Day 47

Progress in only one day is quiet a pleasant experience :)

• Flights are booked
• Lessons with Turid Karlsen, dramatic soprano and professor at the Hochschulen in Hamburg and Stuttgard are secured.
• The house is becoming more German'nated (post it notes throughout the house on various objects)
• The new essay and request for funding is finished.

Although slightly aggravating, it was exciting to search for flights for the summer. Thanks to the suggestion of one of my roommates, I finally booked a very inexpensive flight through www.studentuniverse.com  A website that offers only students travel deals on hotels, flights, activities, etc. If you are a student, I encourage you to explore the website and enroll. My tickets through this website ended up being almost $500 cheaper than any other website. Here is the basic itinerary:

• May 13, 2011 flying out of the US to Berlin
• June 3, 2011 flying from Berlin to Turkey
• September 1, 2011flying from Turkey to the US

 For those of you who may not know who Turid Karlsen is; I had the privilege of meeting Turid while she sang Senta at the Madison Opera's production of The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner.  From her beautiful dramatic soprano to her captivating acting, Turid was an inspiration, and I had hoped very greatly to be able to work with her. She also teaches at the Hamburg and Stuttgart Musik Hochschulen. Feel free to check out her website and listen to her recordings:  http://www.turidkarlsen.com/en/

The response I was given when my roommate walked into the room and saw the kitchen with post-it notes all over it was, "Ah!! The house is German now!" :) However, it is quite helpful. The other useful tool for learning common objects is to print off a coloring sheet and color the objects-kind of like what you would do in anatomy to learn the various bones and organs. So far, I have snoopy in a crazy costume getup to make sure i know all of the pieces of clothing (he is also very flamboyantly colored), a formal dining set that is dramatically colored, and my favorite, I used an online, create your own house website, to design a floor plan and then color various rooms and household objects.

Exciting news! I've been awarded a small scholarship through the International Education Office at UMD! I have yet to hear from the other grants. April 15th, hopefully, I will be auditioning for one of the grants and around that time a decision will be made for the graduate travel grants through UMD. Keeping fingers crossed :)


Time to get back to homework now, a significant portion of which is German homework. More great news to come!