Anyway, yesterday Marina went to work early, so I spent the morning just fluffing around before going to the uni for orientation. On the way I stopped at a little Italian coffee/gelato place that I'd seen. Somehow I managed to order myself a latte-macchiato. What even is that? The name is a bit of an oxymoron, so I had no idea what I was gonna get. Turns out it's a real proper latte! The whole bigger glass more milky deal. I was a bit put off my the straw, but I have since learnt that here in Germany lattes and hot chocolates that come in glasses are served with a straw. They also come at only about 60 degrees, which I thought is unusual for such a cold climate where people want something warm to drink. Back home I'd get coffee sent back to me if it was under 70 degrees, and the majority of people wanted it super hot. Everything here is served at room temperature, you don't need to keep drinks in the fridge and there is never EVER ice in your drink :P I also have a slight suspicion that they serve coffee with sugar already in it.
After my coffee I decided that what I desperately needed was a hat with flappy bits to cover my ears. My ears were hurting from the cold, since I'd walked half an hour to the shops and it was only 5 degrees. So, first shop I saw I bought a daggy hat for a couple of euros :D I loves it, it's lovely and warm :P
Then it was time to make my way to the uni. At the train station I ran into a girl I knew from my class at home, so we found our way there together. It turns out that there are 21 of us from UWA, and 29 from Adelaide. There's a few from Melbourne, and the rest are from Singapore and various places in the US. There's 72 students altogether. I think there's so many of us from Australia because we can squeeze in this course during our summer holidays, whereas everyone else is missing classes back at their universities.
We had to register and get our little baggy of useful papers and brochures, then we sat for two hours and listened to the course coordinator give us an introductory talk about the course and German culture. After that we hung around a bit before our host families came for the welcome dinner. I has a photo of me and Marina:
Naaaaaw. The party was good, there was a buffet of Swabian food, because Stuttgart is in Swabia or something. Marina has been housing students for a very long time, so she brought some tupperware with her to take home some leftovers :P she's heating them up now for dinner :) We stumbled home at around 9pm, we were both really tired, so I went to bed really soon after we got home.
This morning I had to be at uni at 8:45am for a placement test. Our building is off campus, so I have to catch two buses to get there instead of a train. We're relatively close so it only takes about half an hour altogether. We all did our test and then had an hour and a half free whilst they marked them to place us. We all just hung around and went down to a bäckerei for coffee. I ended up being placed in a class with a whole bunch of my Australian classmates, but also a couple from Melbourne and some guys from the US. There's only twelve of us and we immediately bonded and went to have lunch together.
After lunch we had a guided bus tour of Stuttgart, and us from class 3 were back row bandits all afternoon. I didn't get very many photos because I didn't have a window seat, and anyway the windows were really dirty. The few photos I did take have come out all blurry. During the tour we went to the tv tower, but the way our guide said it all afternoon it sounded like he was calling it the "tippy tower", now I have it in my head that we went to visit the tippy tower :P IT WAS COLD. The morning had been sunny and beautiful, but still cold, but by the time we got to the tippy tower it was all overcast. There was snow on the ground from the last snowfall, which has melted everywhere else. When we got to the top we jumped out of the elevator, took a few quick photos, then went back inside to the little cafe to have hot drinks. We made it just in time, because when we got back on the bus it started raining.
Das ist mich! Here I am modelling my new daggy hat, and a brand new facial expression I have just learnt. I think I'm going to call it HOLY CRAP IT'S COLD :P
At the end of the bus tour we ended up in Schlossplatz, which had some lovely old buildings, one of which is a castle, or Schloss, hence the name of the place :P I took lots of photos which I'll put up on facebook, but it was getting dark and my camera didn't really agree with that. We got a bit of an extra tour dealie with our guide where we walked around and he talked a bit about each building, then I wandered around with my new buddy Elizabeth before catching the bus home.
I just had the second most amazing shower of my life, and now I am feeling quite content in my jammies all ready to spend the evening lazing around and going to bed early. Tomorrow classes start for realz, so I have to be up bright and early to get to school by 8:45am.
Guten Nacht! *kisses*
Fact!
ReplyDelete"Macchiato" means 'stained'. If you order a Caffe-Macchiato, you're ordering coffee 'stained' with milk (what we would call a macchiato), whereas a Latte-Macchiato is milk (latte) 'stained' with coffee. So rather than oxymoronic the name is actually quite logical in Italian :P
The thing about drink temperature is interesting!
Mmmm Europe.
I was just coming here to say what Nicola said :P Totally baffled me at first too.
ReplyDeleteI love your daggy hat. Marina sounds lovely. Hooray for bonding with classmates!