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!