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.