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!

Frankfurt!

Hi everyone! I landed in Frankfurt this morning around 6:40am Germany time. I have been up for over 24 hours now so I'm feeling stretched pretty thin, but I wanted to get this all down before I sleep and forget anything.


I flew in on Air India, which was great! The food was really good and I met a girl named Aisha! She is from Chicago but will be studying in India, so we felt just the same way about leaving our families.  Both of us had crying parents and friends at our departures.  She was about my age, and we got to sit alone in a 2 person row so that made it easier for us to chat.

We watched the sun rise over Europe, which was beautiful.








Once landing in Frankfurt, I met a friend of mine who was a foreign exchange student at my high school my senior year.  His name is is Christian, and he lives right here in Frankfurt, so he offered to give me a tour of the city and take me to some interesting sights.

We walked around town seeing many different shops (Bakeries, Leather goods shops, Watch stores, and book stores).

One of the most interesting things about Frankfurt is how it integrates new buildings with the old ones. This is a tower that was the only part standing after WWII of a castle in this area.  As you can see, Frankfurt continued to grow up around it.

Frankfurt is known for its banks and commerce. This is the building that makes the decisions about the current worth of the Euro (some of you may even notice the Euro in the emblem which is also a cross with the symbol for the European Union.)  This can vary day by day, even hour by hour.  It needs a constant watch, and this is where people do it.









This is just me on top of a building that gives you a view of many skyscrapers (Wolkenkratzer) that make Frankfurt a headquarters of business.











Now for some sleep! Tomorrow Christian and I are going to the Frankfurt Zoo, possibly a museum, and also Frankfurt University!

Bis spater!