Good morning everyone! Yep, made it through the last week of classes for a while there, and am now in Lübeck. Where it is snowing. I am not amused. What I have seen of Lübeck so far is very pretty. The city started in the middle ages on an island in a river, so the oldest part is very compact with great picturesque side streets, etc. The youth hostel is quite nice, and the kids havn't been too awful yet.
Today we have polish lessons, then a scavenger hunt through the city (and the snow....) and then tours of the Gunter Grass House and the BUddenbrooks House. The kids have to complete various presentations by the end, and so there is lots of time set aside for group work. And for going out and having fun, too. Lübeck is known for its marzipan, and THE marzipan store is having its 200th anniversary tomorrow. So another teacher and I are going to make a point of checking that out.
One complaint is that the internet is pretty expensive at this hostel, probably to keep lines from forming. So I will probably write again when I get back, but if you have the time I would love to hear from you. Hope all is well and that you have a good Fasching (Mardi Gras), even if the folks up here don't seem very excited about it, and that I will hear from you soon.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Das singende klingende Baumchen
One week closer to spring, and we had a lovely reminder of that this morning. The sky was clear and the sun was shining warm. Birds were singing, and geese were flying back from the south. By four o'clock it was back to being grey and rainy, but for a little while there, the hope that spring will eventually come was strengthened. In my happiness at forgetting winter for a few hours, I had forgotten that in Germany everything closes at 12 on saturdays, and so couldn't go to the book store or the bakery like I had wanted. Well, I went there, but they were both already closed. Fortunately the grocery stores still stay open until the afternoon (some even until 8 pm!) so I could still get that shopping done.
This week I got to do more lessons than last week, but still not as many as I should be doing. We will see what this week with it's yet again revamped schedule will bring. Since I won't have a normal schedule anyway for the two weeks after this coming week, I am not getting too attached to any schedule. First I will be going to Lubeck with students from our school and from a school in Berlin and from Poland, then the week after that is the Fulbright conference and a visit from James, and I won't have to work that week either (yay!). So starting the second week of March, the teachers should know what their schedule looks like, and we'll set up a plan then for the rest of the year (hopefully).
Last night we finally got to have our Fairy Tale Night. It turned into watching fairy tale movie night rather than reading fairy tales, but that was fine. I have now seen the two DDR fairy tale movies that every east german child grew up with: "Der kleine Muck" and "Das singende klingende Baumchen". The first is set roughly in the middle east, and since it was filmed in a studio here in Brandenburg, all the characters are played by white people with really dark makeup. Which was sort of distracting. And the second is the story of an arrogant princess and a good prince who is turned into a bear by the mean dwarf, but the magic of the singing, ringing little tree is strong enough to save them all. It is wierd seeing a beloved children's movie for the first time as an adult, just because the people who grew up with it are like "isn't it the most amazing movie?" and I can't stop thinking about how annoying the princess's drawn on eyebrows were. Oh well. It's important to have experienced to round out my experiences here.
In some Storkow unrelated news, for anyone who hasn't heard already, I have been accepted to Vanderbilt University for the Fall, and with a full scholarship package. It was my first choice, and I am really excited to get to go there, and get the next 5 years or so until my PhD in German literature started. Yay!
Hope you are all doing well, and can find the time to drop me a line. I love to hear news from home!
This week I got to do more lessons than last week, but still not as many as I should be doing. We will see what this week with it's yet again revamped schedule will bring. Since I won't have a normal schedule anyway for the two weeks after this coming week, I am not getting too attached to any schedule. First I will be going to Lubeck with students from our school and from a school in Berlin and from Poland, then the week after that is the Fulbright conference and a visit from James, and I won't have to work that week either (yay!). So starting the second week of March, the teachers should know what their schedule looks like, and we'll set up a plan then for the rest of the year (hopefully).
Last night we finally got to have our Fairy Tale Night. It turned into watching fairy tale movie night rather than reading fairy tales, but that was fine. I have now seen the two DDR fairy tale movies that every east german child grew up with: "Der kleine Muck" and "Das singende klingende Baumchen". The first is set roughly in the middle east, and since it was filmed in a studio here in Brandenburg, all the characters are played by white people with really dark makeup. Which was sort of distracting. And the second is the story of an arrogant princess and a good prince who is turned into a bear by the mean dwarf, but the magic of the singing, ringing little tree is strong enough to save them all. It is wierd seeing a beloved children's movie for the first time as an adult, just because the people who grew up with it are like "isn't it the most amazing movie?" and I can't stop thinking about how annoying the princess's drawn on eyebrows were. Oh well. It's important to have experienced to round out my experiences here.
In some Storkow unrelated news, for anyone who hasn't heard already, I have been accepted to Vanderbilt University for the Fall, and with a full scholarship package. It was my first choice, and I am really excited to get to go there, and get the next 5 years or so until my PhD in German literature started. Yay!
Hope you are all doing well, and can find the time to drop me a line. I love to hear news from home!
Friday, February 10, 2006
Real American Breakfast
Well, I have the first week of the new half-year just about behind me, and things are pretty hectic. I still don't have a clear schedule for this semester, because one of the teachers that I have a lot of lessons with is sick, and hasn't been here to put in her request. I still havn't been to half of the classes that are on the schedule, because the teacher is still figuring out how they want to set up the new semester, and havn't found a way of working me in yet. It didn't help that Wednesday morning I had to go back to the doctor to get a final check up on my arm, and since the doctor started his appointments that morning about 2 hours late, I missed the lessons I was supposed to do then. Still, sometime in the next couple of weeks I should get a routine that I can then stick with. This time there seem to be more early morning classes, which means that will have to be getting up even earlier. Fortunately, it is getting lighter again, and it shouldn't mean walking to school in the dark anymore.
This weekend is Chorlager (chorus camp) and the whole chorus is meeting at what I assume to be a kind of retreat center to practice our new music intensively over the weekend. It starts tonight and goes until Sudnay afternoon. The only problem is that it is also the school open house on Saturday morning. So there will be someone who will come and pick me up, drive me to school Saturday morning, wait while I try and play games with next year's 5th, 6th, and 7th graders in English for 3 hours, and then drive me back to camp just in time to miss lunch. It'll be quite the experience. Oh, the lady from the local news paper will be at the open house, too, and it is possible I will be interviewed. My name has already made it into a newspaper article about the school. Marlies clipped it out and has madee me a copy.
The excitement for today though was that my ninth grade class and I got to make a real American breakfast this morning. I brought in recipes for buttermilk biscuits, pancakes, and cinnamon swirl rolls a few weeks ago, and they had to translate the recipes. Then they divided up ingredients, and brought everything in today. There was also bacon (true bavarian bacon, naturally) and eggs. I had them work with a recipe for grits, too, but no one seemed very excited about it, and since I wasn't sure if you could use Polenta for grits, we decided not to try it. There was also maple syrup for the pancakes and peanut butter for the toast. No one believes me that peanut butter an jelly not only go together, but that that is the way you eat it back home. Oh well, one thing at a time. And in what I have decided is true german fasion, they immediately said that biscuits taste just like brötchen. Which of course, they don't, but germans like to think that anything you can eat or get in the states you can, in fact, get here too. Which isn't really the case, but hey. I think they just want me to feel at home, and that I can get those bits of home here, too. A little like how they said that pumpkin pie tasted like lebkuchen. It does have some of the same spices, but the comparison stops there.
Even though it is a little crazy here right now, it still felt really good to come home from England. I was excited to get back to speaking German, and on the train back from the airport I happened to find one of my friends here who works in Berlin, and we rode back together. It was great to be back in my cozy little apartment, and in my muddy icy street. It was worth taking a little trip away just to see how comfortable I am here. I think the next few months are really going to fly by. There is something almost every weekend, and especially once the classes become routine again, that will also go by quickly.
I hope you are all doing well, and aren't having the crazy weather we are. The past few days it was warm and raining, and now it is snowing again. Right before it started to snow though, it was almost spring for a few hours. The birds were singing, the sun was shining, there was a great breeze, and rain puddles everywhere. That really helped to imagine that there will, in fact, be spring before too much longer. Well, in a month or so, anyway. Take care, and I'd love to hear from you all.
This weekend is Chorlager (chorus camp) and the whole chorus is meeting at what I assume to be a kind of retreat center to practice our new music intensively over the weekend. It starts tonight and goes until Sudnay afternoon. The only problem is that it is also the school open house on Saturday morning. So there will be someone who will come and pick me up, drive me to school Saturday morning, wait while I try and play games with next year's 5th, 6th, and 7th graders in English for 3 hours, and then drive me back to camp just in time to miss lunch. It'll be quite the experience. Oh, the lady from the local news paper will be at the open house, too, and it is possible I will be interviewed. My name has already made it into a newspaper article about the school. Marlies clipped it out and has madee me a copy.
The excitement for today though was that my ninth grade class and I got to make a real American breakfast this morning. I brought in recipes for buttermilk biscuits, pancakes, and cinnamon swirl rolls a few weeks ago, and they had to translate the recipes. Then they divided up ingredients, and brought everything in today. There was also bacon (true bavarian bacon, naturally) and eggs. I had them work with a recipe for grits, too, but no one seemed very excited about it, and since I wasn't sure if you could use Polenta for grits, we decided not to try it. There was also maple syrup for the pancakes and peanut butter for the toast. No one believes me that peanut butter an jelly not only go together, but that that is the way you eat it back home. Oh well, one thing at a time. And in what I have decided is true german fasion, they immediately said that biscuits taste just like brötchen. Which of course, they don't, but germans like to think that anything you can eat or get in the states you can, in fact, get here too. Which isn't really the case, but hey. I think they just want me to feel at home, and that I can get those bits of home here, too. A little like how they said that pumpkin pie tasted like lebkuchen. It does have some of the same spices, but the comparison stops there.
Even though it is a little crazy here right now, it still felt really good to come home from England. I was excited to get back to speaking German, and on the train back from the airport I happened to find one of my friends here who works in Berlin, and we rode back together. It was great to be back in my cozy little apartment, and in my muddy icy street. It was worth taking a little trip away just to see how comfortable I am here. I think the next few months are really going to fly by. There is something almost every weekend, and especially once the classes become routine again, that will also go by quickly.
I hope you are all doing well, and aren't having the crazy weather we are. The past few days it was warm and raining, and now it is snowing again. Right before it started to snow though, it was almost spring for a few hours. The birds were singing, the sun was shining, there was a great breeze, and rain puddles everywhere. That really helped to imagine that there will, in fact, be spring before too much longer. Well, in a month or so, anyway. Take care, and I'd love to hear from you all.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Hello from England!
Hi everyone!
Well I am flying back to Germany tomorrow after spending the semester break in Manchester. It has been a nice trip, and it was of course nice to visit again with my friend from college, Mike. The one thing that I was really hoping to get to see when I was here was something from Jane Austen or Pride and Prejudice. It turns out that the Jane Austen birthplace and museum deal are way on the other side of the island, and so we didn't try to get down there. That will be the next trip. What we did get to see, and anyone who knows how much I love the BBC edition of Pride and Prejudice will understand, was Pemberly! Mr. Darcy's house. Oh, yes. Well ok. It's real name is Lyme Park, and it is the house that they used for the outside shots of Pemberly in the miniseries. But it was so cool! I was at Pemberly. The house was closed for the winter, as was the front garden, so we actually only got to see the back side of it, but we walked all over the grounds, and now I feel like I have experienced one of those long walks that characters are forever taking in Jane Austen novels. Ok, so it was February, and it was really cold, and very foggy, but still totally worth it.
The next day I was pretty exaughsted, and it is hard to top going to see Pemberly. So we saw a little bit of central Manchester, and went and bought train tickets for the trip we decided to take for the next day, to nowhere else but Stratford upon Avon. This has become quite the little literary trip. Because of the most unbelieveable traffic, we missed our first train and ended up getting there an hour later than we had hoped. And because it is a three hour train ride, that had us getting in at like, 1:30 in the afternoon, and all the houses close at 4. We wandered into town, hoping to find the tourist information center to get a map and tickets to the house and whatever else. And we got to the river, and saw a sign that a walking tour was starting at 2:00, in just a few minutes. And since we had to choose between the two, I wanted to learn more about the town in general and take the tour, rather than just see one of the shakespeare houses. So we took the tour which was great, since we were the only two people on it. Because I was American, the tour guide made sure to point out all the times that anything American has crossed paths with Stratford, which was sweet. After the tour we went and bought me a perfectly touristy tea towel with william's face on it. As you do. Then we went and had dinner in the only building in Stratford that still has a thatch roof, and made sure we were at the train station in plenty of time to catch our train back home. Even though it was a really short visit, I am really glad that we went.
Then it was Saturday, and we had Mike's mom's season tickets to the Stockport County soccer game. Stockport has been a team since the 1880s, and not too long ago was challenging to make it up to the highest division, and now is the worst or second worst in the lowest division. Some very bad managing. If they keep losing, the team will have to be kicked out. They played fairly well on Saturday, unfortunately the ref made lots of calls against Stockport. The tying goal didn't count, and most people are still not sure about why. It was pretty messy, and the referee had to have a police escort home, which is not usually the case for this team, whose fans are very enthusiastic, but not hooligans. After the game we went just about all the way across Manchester to see "Anything Goes". Mike has just gotten into a production of it, and since it is full of great music, we decided to go see it. We got the tickets and went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant next door, which had some of the wierdest service I have seen in a while. I don't think there was one interchange between us and a waiter that didn't involve lots of "what? what did you say?" and repeating everything. Usually the waiter would ask a question, we would answer, get this wierd look like.... they want what?? they would ask again, we'd repeat it, and eventually everything would be sorted out. Then we went and saw the show and it was very nice. We had good seats, and the music and dancing was lovely. The only thing I had a little trouble with were the accents. Since it is an American show, and it is sort of important that they are all American except for one british guy, they all had American accents. And most people were alright. The male lead kept slipping sometimes, but I was probably the only one who could hear it. But there was one lady who had the wildest attempts at an American accent I have heard. She would start off wobbly, clearly a british person trying not to sound british, then it would change, sometimes mid sentence, into a "southern lady" drawl, and usually by the end her last word or two would come right out of the midwest. It was totally confusing, because I couldn't decide if it was on purpose or not. But I am thinking it was not. Then we walked along the water (the quay, if that helps) back to the tram to get back into town, and at one point were confronted by hungry swans who were sure we had bread crumbs for them. If you have ever been approached by a swan walking to you very purposefully, you might know just how sinister an experience it is. I recorded a little bit of it on my camera, before we decided it would be best to put some distance between us and our new "friend". Before we went home we had a few drinks, and made another friend, who thinks my name is Jericho, and who told us his whole life story and what we should learn from him. Oh well. Over all, it was a long but very nice day.
Today is another quiet day, I am going to pack up some of my stuff and go meet Mike at Evensong at the Cathedral, where he sings, since he has been at a rehearsal for Anything Goes all day. It is nice to have a little time to myself, since tomorrow will be spent in the airports and getting ready to go back to school early Tuesday morning.
Hope you all are well and that I will hear from you soon!
Well I am flying back to Germany tomorrow after spending the semester break in Manchester. It has been a nice trip, and it was of course nice to visit again with my friend from college, Mike. The one thing that I was really hoping to get to see when I was here was something from Jane Austen or Pride and Prejudice. It turns out that the Jane Austen birthplace and museum deal are way on the other side of the island, and so we didn't try to get down there. That will be the next trip. What we did get to see, and anyone who knows how much I love the BBC edition of Pride and Prejudice will understand, was Pemberly! Mr. Darcy's house. Oh, yes. Well ok. It's real name is Lyme Park, and it is the house that they used for the outside shots of Pemberly in the miniseries. But it was so cool! I was at Pemberly. The house was closed for the winter, as was the front garden, so we actually only got to see the back side of it, but we walked all over the grounds, and now I feel like I have experienced one of those long walks that characters are forever taking in Jane Austen novels. Ok, so it was February, and it was really cold, and very foggy, but still totally worth it.
The next day I was pretty exaughsted, and it is hard to top going to see Pemberly. So we saw a little bit of central Manchester, and went and bought train tickets for the trip we decided to take for the next day, to nowhere else but Stratford upon Avon. This has become quite the little literary trip. Because of the most unbelieveable traffic, we missed our first train and ended up getting there an hour later than we had hoped. And because it is a three hour train ride, that had us getting in at like, 1:30 in the afternoon, and all the houses close at 4. We wandered into town, hoping to find the tourist information center to get a map and tickets to the house and whatever else. And we got to the river, and saw a sign that a walking tour was starting at 2:00, in just a few minutes. And since we had to choose between the two, I wanted to learn more about the town in general and take the tour, rather than just see one of the shakespeare houses. So we took the tour which was great, since we were the only two people on it. Because I was American, the tour guide made sure to point out all the times that anything American has crossed paths with Stratford, which was sweet. After the tour we went and bought me a perfectly touristy tea towel with william's face on it. As you do. Then we went and had dinner in the only building in Stratford that still has a thatch roof, and made sure we were at the train station in plenty of time to catch our train back home. Even though it was a really short visit, I am really glad that we went.
Then it was Saturday, and we had Mike's mom's season tickets to the Stockport County soccer game. Stockport has been a team since the 1880s, and not too long ago was challenging to make it up to the highest division, and now is the worst or second worst in the lowest division. Some very bad managing. If they keep losing, the team will have to be kicked out. They played fairly well on Saturday, unfortunately the ref made lots of calls against Stockport. The tying goal didn't count, and most people are still not sure about why. It was pretty messy, and the referee had to have a police escort home, which is not usually the case for this team, whose fans are very enthusiastic, but not hooligans. After the game we went just about all the way across Manchester to see "Anything Goes". Mike has just gotten into a production of it, and since it is full of great music, we decided to go see it. We got the tickets and went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant next door, which had some of the wierdest service I have seen in a while. I don't think there was one interchange between us and a waiter that didn't involve lots of "what? what did you say?" and repeating everything. Usually the waiter would ask a question, we would answer, get this wierd look like.... they want what?? they would ask again, we'd repeat it, and eventually everything would be sorted out. Then we went and saw the show and it was very nice. We had good seats, and the music and dancing was lovely. The only thing I had a little trouble with were the accents. Since it is an American show, and it is sort of important that they are all American except for one british guy, they all had American accents. And most people were alright. The male lead kept slipping sometimes, but I was probably the only one who could hear it. But there was one lady who had the wildest attempts at an American accent I have heard. She would start off wobbly, clearly a british person trying not to sound british, then it would change, sometimes mid sentence, into a "southern lady" drawl, and usually by the end her last word or two would come right out of the midwest. It was totally confusing, because I couldn't decide if it was on purpose or not. But I am thinking it was not. Then we walked along the water (the quay, if that helps) back to the tram to get back into town, and at one point were confronted by hungry swans who were sure we had bread crumbs for them. If you have ever been approached by a swan walking to you very purposefully, you might know just how sinister an experience it is. I recorded a little bit of it on my camera, before we decided it would be best to put some distance between us and our new "friend". Before we went home we had a few drinks, and made another friend, who thinks my name is Jericho, and who told us his whole life story and what we should learn from him. Oh well. Over all, it was a long but very nice day.
Today is another quiet day, I am going to pack up some of my stuff and go meet Mike at Evensong at the Cathedral, where he sings, since he has been at a rehearsal for Anything Goes all day. It is nice to have a little time to myself, since tomorrow will be spent in the airports and getting ready to go back to school early Tuesday morning.
Hope you all are well and that I will hear from you soon!
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