It is Monday after a three-day weekend, and boy, was it hard to get out of bed this morning. Especially since I spent all of yesterday in my pajamas and never left the apartment (it was unbelievably rainy and miserable), instead opting to sleep late, shop for a wardrobe (meaning a closet, not a new set of clothes) on E-bay, and Skype with my brother, who is recovering from having his one-and-only appendix removed on Saturday. (Speaking of, there seems to be a lot of that going around — check out my friend Kristen’s recent appendicitis account here.)

Having lunch today with an old college friend, who just happened to be in Hamburg today en route from Latvia to the U.S., was an excellent way to ease into Week Two of my project. Isn’t it amazing how a decade can feel so long and so short at the same time?

In other news, I am this close to having my identification cards and e-mail address set-up at my host institution. And at some point, I also need to register with the city of Hamburg to tell them where I live. But other than that, everything seems to be falling into place. I am also expanding my German with the vocabulary necessary for my project: fun words like “offender,” which is Täter, and sounds suspiciously like the “tater” in tater tots. But my favorite word to date is Frauenunterstützungseinrichtungen, which (as far as I can tell) means “women’s support institutions.”

Bis später!