Back in Oxford.

Well, first off, there's some things that I didn't post yesterday that I think deserve posting.

It was interesting to me to talk to our tour guide on the way back from the concentration camp and find out a lot about the current state of Berlin. I think I remember him saying that something like almost 70 percent of people in Berlin were on some sort of welfare. He also said that 30 percent of people who lived in East Berlin with the wall now think that their lives were better with the wall. It never hit me looking from the side that won that the transition from Communism to Capitalism would still be hard for some people, but it is.

Also, something else I noticed in Germany was that a lot of people had those little bitty "smart cars", that are very eco-concious. It was very interesting.

On the way back from Berlin, we also made a friend in the airport who offered me chocolate and also had an all night layover in the London airport. So we talked for a while, and he was really cool. He was about to spend a month and a half traveling Spain to learn Spanish.

So today, I went back to Oxfam again to work. I was wondering how I was going to get all of my service hours, because I only do one hour a week at Oxfam. Well, as soon as I got there, Nihal, the manager, asked me if I could work a full four hour shift on Wednesday. Problem solved. Apparently my Texas accent came out today too. One of the other ladies said she'd never been able to pinpoint a Texas accent when I talked until something that I said today had an accent to it. So we laughed about that for a while. And then I came back and worked on homework, and finished my book.

This particular book was interesting, because it was the story about the woman who escaped from the crazy fundamentalist polygamous mormon group. So reading her story was really interesting to me.

And I finally got in touch with the other intern I'll be working with over the summer in Mexico, and she seems so sweet, I think that it's going to be a lot of fun to work with her.

I did get a little homesick this weekend. Everyone seems to be meeting up with people they know, a boyfriend or parents or siblings. It just makes me miss mine knowing that I won't get to spend a whole lot of time with them for a long time. I have the rest of this trip, then a few days, a maymester, then a few days. Then the whole summer, and just a few weeks before I have to move back to school, and then only some weekends will I get to see them. I guess this is my shove toward independence. Not financially, but physically at least.

But anyways, I love looking back and seeing how I'm becoming who I am. It's so interesting in retrospect, and so encouraging for the future that things I don't understand now might make sense in the future.