Life in Marburg

I mentioned the principle reason we all came to Marburg is to improve our German, and that's where the large chunk of our time goes. We've gotten into this habit of meeting at 8:00 in front of our dorm and walking to class together (about 10 of us) after stopping for coffee/breakfast at a bakery on the way. Everyday from 8:45 to 12:30 we have a language course. As of last week I am now in the fourth group, which is going swimmingly. Then we break for lunch. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we have a course on German culture, which includes such topics as the German federal system, an overview of the German political parties, and discussion on some of the major topics facing Germany today. Tuesdays and Thursdays we have another two hours of language after our lunch is over.

After this time, well, mostly everyone splits up. I've been diving my time mostly between climbing, working out, and running random errands. I (naturally) made friends with the other climber in the group and we've found this really neat little climbing gym in Marburg. It is just a room that's next to an outdoors shop of sorts. There is no administration or employee or anything like that at the climbing gym. In fact the gym itself is about the size of my dorm room, but all the walls are bouldering walls. The members simply rent the key, at a dirt cheap rate of 10€ per month and go whenever they feel like it. It's a tiny room but it's been nice and challenging so far, and I can't complain about the price at all.

There are also three of us (I and two others) that got ourselves a five-week membership at a gym near the train station. I lost a few days trying to find out how to get a membership to the climbing gym, but since then I've been going lifting on my non-climbing days. There's nothing really too special to describe here, but it's been nice and fun.

The days that I neither climb nor pump iron I'm usually dead tired and just go shopping and go home. Most nights involve just reviewing what we've done in class a little, maybe reviewing some other things I have been feeling weak on (as in German things) and then passing the hell out. Because that's tiring.

Weekends have been cool here. We have I think every Saturday off to just explore around. So yesterday, we had a medieval fair of sorts, so 5 or 6 of us picked a time to meet and headed over to it. As always happens here, we then ran into a couple more groups of about the same size once we got to the fair so our numbers were in constant flux. Regardless, we enjoyed the fair. There was lots of food, mead, beer, tea, smithing, axe-throwing, and some stage performances. And it was neat because, unlike every medieval fair I've experienced in the US, this took place outside a castle that actually existed during the time period they were mimicking. That is pretty cool in itself.

Sundays we have excursions to old castles, neighboring cities, or just important things to see. Tonight we're going to a pub crawl in Marburg as a group, so we're all pretty intrigued to see what this will contain.

So yup, that's what life is like here. Exciting eh?