Some Pictures, as promised

First, here is a link to some more pictures from the Ugly Duckling Cup (from a couple of posts ago).

This past weekend was wonderful. We got up on Saturday morning, made some sandwiches and ventured out. We caught a ferry for a 1 minute ride, and then had an hour to kill before the bus to Nida left. As you can see on the map on the last post, Nida is about an hour south of Klaipeda, on the Curonian Spit. It is the last city (on the spit) in Lithuania before you are in Kalinigrad (Russia).
I wasn't aware of this until this evening, but if you click on the map on the top right corner, you can change the view to satellite view, to see the terrain. On the top left of the map, you can zoom in or out, and move the map so you can see what you want. Pretty neat. The road to Nida is a bumpy and windy one, and there is mostly forest the whole way to look at.

Nida is a cool fairy tale-like little city. It has cute little houses and cottages with better kept yards than Klaipeda, water, hills, trees, sand dunes, etc. While we were there, there was a huge international bicycling and orienteering race going on, so every so often we'd be on a trail and a bike would go whirring past us. It was pretty entertaining. The batteries in the camera died about halfway through the day, but we were still able to get some pictures.

Steve on the sand dune.

The view of Nida.

The view behind me. Sand, sand, and more sand.

Artsy.

Steve making it look like I'm in the desert.

I wish I could have taken more pictures of the buildings. Here's one of them. I liked the red flowers in front of the bright blue, Steve liked the big round stack of fire wood.

These, and more pictures from Nida can be seen here.

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Sunday was relaxing as well. We were able to sleep in, play some games with friends, and go to church (we go to church in the evening). The best part was after church when we got to talk to a whole lot of family via Skype for about 2 hours. It is wonderful to have access to this technology. We can talk and see the person we're talking to with more clarity than a cell phone at times...and half a world away! Of course with all things there were technical difficulties to start out, but we got them fixed were able to have a lot of good conversations. :)

Today, Monday, was a busy day with a few different meetings for both of us, as well as Lithuanian class. I think the class is valuable and fun, but will be so relieved when we're done with it. What will we do with the extra 6 hours per week, I wonder?

That is all for now, hope everyone has a great week.

Steve and Laura eina į Nidą

Tomorrow we're taking advantage of the nice weather (high of 57 F), and hopefully taking a day trip to Nida. From the "Klaipeda in your pocket" booklet we always look to (see link on the side of this page), as well as a video about Lithuania that we watched in (where else) Lithuanian Class, it sounds like a neat place to go. To get an idea of where it is, here is a little slice of a map from Google Maps, showing the path from Klaipeda to Nida. Basically we will walk to a ferry, ride a fairy for less than a km, then get on a bus and ride for about an hour, and then we're there.


We'll show pictures and tell stories about it when we get back.
:)
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A week worth writing home about

Well hello.

Sorry it's been so long since we've updated, but we have been BUSY. It is currently 2am, and I am still awake, updating the blog. It's alright though, because tomorrow is Saturday, and we can sleep in a little bit.

The last time we updated, we had just gotten done with community day. It seems like ages ago, when really it has only been a week and a half.

Last Friday was a busy one for me. The first leadership seminar of the year was that afternoon, and then that evening was another leadership event for current student leaders.

The leadership seminar went well. There was a great turnout, about 80 students came. The leadership summit went well, too. I gave each leader an opportunity to take a test to see which style of learning they most lined up with (visual, auditory, kinesthetic), and then talked about leadership with them in those three ways: first a movie clip (for the visual people -- myself included), a group discussion time (for the auditory learners), and then an activity (for the kinesthetic learners). We did this three times, and then took some group pictures, and then the evening was over.

Here is everyone at the end of the Leadership Summit in front of the paper "quilt" that we created.

And then the week was over, I should say. It was a really busy week for the both of us, and through it all, we were both sick with a nasty cold. Needless to say, we needed the weekend to recuperate.

Here's a brief summary of what we did last weekend:

1. Slept a lot

2. Laundry

3. Went on one walk

4. Went to church

and...

I can't think of one single other thing. It was great. It was just the weekend we needed.

Here are a couple of pictures from the walk we went on.

Steve outside of a business that is obviously a furniture store. (We think)

A cool looking building. I think it's a church.

We walked around a huge sculpture park. Here's one sculpture. I don't know its significance.

A HUGE sculpture of a sword. Look how tall it is in comparison to the trees.

This past week has been more relaxed feeling...but somehow just as busy. Just with different things going on.

My first year seminar class had its first "big" paper due, and so I got the privilege of reading and grading them all. So that took some time. While I was grading papers, I thought that it would be good idea to multitask and do some laundry. In a freak accident I ended up scraping off the side of my arm when reaching into the laundry basket for the clothes. There are a couple of pictures of that here. I am going to have a nice scar to accompany this story.

The first dorm event was yesterday (Thursday), and it was a success! There is a pond on campus by the new dorm that has swans in it. So the obvious event to have is one where students build boats and race them across the pond! It was called the "Ugly Duckling Cup" and was the first annual race. There were three boats racing, one from Neumann West, one from Neumann East, and one from Karklu (our dorm). Karklu is about a 25 minute walk (when you're not carrying a boat) from campus, so it was quite the sight for people to see us parading the boat all the way over there! Here are a few pictures from that (I took millions more, and someday, if I make a photo album of them on facebook, I'll post a link here):

Notice Steve is dressed as a pirate. Our dorm color was Green.

Crossing a busy street.

Walking toward Neumann Hall.

The sign for the event.

Karklu taking the lead right away, and dominating.

Three "ugly ducklings"

The ugly duckling trophy sitting on what was left of Karklu's boat.

Now we're back to the weekend again. Hopefully we can do more relaxing. The weather for this coming week is going to be an Indian Summer, and may even get up to 20 degrees Celsius! A very big deal. 68 degrees for those of you who don't speak Celsius.

In other news, we learned a new verb in Lithuanian class today. "skubėti" means "to hurry"

"Skubu" means "I hurry"

"Skubi" means "you hurry"

"Skuba" means "he/she hurries" and "they hurry"

"Skubame" means "we hurry"

"Skubate" means "you (as a group) hurry" or "you (formal) hurry"

Just a little trivia, if you're sitting around later today and there's a lull in the conversation, you can teach everyone some new words.

Well, I'm going to go to sleep now. It is the weekend, after all, and I've been dreaming about this for days.

Here's one final picture:

Most every place we go to knows how to make such pretty lattes. And they taste good, too!

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Community Day and a Little Basketball

Yesterday was Community Day on campus. It was an evening of gathering as a community to celebrate and kick off the academic year. There was an opening ceremony where we gathered and sang "the university hymn" (in Latin), heard from the V.P. of Academics, were introduced as faculty and staff to the students, celebrated the gathering of the 20 different countries that make up LCC this year.

Afterwards there was a bbq with hot dogs and games for everyone (it was a gorgeous day). Then we had Moose Maddness. This was a time for the LCC community to be introduced to the one varsity sport at the university...Basketball. There were some fun games that involved fan participation, as well as some skills competitions for the basketball players like a 3-point contest and a slam-dunk contest. The evening was highlighted by a fun game involving mixed teams of basketball players and faculty/staff members. Your's truly dusted off a jersey, took a couple of warm up shots, pretended to stretch, and joined the starting five of the Moose Blue team. After being down at halftime to the Moose Orange team, our guys turned it around and won! I contributed 2 points by draining a jumper from about 15 feet to the applause of many fans in the stands.

It was a fun evening to see most of the community gather together and start the year off. Here are a couple of pictures from the night. We'll hopefully have more time this weekend to tell more stories.

Hint, Hint, Hint

This past week was a good week for mail. We got a letter from my mom, and some pictures and notes from Camp.
Which reminds me, for the rest of you who would like to send us mail/care packages:

LCC International University
Kretingos 36
LT - 92307
Klaipeda, Lithuania

(You'll probably want to include our names on the address as well)

We'll just have to leave the country then

At the end of October will be Fall Break (I know, it's a long way off, but time moves so quickly, it's nice to be thinking ahead). We were wondering what we should do for Fall Break. Should we travel somewhere fun, maybe visit someone in another country? Should we stick around here, and relax? Should we go somewhere local that we've never been before?
Our questions were answered when we found out that we HAVE to leave the country for 8 days before November 4th.
In order that we may obtain a temporary residence permit (TRP), we had to fill out a lot of paperwork last spring. When the paperwork is received by the proper people, they have six months to make a decision. They got our paperwork on May 12th, so they have to make a decision by November 12th. On November 4th, it will be our 90th day in the country. After that amount of time, you need to have a TRP. It is possible that we might obtain our TRP before that, but you never know. So, in order to buy ourselves some time, we need to be out of the country for 8 days (so they're not counted toward the 90 days).
The catch? We have to travel outside of the Schengen Zone. You can click on it to read a little more about it. Basically, once you're in the Schengen Zone, you can travel within it (basically all over Europe) and not have to get your passport stamped a bunch of times. So we have to go somewhere outside of the Schengen Zone, which limits us to basically Ireland, The UK, Switzerland, and Turkey. It's ok though, because those are all fantastic places to visit, and Steve has contacts in almost all of them.
So now it's just a matter of contacting people and deciding where to go. It's most cost effective to stay with people, so hopefully it works out. What a blessing that our Fall Break happens right when we need it to.

Hope everyone is doing well and having a great Fall/End of Summer.

A walk around town

Here are some photos from the walk that we took last Sunday. It was too nice of a day to stay inside. Hope they give you some idea of where we are. (Click on "photos" to see them)

Lietuviškai

Mano Vardas Laura. Mano Pavardė Hanson. Aš kalbu puikai angliškai. Aš kalbu šiek tiek Lietuviškai.

We had our first Lithuanian 101 class today. One of our assignments was to tell 5 poeple what we learned (basically to get us to practice speaking). If 5 people read the first lines of this post, I should get an A ;).

If anyone thinks to be awake at 4am (Tuesday), please pray for me, I will be teaching the first day of my class: First Year Seminar, at noon. I'm a mix of excited and a little nervous. I think it will go well. Who knows, maybe I'll discover that I love it.

Hope everyone is well.

Can anyone guess the translation of what I learned today? The little squiggle over a letter (like s, c, or z) indicates that it should be pronounced like it has an "h" after it. So š is pronounced sh.