• I love foreign cultures and languages, as well as foreign politics.
  • The brilliant Jon Stewart is my hero.
  • I read for pleasure.
  • Barack and Michelle Obama are an immense inspiration.
  • I like words.
  • I could have CNN’s Anderson Cooper explain the collapsing world to me all day long.
  • I ache for winter to get here already all year ’round.
  • I watch Friends, Gilmore Girls, Friday Night Lights, and 30Rock religiously.
  • I procrastinate. All the time.
  • My favorite TV channel is CNN.
  • I own a Canon Eos 350D.
  • Music is my oxygen.
  • I sometimes like nature better than people and always choose science over god.

They call me Kat, but that’s just online. Offline friends call me Kati. My passport says Katharina, the German version of Katherine – a wonderfully classic and ancient name that I have come to appreciate a lot in the age of parents naming their kids after aerospace apparatuses and fruit. Katherine, in its most ancient form, originates from the Greek and means purity of emotion. As you read along, you will discover a certain discrepancy between name and nature of this here writer. What is life, if not ironic?

I moved to my own place in July 2008, a tiny apartment in the beautiful city of Aachen, a good four hours from my childhood home. In May 2009 I moved again – to another country, the Netherlands. (This has me all excited because, if nothing else, in the future I can be all like, Lived in at least two different countries? CHECK.) Or maybe that’d be three countries because I spent a year in Kentucky as a foreign exchange student. I really, really loved it. Now, I am even more obsessed with everything American. Ever since I can remember I have this dream of marrying a cowboy and living on a ranch with a bunch of kids and dogs somewhere in rural America.

In August 2008, I got officially accepted into Maastricht University which is in the Netherlands; though, courses are held in English. Maastricht University is amazing and I am so glad that I picked it for my studies in social sciences and media culture. However, attending uni has been a struggle for me from day one. I’m not cut out for book learnin’, I suppose. But I’m still determined to pull through and get my BA.

I like to think that I’m fluent in both English and German. I can also understand more or less everything in French but after eight years of high school French I still have trouble speaking it myself. If I had the time and the money, I would try to learn Spanish and Italian and take a look at languages such as Russian, Chinese and Arabic. I can’t think of anything that fascinates me more than languages. Each and every one of them is just so flawlessly complex and beautiful.

Possibly more than anything else, I love to travel. I have been to London, England and to Paris, France. I have been to Washington, DC. I have been to Berlin and Cologne and Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. I have been to Indianapolis and Strasbourg. I have been to Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I want to go to Alaska one day and also visit different places in Canada, including Vancouver, the island of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. I want to see Chicago. Norway is also on my list of places I’d love to see. I am fascinated with everything “up North”; it just seems as though nature was still beautiful up there and the air was that little bit clearer.