getting better, i think!

So today was pretty good overall! The morning was bleh, although I did splurge on a vanille frappe (not really knowing what it was, but it sounded good) during break and it was AMAZING. I think they used legit vanilla beans. I'm going to have a very hard time not buying another one. After Sprachschule I walked to the bookstore to try and get a receipt for the schoolbooks I bought... I didn't even think to ask for one when I bought them. But the man was very nice and taught me the German word for receipt (Quittung), and then reccommended a book for me in English (The Reader) which I bought gratefully. So now I have new reading material and a receipt, so hopefully AFS will refund me for my schoolbooks. After school there was nobody home, because Clara had Judo and Simon was... somewhere. So I watched part of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, first in German with English subtitles, but the German voices are SO OBNOXIOUS so I watched it in English with German subtitles, which was much better. It's rather blissful to hear English, even if it is British. I got about a third of the way through and then Clara and Simon and Daniela came home, so I went downstairs and I had gotten a letter from AFS about post-arrival orientation in mid-October. It's in Berlin, and I'll probably take the UBahn over, I might email some of the other exchange students and see if they want to go together. I'm really excited; we're staying in a student hostel and it will be my first AFS event with students from other countries! Plus we get to talk about what it's like to be here... and I do like to talk... Also, Daniela had a talk with my schule and she tried to tell me about it... I think I understood around half of it (of course, Sebastian was mumbling things in English to help, so that was somewhat helpful although sometimes I can't even understand their English). But I know that I'm going to have to do some kind of apprenticeship thingy starting in January- Jakob did his in a bike shop, Simon did his with computers, and Judith did hers somewhere else. But Daniela mentioned something about a dentist.. I don't know if I would want to be a dentists' apprentice, it sounds a little gross. But I'll keep my mind open. I also learned that in the end of June, my class is going to Amsterdam!!! So I'm really psyched for that.
So after dinner, which was basically apple crisp (the Germans have bizarre eating habits) that Simon made out of apples and zwieback, Clara and Daniela and I went to the grocery store. German grocery stores are funny- all the drinks are displayed in the shipping packaging, so you can either take a whole bunch all wrapped in plastic or rip it open and take one. And there are 2 aisles in this very small store almost entirely devoted to chocolate. And another 2 aisles devoted to meat and fish. And then there's random vegetables and snack foods squeezed in. But going out of the house with people always makes me feel better, and so now I'm pretty cheerful, but it has definitely been an emotional roller-coaster! I think it's bringing down my immune system, because I have a cold- I had a runny nose for a few days, and now my throat hurts and I'm getting a cough. But hopefully it's a quickie cold, and tomorrow morning I'll be all better for my presentations! I'm excited to miss language school.