Road to Orlando

Hi,

So, I guess I am no longer "The Freiburg Kid" but I still do interesting things in life.

On Tuesday, I left Houston by car on my way to Orlando, FL for the AEPi Fraternity national convention. We stopped in New Orleans overnight to hang out and stay with a brother in the fraternity, named Yaakov. He just moved out to Tulane for law school.

We hit up Bourbon St. and ate some delicious Creole specialties. I didn't eat the crab, shrimp, crawfish and catfish with the others, since it isn't kosher, but my meal was delicious. After that, we bar hopped and had a good time.

Leaving Bourbon street was an interesting story. As we waited near the trolley car stop at 3 AM, we were approached by a guy who offered to drive us where we needed to go in his car in exchange for gas money. It was late and we decided to take him up on the offer. All 5 of us plus the driver, Shannon, got into his 1997 Dotson Cutlass. What a piece of crap. But, it got us home eventually. The trunk kept opening on its own and the engine kept sputtering every time we came to a stop.

Next day, I woke up early in order to try to motivate the other brothers to get on the road more quickly. Unfortunately, we still didn't get going until 12:15. New Orleans to Orlando is pretty, pretty far and all I will say is we made it in at 11:30 PM. Long long day.

Now that I have a had a few days to settle in Orlando, I'm not so angry about making it late to convention.

All for now,

AK

By the numbers:

In sports illustrated magazine, they do this really cool section every week where they say a number, followed by what in sports has had to do with that figure. So, I will try to do something similar with my last year.

2 - Times I went to Hamburg, my new favorite city

3 - Concerts I attended while in Europe (a Led Zeppelin cover band, Yuck and Tame Impala)

4.03 - The number of Euros I still have left

5 - Number of Bundesliga (German soccer league) games I attended (4 in Freiburg, 1 in Frankfurt)

6 - Roommates I had in my apartment

7 - Number of currencies I had to use while abroad (Swiss Francs, Euros, Danish Kroner, Israeli Shekel, Jordanian Dinar, Hungarian Forints, Great British Pounds)

10 - Number of flights I took throughout the year, including to and from the US

12 - Countries visited (Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Israel, Jordan, England, Ireland and France)

161 - Hours I spent on a train this past year, the equivalent of 6 days 17 hours

302 - Days I had a residence in Freiburg, Germany

There may be more to come. These are just some I thought of for now.

AK

Cleaning my life away

In a good and bad way, today was productive.

My parents helped me clear out my room. no easy task.
It involved painting splotches on the walls, sweeping underneath my bed and throwing many, many things away.

But, once the day was over, my room, which demonstrates my personality, was completely bare. In a way, my parents I had transformed this personal space of mine into a blank slate, ripe for the next person to move into. Strange how things can change so quickly in such a short time.
After all the time I had spent making the room my own, it was destructed in such fashion.

The blank slate is also my future, to a point. I go back to a life I left and try to take back things I have learned this year. How have I changed? How have my friends changed? Will anything ever be the same again? I'm not looking forward to finding out the answers to the those questions.

I only like to worry about things I have the power to change. Things will be how they will be. So I'll comment on things that already happened.

Dinner tonight was very cool. My parents and brother joined some roommates and I in eating delicious pizza from a local chain. Topics of conversation were a little lame, especially because my mom insisted on asking Richard, my Australian roommate, how to say some words in his variation of English. Got old fast. That doesn't mean I didn't get a kick out of it though.

My night got interesting when I was surprised by Richard that I was getting some visitors. A few friends from my building came over and chatted for a while. They made some pancakes, which we topped with nutella, bananas, almonds and whipped cream. Really good and nice of them to do. Quite an appreciated surprise.

Lastly, I went over to Joe's, an English friend of mine who was at the pancake surprise, to watch the new episode of Top Gear. The show was really good and fitting that it was the end of the season the same night it was the end of my adventure in Freiburg.

On to Munich for 2 days before flying home.

AK (2 days left)