So my internship at the DAAD has ended and now I am left with the heavy task of figuring out if I will be able to find a job here. I’m honestly beyond stressed out and wondering if all of this is going to be worth it in the end, and that is if I actually find employment. First, I haven’t found that many job announcements that will work with my degree or my current German skill level, although I am trying to improve the latter. And second, the feedback I have gotten from jobs I have applied to, write back stating that I don’t have that one special skill they were looking for such as, web design, and that is if they do write back at all. Frustrating!

Standing on the platform of a small-town train station, the wind rips through our hair and the ground rumbles as a sleek white ICE train shoots past at several hundred kilometers an hour (they are capable of 300 km/hour), that is, as far as I know, faster than a speeding bullet.  On an ICE you can get from Frankfurt to Paris (600 kilometers!) in under four hours.  They could get you to the moon in 55 days, if they went that far.

If you had tipped VfL Wolfsburg for the Bundesliga title at the beginning of the season, you would have been declared crazy. If you had been crazy enough to put money on it, you would have been, well, crazy rich. Even Wolfsburg’s coach Felix Magath admitted that before the season he never would have thought that “Wolfsburg have a chance to be German champions.” But on Saturday Wolfsburg won the championship for the first time in their history; sending players and fans absolutely crazy as they all danced around the pitch in a beer-soaked, chaotic frenzy.

At 15:30, when all the Bundesliga games kicked off on Saturday, the title race was talked up as a four-way battle. Anything could happen. It was, after all, the most exciting title tussle in Europe. But at 17:20, when all the matches were over, it seemed crazy to have thought that any team other than Wolfsburg could win this year’s Bundesliga title. VfL Wolfsburg had just destroyed Hannover 96 5-0 away from home. With the other results going their way, they opened up a two-point gap at the top of the league meaning they need only to draw at home against Bremen next weekend to clinch the championship.

I’m glad that we missed the bus. Missing the bus meant walking, and walking—despite looking very, very far on the map—turned out to be a pleasant stroll through fields, between water and trees, cows and grazing sheep.

We had arrived in Schleswig—an itty-bitty coastal town in northern Germany—the night before, and we were on our way to the Haithabu Viking Museum and the neighboring reconstructed Viking village.

Haithabu, an area now referred to as Haddeby on modern maps and bus schedules, is considered one of the most important Viking settlements in northern Europe, its port a center of trade and activity, and one of the oldest. Now almost a century of archeological finds from the original village’s site can be viewed in the museum: pots and bowls, weapons, jewelry, and bits of cloth. From these artifacts archeologists have constructed a detailed picture of Viking life for museum visitors, which after a short walk through more fields and woods, is brought to life in the reconstructed settlement.

Imagine an exiting football season. Now double that excitement. And now add a mind-boggling plotline à la Lost. Not even close. This Bundesliga season is simply incomprehensibly and inconceivably incredible. So incredible, in fact, that after a rollercoaster ride of a season, with just two games left to play; four teams at the top are separated by just two points.

As usual, we began the season knowing Bayern Munich would win all along. But then we toyed with the idea that hyper-hyped newbies 1899 Hoffenheim could do it. They were top at the half way point, played great football, but proceeded to drop quicker than Christiano Ronaldo in the penalty area. Then when Bundesliga dinosaurs Hamburg went top, we thought they could win it too.

Following the infamous Winnenden school massacre on March 11, 2009, in which a 17-year-old shot dead 15 people in the southwestern town in Germany, before killing himself, the German government has agreed to tighten gun laws. According to media reports,  random checks for gun owners will be implemented and paintball and laser tag will be banned.

This has lead to a debate erupting in the paintball and laser tag scene. Paintball is a sport in which players use air guns and rifles to shoot small paint pellets at opponents; whilst in laser tag, players wear vests with sensors and shoot at each other with an infrared-emitting gun.

“They simulate killing,” the deputy head of the conservative Christian Union parliamentary group, Wolfgang Bosbach, told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.