"How do you live each day with this kind of passion? Don't you find it exhausting?"

Kudos to you if you know the movie reference for the title of this entry.
Next line: "Only when I'm around you."
My line: "No. I find it invigorating."

Since coming to Germany, I am astounded, constantly, at what I am doing. Is this my life? Am I really living a bazillion miles away from people I know and love? Am I seriously in a place where I don't understand the language? Is my home referred to as 'the fairytale paradise', even by the locals? Does my neighborhood honestly contain a real castle, a palace where the Prince-Electors of German history resided? Is my town the singularly most beautiful town in the region?

YES! yes to it all!

Do I participate in research that is exciting? That is over my head, and fun, and confusing, and interesting, and important, and everything that research should be? Have I been uniquely blessed? So much beyond what I actually deserve? [WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY beyond it. leagues, miles, light years and parsecs beyond what i deserve...]

again, YES.

I find myself invigorated by my experiences here. I have found so many opportunities. I am going all around europe in the near future. I have seen much of Heidelberg, and i LOVE it.

Do I find it exhausting? No. I find myself rising to the occasion, snatching opportunities and creating them as the come. The passion that brought me here - to do research in a professional setting in Europe - is one that will make the experience rich. I have filled a third of a journal, writing about every single experience, because I can't forget anything. Any detail, emotion, feeling, building, experience, or encounters.

I wish I had a talent with words. That I was eloquent enough to describe everything to you. But I don't. And since the internet is still down at my place, I cannot upload pictures - which, as we all know are worth a 1000 words, and more adequately express feeling.

“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 Pavese

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

“Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca