Saturday, December 29, 2007

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

I just wanted to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to anybody who still reads this. I had a really good Christmas and will explain what I've been doing lately/put up pics in a few days. I have off of school till the 9th, so I'll have some time to upload pics and make really big update post.

My Address:
Chaston Scarborough
Anschuetzstr. 5/307
Luebeck, Germany
23562

Monday, November 26, 2007

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Pumpin it up for TLC!

So this weekend was amazing. The Schleswig-Holstein(the German state that I'm living in) cheerleading championship was on saturday. We had practice on Friday and then had a team bonding/sleep over thing. After practice we all went to this YMCA type place that had a bar and restaurant and training facilities and all that. We had some champagne, ate some food, talked. Then we all got ready for bed, had a motivational talk with the coach. It was a good night. The morning came quickly, we had to get up at 6 to get ready and eat breakfast. Then a 2 hour bus ride to Kiel(state capital). In Germany, cheerleading isn't a very big sport. Even though this was a state championship, it reminded me of a city competition in the states. There were only about 10 teams, and none of them were very good. The scoring system is completely different here, I haven't decided if it's better or worse.

The good news is, we straight dominated everybody. Our youngest team, TLC Candy, took 1st place out of...1 team. The pee wee team, TLC Cutie, took 1st out of 7 teams. Our junior team, TLC Goody, took 4th out of 10 teams. And the team I help, the senior team, TLC Temptation, took 1st out of 5 teams :) :). Not only did we take 1st, we beat the 2nd place team by 15 points, which is A LOT! I am very proud of them. Especially Klitschko, who near the end of the routine ended up falling on her head doing a round off back tuck(flip). She got up, finished the routine, and promptly passed out and had to be taken to the hospital. Luckily she only had a concussion and not a broken neck. She spent the night and is now recovering at home. If she hadn't had the strength/adrenaline to finish the routine, we wouldn't have won. Bus ride home was fun. It was a very emotional night.

The people that were old enough and still had the energy to go out, went out to the club and danced all night. I had to take my moped, and it was raining, and it was a 6.5 mile ride, in the dark, and I got a bit lost on the way there. Not fun. Dancing with my team was a blast though. One of the girls didn't have a way home, so I made a seat out of a towel on my storage rack thing on the back of my moped, and we drove home, in the rain, it was quite interesting, but we had a nice talk, but she lived about 5 miles past my apartment, which made it an 11 mile trip to her place, and 5 miles back to my place, in the rain, I was cold.

Today I slept...a lot. Did a lab report with my lab partner, and prepared for our lab on monday. Watched a really good movie called Martian Child. Now it's bed time. I will get pictures of my Italy trip, and of my cheer team posted soon...

Italy is dirty

So, last weekend 14 of my american friends and I flew to Milan, Italy. The entire trip ended up costing me 250 euros, which isn't bad for flight, hotel, entertainment and food. Too bad Italy is really expensive and dirty and I didn't have a very good time. It reminded me of a really expensive Mexico. Milan is the fashion capital of the world, so there was lots of Gucci and all that crap. It was a very touristy town. The food was good, but not what I expected. I paid 25euros to get into the "best" club in Milan, which was also the worst club I've ever been to. All the guys looked gay, literally with their slicked back hair, large diamond earrings, big designer glasses, and "fashionable" clothes. The only reason I would want to go back is to see the original painting of the Last Supper which is in a small church there, but has a month waiting list to see, and to see an Italian opera, but I might just see one in Rome or Venice which I plan to travel to this spring.

The good part of the trip was seeing the Duomo, which is the world's 3rd largest church. It is absolutely beautiful. You look at it and it doesn't seem real. It seems like you are looking at a postcard. There was also a castle that was pretty neat. I have lots of pictures that I will post after I filter through them and upload.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Pictures!

Holstentor

City Hall

Downtown

Inside Churches

I've been really busy with school and practice lately. The Schleswig-Holstein championship is in 9 days. I'll try to get a bunch of pictures and maybe some video. Basically the only school work there is are lab reports, but there are a bunch of them. I had my first test last week, and it went well, I don't have the grade back yet but I only need to get a 30/40 and I know I got at least that. My moped was stolen from practice 2 weeks ago. Luckily the police found it 5 days later so I got it back. I should have pictures of it later today. I've done a bit of work to it so it goes faster and doesn't make funny noises. There's a lot of stuff I want to do to it but it's too cold. For the record, doing laundry here sucks. I'll post more pictures of my moped, cheerleaders, and things that I find quirky about Germany sometime soon. I also plan on making a list of things that I love/hate/miss about being. Tchuess!

Chaston

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Sick

Basically the last few weeks have been filled with school, parties, practice and thats about it. The first weeks we went on some tours of Luebeck, which is exactly how I pictured Europe in my head. The buildings are all right next to each other, built tall instead of wide. A lot of the roads are made out of brick. I started practicing with a new cheer team, which is a lot of fun. One team is an all girl team that I'm basically coaching and the other team is a partner stunt team that I coach/am on. They're are pretty good I suppose, hopefully after a year of coaching them they will be great. I hope to get some pictures of them performing soon. I've learned a lot of german from them because not all of them can speak english. Most of the time they speak german to me and I speak simple german/english to them. So far it has worked well. I understand them, they understand me. It's weird, because I'm starting to speak "Germish" which is a combination of German and english. I use english words, but german grammar structures, it makes it easier for the germans to understand me.

School is going alright. All of my professors are really boring, and seem to make quite a few mistakes that we have to correct. This isn't very good for me, because these are the classes that I actually need for the future. Hopefully I will be able to get some use out of them. Labs are pretty intense here, more so than at MSOE. The lectures themselves are easy, but an hour and a half long and sometimes we have doubles, which means the same class back to back.

The Germans know how to party. Enough said.

Pictures will be shown soon, I bought a moped :). Currently I have a cold, which ruins my weekend. I have to do a bunch of homework because I have 2 labs next week and a lab presentation, and I have a large pile of laundry/my room is a mess. Unfortunately all I feel like doing is sleeping.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Long time

So I haven't posted in a while I know. Been quite busy with school/it took a while to get internet hooked up in my room. I absolutely love it here. Everybody is really nice, and I've met a ton of people from a bunch of different places. I hope to be able to make a blog every night so I can catch everybody up on what I've been doing. I don't have all(any) my pictures uploaded anywhere yet but I will do that soon.

Friday, September 28, 2007

Day 4

Saturday was a day of sleeping in, and I went to the grocery store again. I have to go to the grocery store at least every other day because our refrigerator and pantry are quite small and they are for 4 people. I went to the hardware shop and bought the stuff to make a beer bong. On friday, while we were downtown we bought 2 hookah's so we went back downtown to buy more shisha. The reason I made a beer bong was for Dennis' and Martin's birthday party was saturday night. The party was a lot of fun, we bought 180 beers and a few random bottles of booze. There were about 25 people inside, and on the porch. It was basically just talking, making the germans do their first beer bong, and having a good time. Music was playing, drinks were flowing, and everybody was getting along great, 0 drama, that's the way I like it.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Day 3

We had nothing planned for us on friday, so I spent the day cleaning, sleeping, and shopping again. The night was a crazy one. Everybody went bar hopping downtown. Our first stop was this old brewery from the 13th century. It was crazy old and had really really good beer. We drank about 10 pitchers and decided to go to Angus. This bar was kind of a heavy metal bar. There was some otep playing when we walked in, and the beer wasn't very expensive. We played a little bit of pool(worst table I've ever seen) and some foosball. It was Dennis' birthday on sunday so we sang happy birthday and had a massive Prost! which is ther german version of cheers. Our next bar was a small club called Hueks. They had a dance floor, a dj, and a bar area. It was packed! A lot of the people looked older, around mid 30's so it was kind of awkward dancing. It was really hot, and people in Germany dance a lot different than in the US. I suppose I'll just have to get used to it. After leaving the "disko" jean, sam, frank and I took a taxi home.

Day 2

I slept well the first night, but woke up around 6am. I didn't have anything to do till 10 so I decided to unpack and organize all of my things. At 10 we all walked to the bank in order to set up our german bank accounts. After that we went and filled out a whole bunch of paper work, like 2 hours worth in order to get German health insurance, enroll into school, get my visa. We were then free to do w/e we wanted so we all went to the grocery store to buy food and beer. Food is really cheap here, which makes the exchange rate a little bit more bearable. That night I went back to Stress with some friends and my 3 new german friends were there as well. We spent the night talking about music and concerts. It was a great time.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Day 1



















I woke up around 8 on tuesday Sept. 18th and finshed packing. I had to go get more passport pictures for the different ID's that I will be getting so I had my mom take a picture of me and I went to walmart to print them. I got on the plane at 3:30 and was soon on my way to a new country. Ben and I sat next to a nice woman who was born in Poland but moved to Seattle in her early 20's. We talked quite a bit and that made the 7.5 hour flight a little easier. I wasn't able to sleep at all. We arrived in London at about 9am London time. Everything was really expensive, and the cars drove on the wrong side of the road. When we arrived in Hamburg, Jens was there waiting for us and we all took a 30 minute taxi ride to Luebeck. Upon arriving to Luebeck we were allowed to put our stuff in our rooms and meet our roommates. I live with Kate Dechambre, a Biomedical student that graduated from MSOE and she is now getting her masters here at FHL. My other roommates are a german mechanical engineer named Simon, and another masters BE student from Mexico name Alain. They are quite nice and I think I will enjoy living with them. After I put my bags away we were taken to Die Mensa, which is the cafeteria, and like all school cafeterias, it's food was not good. I ate soem weird raspberry creme pudding, and a fried and breaded broccoli triangle. It tasted bad. After that we went to Aldi to buy food, which is quite cheap in germany. Then we were free to do whatever we wanted. Martin showed us the beer vending machine. 1Euro gets you half a liter of beer, in a big can. Amazing. We sat on Martin's balcony drinking beer and talking to everybody, it was a good time. I am really glad I know german because most the other guys here know little to none. Jean and I are the translators of the group. The german students speak very good english so that helps. That night we went to stress and drank more beer, we talked about random german things and I met 3 really nice german girls that are studying hearing aid technology. At about midnight I decided it was bed time because I had been up for 31 hours. Thus concludes day 1. If you want to see more pictures from my first few days here, then go to Pictures

First Post

Hello everybody, and welcome to my travel blog. I will be in Luebeck, Germany for the next 11 months and this is where I will put my better pictures and such of my travels and update everybody about what I'm doing and keep a record of my time spent here.