Euro-DST starts today, woop

I only now just figured out how to change the date settings on my phone so it would read month-day-year instead of day-month-year. The time also used to read that obnoxious 24 hour military thing, now it's back to good old American 12-h time. Hooray.

Big week coming up after this upcoming one. :-D Thursday, we'll be going to a Spanish production of Jesus Christ Superstar (YAY), then we'll be leaving for Germany on Friday morning. It'll be a pretty stressful day, Friday, first getting to Seville on a 3- hour bus (luckily for me, I have the delightful ability to sleep in any/every environment), then we'll mill around the dinky Seville airport to get to Frankfurt that night. This will mark the first time I'll be in a country 1) without speaking the language and 2) not knowing anybody ELSE who speaks the language.

Sure, I'm not completely fluent in Spanish, so I've discovered how body language comes in handy when I've reached a communication impasse, but I'm going to hit a huge wave of culture shock in Germany. And the German language always freaks me out, since you can say anything and it sounds like a death threat. That's probably just being an ignorant American...then again, the Spaniards I've mentioned that to laugh and say they agree, so who knows.

At least my trip to Germany/Austria will be a nice little segue to Belgium, since Dutch and German sound really similar to my ear, kind of like Portuguese and Spanish, like they are mutually intelligible. Not sure, though.

By the way, my Belgian relatives are descendants of my Grandma Boberg's first cousins. Cool, right? My great grandparents left Belgium in 1918 or 19 after WW I with my grandma's older brother and sister, but my grandma wasn't born yet...she was born in 1925, in Illinois. Sidenote: if my grandma HAD been born in Belgium, then I would have an in on the highly coveted dual citizenship, since American grandchildren of European-born grandparents can get a European Union passport on that merit alone. So frustrating! That would mean, then, that my second cousins on my dad's side are eligible for that dual citizenship, since their grandparents (my great uncle Renee and great aunt Irene, both deceased), were born in Belgium. And yet, I'm fairly sure none of them have any interest of living or working in Europe. Murphy's law?

More about family -- I am completely unaware what happened with the Italian and Swedish sides of the fam (my maternal grandpa and paternal grandpa, respectively). My Grandpa Catanzaro grew up hearing his parents speaking Italian, so I'm going to assume you'd only have to go back a few more generations to find out who emigrated from Sicily. Oh, and they changed their last name from whatever it once was to "Catanzaro," for unknown reasons. Catanzaro is a name of a city in the southern region of Calabria in Italy, which isn't even in Sicily. They might have been fugitives, which is kinda funny.
The Swedes are even more of a mystery. Boberg is a swedish name, though, even though most people don't think that. And I don't have the typical Swedish looks, either. I might not ever figure out when or why the Swedes in my family decided to head over to the US, especially because my Grandpa Boberg died in 1996 and all of his siblings are also gone. My Great Uncle Ben died a few years ago. I met one of my Grandpa Boberg's cousins, Glen Slater, within the last 10 years, and he showed my dad and I some of the Swedish family tree, but that stuff is lost on me. My dad would probably know more than I would. I should probably ask my Grandma Boberg what she knows about this whole thing, because I'm confused/curious.

Speaking of closer relatives, I'll be heading to Illinois this summer for a least a week or so to hang out with the grandparents/cousins/aunts/uncles. I'm not exactly sure what we'll be doing, though, probably just catching up and hanging out, and I'll be answering a barrage of questions about what I've done/what I'll be doing with my life. I don't even know yet!