with the right proportions)?  The river is the Elbe.
So now I'm preparing everything, and it's really exciting but also scary to see everything coming together finally - dealing with actual dates and places and times.  I've got my plane tickets already to go to Cologne.  The three-day orientation is in Altenberg, 
a little ways from Cologne, in this very cool monastery:




After that, I go to Dresden - have to arrange the train myself and all, which should be entertaining, at least. I think I'm going to stay in the International Gaesthaus, run by the Studentenwerk-Dresden, for the first month. It's fairly inexpensive, includes all utilities and internet and so forth, fully furnished, and includes dishes and bedclothes and whatnot, so it'll make moving there very easy and give me a good base of operations to find a "real" apartment. The decoration appears to me amusingly attempted-modern, but it looks comfy, at least.


It's also only about a kilometer from the BSZ-Ernaehrung, where I'll be working. The school itself is cool. Some German secondary schools combine technical classes and academic classes with an apprenticeship to teach a trade, and this one is focused on cooking stuff, specifically brewing and baking. A picture from one of the baking department's tests:


Looks excellent, nicht wahr?
So, yeah, that's what I'm doing now - setting up apartment rental, and looking into train tickets, and just generally panicking over all that needs to be done.