I Love Fridays

German update: I'm learning so much!! The German language course is going really well and all of the exchange students get along SO well!! I LOVE them, we have some pretty exciting things planned and we've done some pretty exciting things together. We're all in this together and all dealing with the same stuff, so it's an amazing group of friends to be around since everyone's so supportive and everyone just wants to have fun! My German is coming along pretty smoothly. I have been here for almost three weeks now (it's going by very fast) and I can understand a lot of what people say when they speak German. The difficulty here is that most people speak Swiss German like all your friends and family and so on. Swiss German is a lot different than German, from the impression I got it's a really fancy German with different words and a much different dialect. Swiss German can understand German, but not the other way around. Since we are all learning High German and not Swiss German, I don't understand anything!! Also, people appear to speak really fast but I think it always seems like that when you don't know the language. It's coming along very nicely though, when people speak high German I can understand most of it. Swiss German is only a spoken language, not a written one so in schools they aren't allowed to speak it, everything has to be in High German - luckily!! So together, all the Rotary students are learning German and it has some pretty funny moments, I love my class.Okay.. I love Fridays!!

Right now it's about 1 30 am and I just got home from the lovely city of Basel... I had such an amazing night. Four of us exchange students went to a movie at the Orange Cinema downtown Basel. It's not a regular cinema, it's outside and there are a bunch of chairs set up on the cobblestone area with a HUGE screen set up. It was the most beautiful spot- there were typical Swiss apartments all around, with a VERY old church right behind us with a grandfather clock on the top of it that kept ringing and we sat and watched "Down By Law." It's a really old movie, in black and white. I sat there and realized that I was in central Europe, sitting in Basel, Switzerland watching a movie outside with this beautiful purple sky from the city lights and the typical beautiful Swiss scenery all around us. We sat in the front row in comfortable lounge chairs and the front row wasn't that close to the screen so it was the perfect spot to enjoy the moment.

About half way through the movie it started to rain and most people would be upset with that, but i LOVED it.. and it seemed like everyone else did too! There were complimentary rain ponchos that everyone put on with the words "Don't Worry" labelled on the back of them. All cuddled into the poncho, everyone sat and enjoyed this beautiful Friday night. I wouldn't change it for anything, here are a few pictures to help explain what I'm talking about.
That's the big screen behind me, along with the Swiss buildings that surrounded the left and right side of us.

Tomorrow (I guess that it's this morning!! ) I have to wake up at 8am and I am going to a a wine festival all day, then off to a teenage hangout type place called Hakuna Mattata. Life is so exciting here, so much to do and see.

loving it here...