The next step in my adventure

I know that I have been horrible in keeping up my blog and I am very sorry for that. Things in my life has been a bit cray I guess its been a little harder to get the motivation to give an update.

Since I have last written on here, I have found a place to move into and get set up. It is an unfurnished room just outside of city center. It will be a small adjustment because I will be living with roommate. His name is Imad. He is a nice guy that doesn't speak a lot of english but I think that will be a good thing for me and will help me learn the language. It will be an experience but I will only be there for 2 weeks before my trip to Africa.

Africa has had a few snags recently, First was the amount of time it took for my passport to get to the States and now they have had my passport for a week at the embassy. This is not my only issue, the are continually changing my flight. It looks like I am now going to be leaving a day early and will be getting back a day later. I guess it is good that I will now get a couple more days in Ghana.

The final big change in my life would have to be the moving of Stina. She has moved in with her Au Pair family. Turns out that the she now lives just an hour outside of the city. We had both expected that she would be closer to town but we are trying to make the best of it. We are trying to set it up that she will come into town each weekend. On the other hand, it means that I will now be living completely alone for 5 days week.




Other then that Stina and I have had a couple adventures. We have attended the Wasen in Stuttgart, which is the schwabish Oktoberfest. It was a lot of fun. Not really what I had expected it to be. Turns out that Oktoberfest was a huge carnival that contains large beer tents. Some other things that we have been up to is having some beers with some new friends, a trip to the zoo, trip to Ikea, and some sight seeing.

Culture shock

Since my last blog, I have not really had many changes in my life. What I have had is a change in how I feel. You may call it culture shock, home sick, or just stress but what I do know is that the excitement of being outside of the states has now warn off and I think the true weight of what I am doing is set in. I knew this was going to happen, it was just a question of when. Since I spent time in Sweden before I came to Germany, I have now been outside of an English speaking country for almost 6 weeks now. As most of you know I love to talk,  my mom has always said "I love the sound of my own voice" so its a very strange feeling for me when I can no longer involve myself in a conversation or figure out how to order my meal correctly.
Last year, when I was in Ireland, I believe, that my culture shock was much less because there was no language barrier. I know that this situation will not last and that I will soon be able to focus my attention on learning the language but for the time being it is making life difficult and sometimes near impossible. Stina and I are doing are best and beginning to make progress in the right direction.
As for the couch surfing and apartment searching, today was a great day. We looked at a room right near where we are staying and it turned out that the guy liked us and I should be able to move in by the end of the month. The rent is rather cheap compared to what we have been looking at and I don't have to sign a contract. We will meet with him again tomorrow and work out the details. This did put us in another bind, we didn't know where we were going to stay for the next month. This is where we got extremely lucky. As we were staying at a couch surfers house he is leaving for a month to Indonesia, we talked to him for a bit and he offered us his place to stay at for the next month. I don't think we could have gotten luckier.
Things may be looking up for Stina and I, keep your fingers crossed for us. As always miss you all and I hope everything is going great stateside, and please leave a comment so I can hear from you.