Monday, August 30, 2010

First week in Schweinfurt!

So the night we arrived back from Berlin we met the other 3 externs from Pennsylvania College of Optometry.  They have 2 guys and 1 girl...Andrea, Adam and Ketan.  They're pretty cool and we all get along really well so far.  It's funny how in just a few days I feel like I know these people better than people I went to school with for 3 years.  That's what happens when you work together, live on the same hallway, eat together, and do pretty much everything else together.  In 3 months we'll either be best friends or never speak again, I guess we'll see!  Haha!  No, they're really cool, I'm excited to have such a fun group to hang out with in Germany for 3 months.

These are the laundry facilities on our hall, this is how I found it.  The common kitchen looks similar, which we dont use.  However, I have used the machines, they do work!!
As for the barracks, it keeps things interesting.  It's like living in a really old, kinda dirty, boys dorm in college.  Except the boys are crazy!  We don't know all of our neighbors names, but we give them nicknames based on their tatoos.  There's a guy we call "Dragon", he's really loud and possibly certifiably insane.  He got his name because the other night he comes knocking on our door, since there were 3 people in our room we decided to open it.  He had a fresh bloody tatoo of a GIANT dragon across his chest that he wanted to show off.  Never a dull moment with these guys!  (But don't worry, we've become friends with their commander's girlfriend who works at the clinic and he's given the guys a briefing not to bother us, so we shouldn't have any problems.)

This is a lot like college, except we're in Europe!  It takes some adjusting to get use to again and I never thought I could get use to dorm living, but I'm getting there.  We hang out in the dorm room watching movies, we take our laundry down the hall, and we have to take the bus to the store.  Lots of college de ja vu moments, but I'm 25, it's weird.

Old church in town.  One of the few building that survived WW2.
Work is good.  Seeing patients right off.  Nothing too exciting, except I'm seeing more kids than I would like to.  Hopefully that will end when school starts.  But work is boring, who wants to talk about that...

So Friday night we decided to stay in town because we were told there was some sort of festival going on in town.  Even though it was raining we made our way to down town with the promise of music and beer.  I must say, I love to hear 1980's American music sung with German accents, it cracks me up!!!  After sampling some of the local beverages, listening to some bands, and making a bad decision to eat a late night burger at McDonalds we decided it would be a good idea to head to a local nightclub that many of the soldiers told us about.  Keep in mind it is somewhere between 11:00 and 11:30 at night, so not too late, by nightclub standards.  We get to the club, and it was just okay, we just felt weird, we felt OLD, and we didn't know why.  After a little while their we decided to catch a cab home.

All of the externs at the Schwinfurt Festival
  1. Sarah and I with a Schweinfurt pig.  You see these around town.
The next morning at the dining facility we talked to one of the dudes the recommended the nightclub to us and told him how we felt we must be too old for this sort of thing now.  Come to find out in Germany night clubs are open to teenages (16-20) until midnight, and the over 21 crowd doesn't get there until about 1:00am.  So basically we were partying with a bunch of kids almost a decade younger than us, most excellent.  Don't think we'll be going back there since I like to be in bed by 1:00am these days!  Haha!  But kinda a funny story!

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