"The Heart is an Autumn Wanderer"

Guten tag!

School is starting to get busy ... 3 midterms and an annoying research paper are getting in the way of my traveling through Europe. I have been here for 2 months. Unbelievable. I feel like I am getting used to it though (took awhile) and I am feeling more comfortable living in Rome every day.

New things:
1. Chinese Food = heaven
2. The city is starting to get busy! Tourists are flowing in.
3. You can tell how much walking I do by looking at my shoes (aka, they look like every pair Casey McCorry owns).
4. I am reading Franny and Zooey. I am recommend you read it as well.
5. I hand washed clothes. Yes, I did.
6. I like to cook (weird).

Other news:
This past weekend I went to Hamburg, Germany to meet up with one of our amazing family friends, Nicky. Nicky was in Hamburg for work and invited me to come along. I flew on my own and even mastered the German subway system (S Bahn). Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany and is the largest non-capital city in Europe. It also has the most waterways second to Venice. It was so strange and so much fun being out of Italy. Italy really should just be its own continent. Germany was clean, big, organized, filled with Starbucks (delicious!), and was covered with amazing architecture.

The first day, Nicky and I walked around and did a little site seeing. On Saturday, we went to Neuengamme, a concentration camp on the outskirts of town. It's hard to put into words what it was like to be at a concentration camp. About 50,000 people died at the camp and it was one of the larger satellite camps in Hamburg. I have been to the Holocaust museum in D.C., I have read Anne Frank and Night, but I don't think anything could have prepared me for being at a concentration camp. It was haunting, chilling, and humbling. The most terrifying thing to me was how organized the entire process was. I felt sick knowing that Hitler (and others) had overseen the plans of the camp. The most intense part of the visit was when I read about a 16 year old Russian boy who died at the camp. He had been at a labor camp in Russia, and he became home sick. He thought that if he set one of the buildings on fire, they would send him home for poor behavior and he would be able to see his family again. And so he did. Instead, the boy was sent to Neuengamme where he was put on trial and later executed. They had a copy of the last letter he wrote to his parents. It was the most amazing thing I have read or come across, and I am crying now thinking about it.

After the visit to Neuengamme, Nicky and I went out to dinner for my birthday. German food was delicious and a nice change from pasta. After dinner, we went out to St. Pauli's/Reeperbahn which is the "Amsterdam" of Germany. We walked around and took in the odd/crazy sites, and went to a bar. My favorite part of the night was watching an entire bar full of Germans sing a song that seemed to be the anthem of Hamburg.

On Sunday (my 21st!), I got a grande coffee to go (!!) and walked around Hamburg in the morning. Like Italy, everything in Hamburg was closed on Sunday so it was pretty much me and a few others walking around. I bumped into St. Nikolai - a once massive church with some remains intact following bombings in WWII. The steeple was a couple stories tall and you could barely make out the top because of the fog. St. Nikolai is now used as an anti-war memorial. I also went to see St. Michaelis, and fortunately mass was currently going on. I am getting a good mix of Catholic masses in different languages.

The rest of Sunday I spent traveling, skyping, and I went to the Irish Pub, Elliot's, down the street to celebrate my birthday with some roommates.

I never imagined I would have spent my 21st in Europe. Never in my wildest dreams. But it's been an amazing trip. It has been a humbling experience.

You are loved and prayed for,
Kaitlin

"Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it."
-Cesare Parese