Hallo - from Germany

Here I am in Germany. I have many photos but not uploaded yet... I will post them, have no fear.
This is the second day of my second week, but it feels like I have been here forever.
I am finally adjusting to the different keyboard... see, I have new keys like ä and ö and € and other regular keys are in new places.
But you don't want to hear about the keyboards.
I am here for a 2 week workshop on Faith Development theory and research methods, which has turned out to be more interesting than I expected. I was afraid they would try to indoctrinate us into some type of theory/methodolgy, but the project coordinators are asking questions about this theory/methodology to revise it and asking us to participate in the process.
There are 15 international persons (students, researchers, professors) here for the workshop, plus a few research assistants (also students) from the project - including my friend Chris who suggested this workshop in the first place.
Two additional students are from WLU - so Waterloo-Laurier has a strong representation :) Others are from Turkey, the Netherlands, Rome, Wales, the U.S., and local. And research interests and background cover a wide range of traditions, which is very useful as one of the goals of the project here is to make Faith Development research more applicable across religions and cultures. (Needless to say there is a lot of work to be done and it is questionable whether this is even possible).
We have classes from 9 am until 6pm daily. So far Sunday has been our only day off. We have things planned eveyday until Sunday afternoon when the workshop ends. Granted, 2 of the days are excursions (field trips).
Our first excursion was last Saturday when we visited the Castle of Detmold (where a prince still lives (in half of it, the other half is a museum) decorated in Baroque style), the Open air museum in Detmold (with complete 18th and 9th C farms and farm houses and villages arranged on a vast area of land, working old wooden windmills, old farm animal breeds, and a delicious bakery) and finally, the Extern Stones. The stones were my favourite of course. (here is a brief intro: http://www.sacredsites.com/europe/germany/externsteine.html)

Sunday I attended the local Medieval Festival at Spurrenburg Castle (rebuilt ruins) here in Bielefeld (BTW, that's BEE-le-feld) with friends. Yep, I have made several new friends. We bonded over "bier" and bagels.
This is definitley the land of beer.
Free alcohol was served on the flight here! And beer is very very cheap. But nobody uses bier steines... it's all tall beer glasses (sorry Robin).

Thursday is our second excursion when we visit historic churches in the area and see a Frank Gehry building (some architect).

I will be home Monday after another long flight... I was up for about 33 hours on the way here because I arrived in town just in time for the first lecture and had to stay awake for the rest of the day - and then there was a social event (with beer of course). It put me back on a schedule, I just lost a night of sleep.

TTFN,
Mandy

PS I no longer have access to my primary email account, as of a week ago. I am working at building up a new address book. I can be reached at mandyfurney @ yahoo.ca