It Came, It Came, IT CAME!!!!

I was just about to get out of bed this morning when my doorbell rang. I opened the door and was given this:

(OK, so it wasn't open when it was given to me. I was just so excited that I broke into it before realizing this is really something I should blog about.)

It was my Wollmeise package! It came quickly since they just shipped it on Friday. I had seen it on several blogs (Elemmaciltur and Bockstark Knits and pictures from the Summer of Socks Flickr group)and decided that since I was in the same country as them, I just had to have some! (plus my trip to London fell through, so I had some extra cash lying around and never having bought hand dyed yarn I thought it was my chance!)

So I ordered 4 skeins of their superwash sock yarn:

Campari-Orange: Beautiful purpley reds and yellow and orange.

Birkenrinde (Birch bark): Black, grey, and an off-white

Sonne (sun): Bright orange and yellow (it's a lot oranger than on the website and I'm not sure if I like that or not. This may end up in a secret pal gift or yarn swap or something)

Gewitterhimmel (Stormy sky): All sorts of shades of GORGEOUS blues.. teal, navy, azure?

And she even included a sample skein of the thicker yarn in the Zenzi colorway (Zenzi is apparently a common name for a milk cow here in Bavaria and it is grey and brown and cream)

So that was my excitement for the day! I haven't decided what to knit with it yet (most likely socks, but I have no clue as to patterns.. there are many I am looking at). Maybe one will be the first yarn I knit with for SOS '07!

Wow....

So I joined the knitting blogs web ring thinking I might have a chance at having a few more people visit my blog. In the last 2.5 days I have tripled the number of visitors to my blog (and the first stuff included several visits by me before I figured out how to block myself)! Over 150 new visits since June 1. WOW.

Anyways, on to some knitting content.

My good friend Jenny (Hi Jenny!) came to visit me this weekend in order to go to the beer festival. We studied abroad together in this town 2+ year ago, but were back in the States before the festival came around. Anyways, knitting. So when I went to visit her earlier this year (she's currently studying on the other side of Germany), I brought some knitting with me because she likes to knit as well. Up to that point though, she had only done scarves (correct me if this is wrong Jenny!). She saw my socks and wanted me to show her how to do them. So we went to the store and bought her some dpns and sock yarn and the rest is history! We had a great time knitting together this weekend between the beer and wine drinking and I even made some progress on Tubey! We also spent part of the afternoon looking at EVERY SINGLE PATTERN in the archives at Knitty! There are now lots more patterns bookmarked for future use. Needless to say a great time was had and her socks are looking great!

Jenny (right) and I working on our knitting.

Tubey progress (I've knit about 6-7 inches on the body)

Close-up of the progress.

I didn't have a chance to work on any other knitting projects due to large amounts of beer and other alcohol consumption. The Bergkirchweih beer festival is still going on after all! Here is another small sampling of photos for your viewing pleasure:

Waitress with a lot of beer steins! and A view of the festival.

Scary, scary, scary high up swings. SCARY! and a view of the festival from the ferris wheel.

C and I on the ferris wheel and me with a view of the town

My apartment from the ferris wheel! and an ox on a spit... yum.

Getting ready to go out (it's a LOT cheaper to bring your own beer...) and Jenny and I the first night szhe was in town.

Me in a cool Bavarian hat and Jenny drinking lots of beer. (these were both taken after we had only drank 1 liter of beer..)

Beer bottles! (only about 12 are ours.. the rest were found on the street. Yarn money!) and me attempting to make a carrot cake after 2 liters of beer and half a bottle of wine. It turned out pretty good...

Facebook Secret Pals

Oh! I almost forgot. If any of you are on facebook, there is a secret pals group that is forming. Search for the group "Secret Knitting Pals" and join up! You have until June 12.

Nothing's better at curing Homesickness than....

A beer festival! (and some knitting.)

Sorry that I haven't written in a while and that the last time I wrote it was a depressing note about how I wasn't enjoying being in Germany and didn't really have anything to do about knitting. At all. Hopefully this entry will have more knitting content, but of course there has to be some beer!

Ok, so I'll get the knitting stuff in first. Tubey is coming along nicely. I finished the sleeves!

Now just to do the body. I think I've calculated that I'm halfway done now though. Yay! It's a little looser in the sleeves than I would have liked. And I'm not liking the colors (the green) as much as I did when I bought it and it was separate from the black. And those dang color changes look like crap. Sigh. Well, if nothing else I'll have a warm comfy sweater for those days I just want to stay inside.

The Snicket Socks are coming along rather slowly (I've been working on Tubey!) but I'm not half a repeat away from starting the heel.

I think I've figured out what to do about the pattern and the instep. We'll see how it turns out.

The lace scarf for my mom is also coming along. I have 1.5-2 feet of it done (I've been working on Tubey!)

I'm not a huge fan of the lace pattern. Especially in the dark yarn. But she chose them both. So I'll do it for her.

Well. Umm. That's all the knitting content. Ha. Now for the beer!

So there's a local beer festival going on right now called the Bergkirchweih. Apparently it's the 3rd largest beer festival in Bavaria. And it's about a 2 minute walk from my apartment. So C and I have been going up there every night and getting dinner or a beer or both. Here are some pictures from it.

An oompa band and Miss Bergkirchweih 2007

The first beer from the "first" keg of the festival and C and I sharing a "Mass" (1 L of beer)

Sauerkraut, Bratwurst, and an Ox sandwich. Yum! and 2 "Krugs" to hold all of our beer

Lots of People!

Can I go Home yet?

OK, so this post probably won't have much to do about knitting. But I'm going to put it out there anyways because the knitting community seems like a great group of people who won't mind me going on a little about myself (and if you do care, you should probably stop reading now).

So about... 1.75 years ago (August 2005) I had this fantastic idea that I wanted to come live in Europe for a while. I was 6 months removed from my 6 month study abroad term and missing stuff like yummy pastries and travelling all the time and the fantatstic German beer. So I decided to apply for a Fulbright, even though according to my college it was way too late for me to get everything together. But I did and I ended up getting the fellowship and now I'm here living in Germany. You see, at the time this was a great idea. I didn't really know what I wanted to do after college. Grad school, which had seemed a given since I started attending preschool (that's what 2 parents with advanced degrees will get you), wasn't really all that appealing any more. So I decided to put it all off, head to Europe, and hopefully have a great time. As luck would have it, C got a position teaching English in France and we were both going to be in Europe and it was going to be great!

Fast forward to now. Well, it hasn't been great. For the first 8 months C and I were 7 hours and about 80euros apart. We tried to see eachother 1 or 2 weekends a month, and because he worked at a school he got a lot of holidays, but after having been around eachother almost 24/7 for the past year, that just didn't cut it. Long distance relationships SUCK! We have both vowed to never let that happen again... I only hope it can work out that it doesn't.

Now his program is done, and he is living with me! Which is great! Most of the time. It has nothing to do with him. Just the accomodations in which we live. Living in an approximately 280 square foot apartment, one room (except for the bathroom), with 2 stove burners and a dorm size fridge was tolerable for one person. Sure, I have to sleep on a sofa bed, and I have limited options as to what I can cook, but I have internet so it's ok! Now the slightly larger than twin size bed is just a touch small for 2 people. We bought a microwave and a mini oven in February, but food is still limited. And there just isn't any privacy (which is tolerable when it's just the 2 of us, but when we have 1 or 2 people visiting, gets... annoying.).

My job has kind of stalled. I don't have any reason to do the research (chemistry research in a grad student lab... where I'm a nobody) other than for the "fun" of it.. and nothing seems to be working for me. I feel like I'm in limbo where I'm trying to plan for when we head back to the states in less than 2 months so I don't have to live with my parents for long... but everytime I apply for a job it seems they need someone RIGHT NOW. So I want to move forward, but there's a wall. There's nothing for me here, and I have no idea what is in store for me back home.

And I miss my car. And Taco Bell. And things being open after 8pm or on Sundays.

Europe (Germany specifically) isn't all bad. There are fantastic pastries. And Nutella. And AMAZING beer (for cheap!!). And it's nice (most of the time) to walk everywhere and take public transportation and feel like you're being good to yourself and the environment for doing so. And the trains here are awesome! But walking to grocery store and having to carry everything back every other day or so gets old. Especially when you live a good bit away. And travelling is great (see Venice!) when I get the chance, but I feel bad taking off of "work" and having a tiny apartment that costs more than half of your monthly stipend doesn't leave a lot extra to travel on.

I feel stuck in the life of a college student, and, believe it or not, I'm ready to grow up.

(Sorry that was really rambly and didn't make a lot of sense... I just had to get it out somewhere, and apparently the internet was the place it needed to go.)