Hey y'all! It's about 11:00 p.m., just got back from a very long day. Today we met at ten a.m. in the Becks' flat (Dr. Beck is the prof leading the trip, and he has brought his family with him). He gave us an assignment for us to go find on our own about 6 different places in town tomorrow and we have to journal about that (just give our reflection of our experiences) and turn it in to him. Then we walked down to a market that happens twice a week. I want to go back and get a better look though. We didn't spend much time there at all because we were just getting acquainted with the neighborhood we live in here.

Then we took a tram downtown, which is situated right by the train station we came into last night. We looked in the train station again in more depth. It's set up like a mall almost. We at lunch there and I got some of my cash made into Euros. That was sad, the exchange rate sucks. Oh well! Tomorrow I'm going back to the train station to rent my cell phone (I found if you guys call me it doesn't cost me a thing other than the rental of the phone).

After that we walked all around downtown and then spent some time in St. Nickolas (beautiful church! I have pictures!). Then we came back to our side of town and visited the grocery store in our neighborhood. I am going back tomorrow to do a real shop for food. You buy your own cloth grocery bags here and reuse them. You have to pay for plastic ones too, so I decided to buy the reusable one.

After that we came back to our flats and had some time to do whatever we wanted. For dinner we all met at this really cool restaurant that is like underground. It was really cool and apparently is a popular place for college students here. Stephen is the guy from the study abroad office that is here with us and he knows a few people in Leipzig so he introduced us to them. Elfie is a woman who I think he coordinates with to get us set up for our trips here, and she brought two college students with her, Maxie and Conrad. They both speak really good English so it was really nice to talk with someone who can really tell us about Germany and translate stuff and all that. Maxie and Conrad both want to hang out more with us before we leave so in our free time I am sure most of us will try to find times they can give us tours of the city and stuff. Conrad is actually in medical school and there are some other psych majors here that are also premed and Conrad said he could show us his medical school. That should be interesting. They go straight to med school out of high school here, so I am interested to see how their school system works. This picture to the left is of me and Maxie, by the way!

After dinner we got geleto (delicious!) and then rode the tram back to our flats. I still need to unpack and hang up my clothes so I'm off to go do that. Night night!