My birthday

I've now been in Germany for a week already!

Class is going really well, but I'm getting a little homesick (Heimweh haben).  I was just thinking today how I'd like to go to the beach, but I can't here. I'm also starting to miss just hearing people talk in my mother language, it's still cool to overhear German when I walk by a group, but those homey touches are missing.  I was thinking last night how much I would have just liked a grilled cheese sandwich made with Kraft cheese.  Right now, I need to do a little bit of grocery shopping, but here are the kinds of things I've bought in Germany to eat back at my dorm (It's still fun to be able to buy everything in German!):

Vince sent me flowers yesterday, which were delivered in front of the whole class so everyone ended up seeing and then they all sung me Happy Birthday in German.  I gave everyone chocolate ladybugs (Marienkaefer) as a little birthday treat. (Marienkaefer are lucky in Germany).

 Here are the flowers from him.

Since it was my 21st, I went out with some friends for a little while last night, but it was pretty short and tame since we still had school this morning.  It was just nice to be able to celebrate with some people. I had been worried I wouldn't know anyone really well yet.

As far as I know, no big plans for the weekend yet.  It's probably not going to be one of my travel weekends.  I'm going with some of my classmates and roommate again tomorrow night to a Kneipe (bar) to watch one of the Fussball games for the World Cup.  There's been German flags on everyone's cars and the packaging to almost anything has something about the World Cup coming up.  Lots of products even have German temporary tattoos in the wrappers including cheese and juice.

The one other kinda interesting thing I've noticed is that lots of people walk with their dogs at pretty much any time of day.  In itself, that's not really that interesting, but in every case, the dog is never on a leash. It just walks next to the owner or behind them obediently.  None of them are running ahead or even paying attention to people they meet on the sidewalk.  In the US, I'm not sure, but I think we HAVE to have our dogs on a leash a lot of the time.  The other thing is I've yet to be in a carpeted room that had padding under the carpet.  Everything is like walking on concrete, even in the hotels I had been in.  Oh yes, and the cranberry juice (again, I haven't tried many brands, but I'm just guessing as a generalization) is not as sweet as it is in the States, but I'm getting used to it since I have it with breakfast everyday in the cafeteria.

Settled In

Guten Tag!

Everything is really beautiful here. The Institute sometimes reminds me of WLC because of some of the old architecture.  I could run around the place all day taking pictures of all of the intricate carvings.  There are gorgeous lions, dragons, flowers, and patterns everywhere.

Class was good. We had a presentation this morning to give about an important building or statue in Goettingen and my partner Veronika and I had das Gaenseliesel, which is the icon of Goettingen.  Here's a picture of our poster. I drew the picture!

We worked on prepositions a whole bunch today, in, an, and auf.  She said if we understand the use of those three, we have 80% of preposition use figured out.  I think I might finally have it down too. We'll have to see in class tomorrow.

My roommate is Elizabeth and she is a grad student at the University of Virginia.  She's from the US and knows just a few German phrases, but it sounds like she's fairly fluent in Italian.  I was a little sad I wouldn't have anyone to speak German to, and when she told me she was starting, I was almost as sad, but she said I should try to just speak German with her next week, after she can get her feet wet a little.

I think I'm suffering allergies a little so I hope that passes soon. My nose keeps running and I lost my voice for two days now. Hopefully that clears up soon, it's hard to speak another language when you already have an accent and then no voice.

There's a stairway next to the door to my room that goes up to a tower that overlooks Goettingen. I tried to upload a video I took, but I'm not sure if there is a way to do that on here, so I'm just going to post it to facebook and link it from here. Hopefully that works for those of you who don't have facebook too.  Here's some pictures though.

No one warned me...

I've been sleeping around late afternoons into the night and getting up around 12 and finishing whatever I wanted to get done yet, or just waste time for the last few days, and so I was awake yet around 4 in the morning.  I was horribly surprised to see a spider about half the size of my hand on the ceiling.  I'm generally not scared of spiders, but I realized at home I know what they all are.  Here I don't know if it's something like a recluse spider or if it's as harmless as a daddy long legs.  It somewhat resembled a daddy long legs actually (long thin legs a fairly small body), and I looked up spiders of Europe and found that he seems to be called a "Vibrating Spider."

He has his name because he shakes violently in his web if someone comes too close.  The ceiling is so tall that there was no way I could reach him to kill it.  I forgot about him for a little bit, all of a sudden he drops down on the lamp on my desk.  I got up really fast and I think it scared him, he started climbing up the string he dropped down on, I grabbed a book and got him, but I am still very concerned about finding more because they are kind of scary and I just don't want to wake up with one.  They are harmless to people though.

I got my placement this morning and am in level B22.  Remember the system I wrote about yesterday? Well the Goethe Institute here splits B2 into two levels for further specification: B21 and B22 (B22 is the higher).  I was pretty pleased about that.  The teacher (Frau Schumacher) is very nice and extremely easy to understand. I don't think anyone said anything today that I didn't fully understand, so I felt very good about that.  She did, however, say that she will look over our homework assignments for tomorrow and decide if we should be moved to a higher or lower level yet.  Every time they say they will test me I get nervous even though it will probably be ok just like always.

I already lost  my school card. I hadn't left my room after I got my key yesterday.  To get my key I needed my card, so I had to have lost it somewhere in there.  Either way I talked to the front desk and they said it's no big deal and I can easily get a new one.

For one of our assignments for tomorrow, we were given a picture of something in Goettingen.  We had to find it, learn about it, and get something short to present about it to the class in the morning.  There are 8 Americans in my class and 8 people from foreign lands.  They wanted us to split up so no Americans were together so I went with a girl from Russia named Veronika (she is only 16! probably the youngest of our class).  Her accent was a little difficult to understand at times, but she is very patient and friendly.  We had the Gaenseliesel, which is a statue that is the symbol of Goettingen, so that was easy.  We answered the questions on the paper she gave us and walked down to get a picture.

We stopped at Kaufland so that I could pick up some groceries since I got the food plan at school that is only for breakfasts and need to feed myself for the rest of the day.  I bought a fairly good amount of food for about 20 Euros (which right now is about $25.50)  Unfortunately, and I wasn't prepared for this - YOU MUST BUY PLASTIC BAGS TO USE THEM.  In America, we use them like crazy for free, I never even thought of paying for them.  The lady hadn't asked me at the check out, she probably assumed I knew what I was doing when I didn't take any. I realized that we bag ourselves and that there were no bags at the end of the check out, so I went to a closed nearby aisle to grab a bag.  A lady stopped me and asked me if I paid for it.  I said no, but explained that I had bought my groceries, just so it didn't look like I was just going through an empty aisle and filling my bag with my unpaid groceries.  She said you have to pay for bags, but she didn't seem in the mood to sell me one.  I put as much as I could in my handbag and carried the rest, dropping bottles and things the whole way back.  Embarrassing.


That was my little adventure for today.  My roommate just got here! She literally just walked in! I'm glad I'm not living alone!

Mailing Address

If anyone would be interested in writing to me while I am in Germany, I received my mailing address:

Eileen Tesarik
c/o Goethe-Institut Goettingen
Merkelstrasse 4
D-37085 Goettingen
Germany

Be aware that it might take a few weeks to get here.  But don't let that stop you! Facebook and the blog have been great for keeping in touch with everyone back home, but mail is always fun too. :)

Goethe Institut

Good morning everyone!

This morning I woke up to rain and a giant slug on my window!

I have never seen a slug that big at home in the States before! Crazy.

Anyway, I left my hotel this morning, caught a taxi, and headed off to the Goethe Institute in downtown Goettingen. I have spent all morning passing through lines and waiting for hours! There are a lot of students here!

Upon arrival, I dropped off my baggage in the baggage room and went to a line to have my passport checked and to prove that I have overseas health insurance (they wouldn't let you start the course without it, if you didn't have it upon arrival, they had an affordable plan through the school).

After that I was pointed towards another line where I waited to have an interview with someone to act as my oral exam.  The man that brought me in, asked me my name, spelled it wrong on the form (I think on purpose so that I could prove I could say German letters), and then asked me things like how long I have studied German, where I am from, what I want to get out of the course here, what I like to do in my spare time, and what kind of German classes I most recently took at school.  He said I was a very good speaker and quite easy to understand and said he was sure I belonged in the B level, and he was leaning towards B2 so that's what he circled.  (B2 is the last level before fluency in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages - for a quick overview, see the link).  A1 is the first level, and C2 is complete fluency.

After the oral exam, which I felt pretty confident about, he took me to a room where a woman administered written exams.  The first part I felt pretty good about, the second part, which was aimed particularly toward level B2 and higher, seemed extremely difficult.  Everything was multiple choice and there were several words I hadn't even heard before.  I turned it in to the woman and she asked how I thought it went.  I said it seemed really hard.  She smiled and just said, "You didn't even start school yet. I wouldn't worry about it.  However you did, you're going to improve a lot in the next eight weeks."

After that I went to another office and got my room key.  I'm on the 2nd floor of the Goethe Institute in an extremely large room, considering it is only for two people.  This was a nice surprise as I signed up to share with more girls to reduce my price more, but they moved things around a little bit and gave me a bigger room for the same price as if I had been splitting it with more people.  It's almost twice the size of my dorm room at WLC!  The ceilings are probably about 15 feet tall too, so it seems extra roomy.  We have a large window with a pretty view of the front of the school and neighboring houses which are also very beautiful and look very old.

We have a bed, desk, closet, a wardrobe and large shelving units for each of us, a sink in the room, and a minifridge.  We each have a tiny safe in the wardrobe and more shelving by the sink.  All of the desk drawers lock so that we can stow away extra valuables that may not fit in the safe.

I am all unpacked, but haven't met my roommate yet - no one has moved in so far.  Maybe I get a whole room to myself? I haven't seen anyone else on my floor yet either, but check-in continues for about 6 more hours.

It seems like at least half the students I met are from the US which was more than I expected after seeing the Goettingen Goethe Institute's facebook group for students.  Most students writing about their experiences were Turkish, French, or Chinese.  So far, I have only seen Americans, Indians, French, Korean, and I think a few Turks.

Here are some pictures of the Institute that I took so far today.

Pictures of the main hall and stairway to my floor.

Pictures from my room and the view outside.

More Frankfurt and Arrival in Goettingen

I cannot tell you all how delicious food is here! I knew it would be good but this is more than I even expected.

For breakfast at the hotel, I had bread with raspberry jam, brown eggs (so far I haven't seen white ones anywhere, so maybe brown is more common), coffee, and a sandwich made of fresh deli meats and delicious bread rolls.

Christian picked me up at my checkout time and we drove back into Frankfurt.

We spent a while at the Frankfurt Zoo, which I would say is fairly comparable to Milwaukee's.  Maybe a little bit smaller. 

Turtles!
(Schildkrote)

For non-German speaking readers... I'm pretty sure this means exactly what you think it does. I just had to laugh.

Me and a monkey (Affe). He was fun to take pictures with.

I think it was because he was so excited about it.

This picture turned out really cute, but he actually looked like a tiny old man.

This is a shrew (Russelspringer).  The name is kind of cute because Russel means "trunk" like an elephant, and springer means "jumper" just like English!

They had a lot of exotic birds. I don't remember what this one was, but I thought he looked really cool.

After the zoo, Christian drove me to a nice Italian restaurant.  The pizza was amazing - all the ingredients were fresh and they made everything right in front of you. On our pizza we had cheese (Kase), pinapples (Ananas), and very thin slices of ham (Fleisch).  Of course, we had to have the traditional German drink of sparkling water (Mineralwasser) to go with it.

Again, the old mixes with the new in Frankfurt.  These are some old Roman ruins near the middle of town.

The ruins were right next to a cathedral Christian wanted to show me.  He said it was similar to the one in Cologne (Koln).

This is the interior.  The whole inside was "t" shaped.  The top of the "t" was the altar area and then the two wings on the side and the one straight in front of the altar came off of that.  It reminded me of the layout of WLC's chapel quite a lot. 

Along the walls by the pews were a lot of carvings and very old paintings.  This was a carving that I particularly liked, but I think it might be partially because their head to body size ratio.

After the cathedral, Christian and I headed over to my train station (Bahnhof) to board my 8pm train (Zug).

It was extremely busy, even for being a later night train. The whole station was very interesting though.

The view was not as mountainous as I expected, but it was very pretty.  I took this picture about 9, maybe even a little later.  Notice it's still pretty bright outside.  There is a fairly bright sunrise around 4:30am and there is still traces of the last light in the sky at 10pm.  When I got off the train around 10 it was nice to see it wasn't completely dark out yet.




Well that was most of my day yesterday. I'm waiting outside about to call a taxi and I think I've been putting it off long enough.  It's just nice to know I'm in Goettingen and can now just get used to the town a little bit and enjoy it a little more knowing I'm not rushed.

I miss everyone back home! Skype has been a real money saver in being able to make calls back home, the biggest problem is just the time difference, and that's not horrible to get over most of the time.

Tomorrow I move into school! Stay posted for updates on my move-in!

Alles gute!

Tschuss!