Two weekends, two trips. And more.

So, it has been a while since I have written.
Two weekends ago Shaun and I went skiing in Austria. It was a trip planned by a group called AEGEE, which is a European organization that helps exchange students do things on campus and on the weekends. They do a lot of different things, like parties and trips. It is pretty cool. Anyway, the place we went to in Austria is called Warth Schroecken. It was a pretty cool mountain. There were quite a few blue (easy) paths for me to take down, which was good because it had been a long time since I had skied. We spent about 6 hours skiing, and most of that was actually going down the hill, unlike in Michigan where one spends more time riding up to the top than going down. There were a few times we went down in ungroomed areas, which was a lot of fun. Unfortunately it was quite warm, so the snow was heavy, and slow. (More about the weather in a second.) There were also a few really steep parts in which we both fell, hard. Shaun did a spectacular face plant into the snow, but he had the camera so I couldn't take a picture. I also fell, though it is more like tumbling than anything, as the pictures (coming shortly) show.
So, the weather. It was really sunny. Sunny enough that if you didn't wear sun screen, your face burned. Shaun and I considered such things briefly and because neither of us thought we would get 'snow burn', we didn't take any, even though it was offered to us. By the end of the day, we were very toasted, Shaun more so than I. We spent the next week walking around with red and peeling faces, and because of our sun glasses, everybody knew what had happened. It was a bad choice.
Our trip over Easter weekend is to Saes Fae Switzerland for more skiing. Don't worry, we have already bought the sun screen.
Last weekend we took a trip to Karlsruhe, a city northwest of Stuttgart. It was a trip put on by the International Zentrum (IZ). It was an interesting trip. The first place we went to was Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medien technologie (Center for Art and Media). It was definitely an art museum, because most of the stuff that was artistic, I didn't understand. This art wasn't painting and sculpture art. Instead it was art that utilizes technology to make statements and stuff like that. I found a few things to be cool, but I am not much of an art person. After that we went to the cities botanical garden and saw some cool things there, and the baroque castle built by the founder of the city. Castles are cool. Unfortunately it is now a museum, so it is not cool on the inside, but the outside is impressive.After that we went to a brew house an took a tour of their beer making process. This is kinda misleading because it only took about 2 minutes to see everything. All in all it was a good trip though. A good way to spend a rainy Saturday.
The only eventful thing that has happened during the week is that we had a test. It was three hours long, and we had to wait for everybody to finish before we moved on to the next parts, so I did a lot of waiting. We got the test back today, and I did surprisingly well. In German, all nouns have genders, either masculine, feminine or neutral. I know it is the same in many languages, but in German there is almost no pattern or reason for the gender. This means that you just have to memorize the gender of, I don't know, several THOUSAND, words. For one, that is ridiculous, and two, I hate memorizing. The reason I mention all of this is because I thought I was going to do pretty poorly on the grammar part of the test because I didn't know the gender of about half the words. It turned out okay though.