My Grandmother could have sent that package!

Dear Family, Thursday December 4th 2008
This morning I woke up to the great drilling noises of construction workers on the floor below. I got up, did 5, count em'! 5 push ups, got ready for school, and went to breakfast. Josef's son is staying with us for quite some time apparently, so I had breakfast with him. He talked a lot about his ridiculously diverse family I knew nothing about. It turns out that he grew up in Italy, his mother was British/American, and when his parents got divorced Josef came back to Austria, and he went to Hungary. So he speaks four languages fluently, considers English his mother tongue and German his father tongue. At the very end of breakfast he suddenly remembered a box that his grandfather had that was a Mormon Care Package. He said he used some of the things in there for years afterwards, such as the razor. He said they were great quality. His grandfather had received it while living in Hungary, so I told him about the care packages we do today, and that also European Mormons sent care packages, so it could have been from Denmark. In one of our religion books we read about a church leader going to Denmark after the war. He noticed that the members of the church there were just as hateful towards Germans as other Danish, so to change that he started them on a 20-year-mission, to send as many care packages as possible to the Germans. That changed really fast, they were able to forgive Germany quite quickly after that. Grandma could have sent that package!

I ran off to two second hand stores with my friends, found nothing, went off to class, got some more reimbursement money from my cultural activities, and learned about the very fast, busy, and stressful end of the program. We will receive €15 from the Institut after we de-register with the city, to be used towards transportation to the airport, so I'll have even more money. It's great, due to the wonderful exchange rate, I got so much of the money paid over the summer back. Overall, Cindy has given us €355, which is even more considering we did not have to pay the conversion fee, or the ATM fees for that. Overall it's been an amazingly lucky experience. I am loving having plenty of money for next semester.

Still trying to find housing, but I have some friends working on it, as well as Mark, so hopefully I'll have something by next week. After class I wandered around looking for a mysterious Christmas market, didn't find it, bought some Gelato, and then went back to the Institut to study. All of the studying paid off, as I rocked the test.

After class I dropped my stuff off at home, and then went to that fresh soup and salad place, and tried the carrot orange soup. It was great, I didn't really taste any oranges though, mostly carrots. Afterwards we went and got ice cream again, and then I came back home to do homework. Life is great, stressful, everything is ending so fast which is terribly sad, but I'm excited for Christmas!
Love,
Anna