WARNING: I will try to keep the images in this post PG-13, but there are no promises!

Two cool kids from GCI!

It’s amazing how much the culture changes after just one hour of driving! Last week, we we went to Colmar, France, which is only a 90 minute drive from Freiburg, and I could immediately tell the difference between German and French cultures. Firstly, everything and everyone spoke French (obviously), but it was still interesting to see such a drastic linguistic jump just by driving 20 minutes over the French border! Secondly, Colmar was so quite and quaint. Although Freiburg is small, it’s busy!

After the Naked Bike Ride this Saturday, the whole IES group was invited to go to the Township of Gugulethu to participate in a homestay. The whole gang piled into a huge van and took off to go to our new “mama’s” houses for the night. We got to the main coordinator, Mama Nok’s house, and from there we were in for a surprise. A second after we all put our bags down, a million kids charged at us from the front yard.  For the next two hours, at least 20 kids where constantly playing, charging, hanging or attacking me at all times.

The Second law of Thermodynamics states that entropy increases, or that the universe tends toward disorder. But what do the laws of thermodynamics, which are used to describe particles, have to do with my visit to the Amazon? A reasonable person might answer nothing. Clearly I am not reasonable, because it was all I could think about as we walked through la selva. The biodiversity in the Amazon is great – with more than 40,000 plant and animal species.

Okay, so I know what you’re thinking. ”Limes” is probably the lamest title in the world, and I’m sure you’re all assuming that I’m seriously lacking in my creative writing skills if I’m going to be writing about limes. But I promise this is going somewhere.

Here in Shanghai, we were assigned language partners to help us with anything we need – where to buy certain items, language help, etc. We’ve made pretty great friends with a bunch of our language partners’ friends and were invited to a bbq! Now, BBQs are very different in China. First, you have to pay an admission fee to get into the park itself, where there are plenty of other activities inside (like boating, rides, horse riding, so on and so forth). When we arrived at the BBQ area, everyone has their own little BBQ pod that looks like this:

I rode home today on a double-decker train from class at the Musée d’Orsay. Now how many people can say that? Occasionally I’ll stop and take in where I am and be in absolute awe of Paris. The other night I took a stroll with some friends from the Latin Quarter home to the 16^th arrondissement; I must admit I felt a bit like Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris. Anything is possible in the City of Lights!