Bauchschmertz :(

This day has been full of food.  I was at the Steinmeyer's house all day, basically eating the entire time.  They made me waffles, which are really good German-style, but then they kept making waffles.  They made three batches of batter.  I don't know why that many waffles were necessary, but they were very good.  I would have thought that would be enough food for the evening, but then a huge platter of sausages, cheeses, breads, pickles, peppers, and apples arrived on my lap.  I managed almost half of it, while watching a German crime drama show that was completely more insane than most of the same American genre.

Yesterday I went to Nurnberg.  The bus ride there was interesting because they guy that was taking us would not stop talking for the entire time, about things nobody wanted to hear about.  It was 8:30 in the morning and we really just wanted to sleep, but he was on the loudspeaker the whole time explaining things like, "If you see a truck with a blue stripe, it's from Poland" in German.  For one and a half hours.  I turned up my iPod all the way.  Then he was leading a tour when we got there, which my friends and I started out on but quickly realized it was just more of him talking forever and ever, and so we (not-so-discreetly) ditched it.  

We ended up with a very American breakfast of omelets (finally, there are otherwise no scrambled eggs to be found in Germany, at least not that I've seen).  Then we just walked around for awhile, not really sure what we were looking at, but it was all very pretty.  There were lots of very old, gigantic churches.  We went inside a lot of them, and saw that they all were, as usual here, reconstructions, since the originals got bombed.  But still, very beautiful.  We also found a castle.  A castle for what or who, we don't know, but it was fun.  And later on the drive out, we saw Hitler's crazy copy of the Colosseum, where he thought he could build all of the biggest and most important buildings in the world, but make them better.  Admittedly, it was pretty impressive.

And, speaking of Hitler, my class this week was for some reason about assisted suicide, Sterbehilfe.  Since I am in the intermediate-advanced level, we are working on expressing our opinions on lots of topics auf Deutsch, but this was probably one of the more depressing we could have chosen.  The class was about the medical version and whether it should be legal or not, but researching it online led me to lots of stuff about Nazi "euthanasia" programs, and then pictures of all the death camps, and then I basically just felt horrible for a night.  I'm pretty sure I could not even go on a tour of one, or stand in the gas chambers, like I saw pictures of people doing.  And it all just reinforced my strong opposition to the death penalty, because there were pictures of Nazi gas chambers, and then pictures of American death penalty gas chambers, and they looked the same.

So...on better topics, last weekend I saw the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart, which was really really cool, and talked to some random German guy in German for awhile waiting for the train, which made me happy.  I also bought Harry Potter in German (Harry Potter und der Gefangene von Askaban) and I loooooove it.  I'm learning a lot of new fantastical vocabulary, and I actually understand a lot, but that might be mostly because I've read it enough in English.  But I spent last Sunday, when it was beautiful and sunny but still very very cold outside, sitting in the park reading it, surrounded by ducks.  

Spring break is almost finalized, just working out Paris.  The hostel we are trying to get is very close to the Moulin Rouge, and I definitely want to go to a show.  And also, Laura is coming to visit on Thursday, and I am excited.

Gute Nacht.