It is an Honor to be a Bonner

So after a month in beautiful Deutschland comes my first blog entry. It has been almost non-stop until now. I don't have class until Monday so I finally have some time to breathe.

Basically, Germany is amazing and exceeds my expectations every day I am here. The trip over was long...very long. However I am glad that I took the group flight because it made it a lot more bearable being with people I knew. For some reason though I had a lot of trouble sleeping and didn't really until I got to my room in Germany. We got to the Frankfurt airport and took a 2 hour bus ride to the city of Bonn, where I will be living until mid-December. One of the first things I noticed as I stepped into Germany was how much English is used everywhere. I'm glad that I garnered a very basic understanding of the language before I left but after I noticed this I knew it wouldn't be much of a problem to make my way around the country.

After getting into Bonn they separated the students staying with host families from the students staying in the dorms. I was told that I would be living by myself and at first I was a little bit apprehensive about this but now I quite enjoy it because I'm living in a room for 2 people as 1. The people I live with are really nice and I know I'm creating some lasting relationships with my newly-formed friends. In the dorm facilities there are also students from a landscaping program at Texas A&M University as well as several German business men so it's an interesting smorgesboard of people from different cultures!

After settling into our rooms, our housing coordinator Olaf took us all out to dinner at a Biergarten near the university. There I had my first taste of German beer. The regional favorite is Kölsch which is brewed in nearby Cologne. German beer is way better than American beer. To put it mildly. Anyway, we had dinner on the Rhine and I got to take lots of beautiful pictures. Then Olaf asked us if we wanted to go shopping for food or out to a bar. We chose the bar.

Zebulon is a bar famous amongst the LMU students in the Bonn program because of their friendliness to us basically. Inside there's a large LMU banner and various pictures of LMU students from their semesters abroad. The staff is really friendly and ordered us all a round on the house.

Before arriving to Bonn I was worried about how long it would take to adjust to a completely different way of life than my own but after my first day in Bonn I knew it wouldn't be much of a challenge.