oh, what a day

i'm off from lexington and have safely arrived in manhattan, kansas, which is place of about 45000 people and a bunch of kansas state university students. i got to know lil sanya, my sweet and very, very wild two year-old cousin, who after some shy time warmed up and by now has not only learned my name but also announced that from now on she'll be sleeping in my bed.
i've driven. a tractor. pictures have been taken so that i'll be able to prove things to you once i get them. wow. i haven't driven a car in years, but who cares: now i can officially state: i can drive a tractor.

yesterday morning i got soaked twice before leaving for the airport. kentucky rains never cease to amaze me, even though it has been raining there for quite a while now. they're not just rains like in water falling from the sky in small bits. they give you the feeling of walking through a waterfall. i got soaked walking with an umbrella, actually. not quite as soaked as i might have got otherwise, but still soaked.

those last few days in lex were wild. we had very little sleep. we tried to compensate for that by drinking beer. all in all a mind-altering combo, especially when you get to bed at four a.m. and have to sit in class at nine. apparently this does not exactly help to stay all good and healthy, so i'm still in a foggy state of mind. but maybe also, because it is a little surreal being here in the us with people i normally see about 9 time zones away from here.

my flight here was pleasant, i slept through most of it, although it was very weird getting on the plane in lex and literally getting out twenty minutes later in cincinnati, like getting on a tram or a bus. no discussions about my whereabouts this time, in fact they did not check my documents at all - do they do that on german domestic flights? i'm not sure.

so. now i'm hanging out in kansas, and after going through half of it by car i can only say that it's really, really pretty. there is almost nothing there, besides cows and grassy hills, but the grass has sort of a reddish shade to it, they call them the enflamed hills. pretty, really pretty.
my grandma has not noticed my eyebrow piercing so far. yay. or maybe she is only pretending not to have noticed it, that's quite possible, too - one way or the other: no discussions on that part. so far.

i miss the fellow lexingtonians. if any of you read this: i had a great time with all of you and i hope to meet you all again at some point. i mean, in the end these days it's only a couple of hours away,
right...

i have to go now. have a good day everybody, dear fulbrighters, let me know if you arrived well!