Victory will be mine!!!

So last Thursday was a day for some major victories, among them getting a good chunk of my paperwork taken care of as well as getting health insurance and a bank account.  Today I had two additional victories which I would like to share.

Victory number one: I emailed two professors to see if I could participate in their classes.  For some classes you just sign up for the course online and you’re in.  For others you have to email the professor directly and they will tell you if you’re in, if the class is full, etc.  One of the professors got back to me and said that the class was full.  I knew this already, but I figured that asking couldn’t hurt.  Sometimes they set aside a certain number of slots for foreign students, so if those weren’t filled then I had a shot.  It wasn’t the best fit of a course, so it wasn’t too upsetting.

The other professor wrote back and said that she would be happy to have me in her class.  Yea!!!  But now I had to look for another class because I can’t just take one class.  So I looked online again, and a course that I thought had disappeared off of the schedule was suddenly there again.  This course actually fits perfectly with some of the works on which my dissertation will focus, namely the philosophical idea of the Sublime.  So I emailed the professor, while I was in my room for lunch.  When I came back 2 hours later, I had an email from him saying that he would be happy to have me in the class and giving me further instructions for what books to get and what forms to fill out.  AWESOME!!!

So that was victory number one – well really you could call those two victories, but I don’t want to exaggerate.  :)

Victory number two:  I found Kaufland today.  There are two grocery stores in the Altstadt.  The first is Edeka, which is nice, relatively large, but a little expensive.  The second grocery store is Plus which is tiny, a little dirty, and cheap.  Kaufland is a little outside of town – maybe a 10 minute walk (1.3 km according to Google maps) but totally worth it.  They have a huge produce section, a huge frozen food section and…wait for it…frozen turkey so I can make Thanksgiving dinner in November!!!! Yea!!!!

But seriously this place has everything and a huge selection of everything that they have. I would highly recommend going there, and maybe stocking up on some of the basics like pasta, sauce mixes, etc.  If I lived closer it might make sense to buy meat, beer and wine there too, but it’s a bit of a trek to carry that stuff back.  We’ll see.  I’ve got a lot more time here to figure that out.