Germany Week 38 - Work, Work, Work

This was my chill week after my long trip to Bratislava and Vienna. I definitely needed this break and the downtime. This video is not as action filled, therefore I have attempted to make up for it with my own sense of humor, applause please. Lots of footage from my work last week will be included. Throughout this week I have, chilled out, chilled out, and chilled out. Okay, I'm done with the ridiculousness. I played baseball with my host brothers, my favorite sport of all. We had an awesome grill-out, and my host dad sacrificed his dryness in order to cook us delicious food in the pouring rain. More delicious food was had on the weekend. Of course you guys get to see at least some of it. With the holiday on Thursday and another day off coming up this Friday, I'm sure to get into something this week!

Germany Week 37 - Bratislava/Vienna

Only about 12 weeks to go now and I will be back home in good old Covington, Kentucky. While I do miss home a lot, my adventures continue on. And of course the videos do too! This whole week's video was dedicated to our trip to Bratislava and Vienna. It was Trez, Janne, Kelsey, and I that went on this trip over our Easter break. It was nothing short of epic. During work before I left on my trip, we spent every day filming for an advertisement. You guys will be able to see that in next week's video because I didn't want to omit the footage that I had from our 4 day trip. I really didn't know what to expect from Bratislava, I was honestly a bit afraid to go there. I barely knew what it was or where it was, and much less about its culture, its people, and its cuisine. I was thoroughly surprised. In the 24 hours that I spent there, I came to love that beautiful city. I hadn't realized how rich its history and beauty was. It seems that although I spent only a day in Bratislava, it has about as much footage as Vienna did! The food was quite enjoyable and Slovakia is home to many different castles. We had bought bus tickets from Bratislava to Vienna. We saw an advertisement for Twin-City Liners. It was a high speed boat that ran between Bratislava and Vienna. We quickly decided that that was what we were going to do. We hopped on the ship on Saturday afternoon and off we went!

We arrived in Vienna about an hour and a half later. The sights that we saw along the way were absolutely gorgeous, and the ship that we took was extremely fast for being such a large boat. We arrived in the Donau canal in Vienna and hopped on one of the local U-Bahns to our apartment. The city of Vienna is huge. One cannot simply walk the entirety of Vienna. During our time there, we went out to several bars and clubs, ate some local food(and some not local food). One of those foods included 2 pieces of schnitzel the size of both my hands and a bowl of fries. Needless to say, that was a filling meal. We saw the many sites in Vienna including Hofburg Schloss(Castle), the Rathaus(Courthouse), and Schloss Schönbrunn. The city of Vienna is rich with culture, internationality, music, and history. Within the 2 1/2 days that we had in Vienna, we had barely scratched the surface of seeing what it was all about. Nevertheless, we enjoyed ourselves to the fullest! We arrived back at the Hauptbahnhof in Dresden on Monday night. Monday, April 21st was my 21st birthday. That's right, biggest American birthday that there is. To my surprise, Falk, my host dad, was waiting for all of us to give us a ride home. The whole host family was there and set out a nice dinner, cakes, and presents just for me. That was so sweet of them and I was not expecting it at all. We ate and drank and were merry together. It was a great week!

Germany Week 36 - Everyday is an Experience

This week was quite an enjoyable one, of course Wednesday was again at the Vogelstation. I absolutely loved my work there on that day, feeding a baby bird and baby raccoon and going to the airport, it was an awesome day. On Friday we were actually filming at the office where I work at. That was quite convenient. I was actually the boom operator which meant that I actually got to do something, yay! On the weekend I was visited by a PPPler and friend, Nancy. We explored the city of Dresden, even I was able to see more of it than I had before. We enjoyed ourselves at a club later on on Saturday night. It was a fantastic week.

Germany Week 35 - Shaping Lives

This week was again spent in Meissen Porcelain Manufaktur. Well, of course not the entire week! We were again in a separate part where they were doing clay mock-ups of the various body parts of a 2.8 meter high porcelain woman that they are working on. Porcelain dries much too fast for it to be sculpted from scratch in such a large scale. I was also able to do the audio work at a place we filmed with my company. It was neat to actually be able to contribute this time! On Friday, I had heard about a famous bridge in Dresden with a couple bars right down on the water next to it. Trez, Janne, and I decided we would go there to visit it. It was very pretty down there and the bar/restaurant was pretty cool. We had a few visitors to Dresden this past weekend, Michael, Scott, and Allison. We hung out on Saturday and had a nice walk around the city and went to a bar later. It was cool to have visitors in Dresden, and again, anyone that wants to visit us is welcome!

Germany Week 34 - The Soft Side of Roughness

This week was started off with another awesome trip with the camera crew to Meissen Porcelain. This time, as you can see from the main picture of the video, we were filming an American artist named Jen Ray. She is very talented, although she said that sculpting porcelain was something that she has picked up within the last few years. This overall project will be explained more in the video, just know that it is going to be an amazing of lavish, garnished porcelain tools and weapons with what Jen said: "have a romantic side to them." The day was filled with this interesting project. I'm sure that we will be going back there many times to film its progress. No news really from the Vogelstation, most of it was spent hacking up weeds... long, thorned vine weeds. Skipping to Saturday which was having a beer with Trez, Kelsey, and Kerstin at Freiburger. It was more of a chilled out weekend, only 3 more weeks until my birthday and our grand trip across the country of Austria, and mostly within Vienna!