Visa and a special assignment

I now have a visa permanantly set inside my passport. and we discovered it's also a work permit! So that's good news. It's valid for 3 years, which is nice. After that I can apply for a longer term visa. The bad news is that I've been assigned to take a German culture class - actually, that's not a big deal, but the other thing that goes with it is: 600 hours of language lessons. And my current courses at the university don't count for some reason. Which is bad. We're hoping that when we transfer our papers of residence from Gießen to Marburg (next month) we can work with the Immigration Office here to negotiate out of that.

Nicely coinciding with my newly aquired work permit was an inquiry: would I be interested in reading a medical researcher's english journal article? My friend, Johanna, is a medical resident here in the surgery section and knew about my previous job back in Boston and made the connection. This other researcher wants to submit an article and wants to have a native speaker review it for him. This is very familiar territory for me, so I agreed. She said he would likely refer me to other colleagues if all goes well, so this could be a little freelancing gig on the side....we shall see what comes of it. I do think it's funny this task should follow me here!

the weather has cooled off nicely, thanks to the off/on torrential downpours we've been recieving...thank goodness for my massive umbrella! (i actually shielded 4 people in the bus stop yesterday - everybody was laughing)