Goodbyes

It all started last Thursday evening, when Susanne arranged for a few teachers to come to Detmold and have one last dinner with me.  It was really nice seeing everyone outside of school – we even managed to talk about non-school related things part of the time, which I think is pretty impressive for a bunch of teachers – but as soon as dinner was over the “I’m leaving soon!” panic – and the tears – set in.

Sunday evening we threw a party, and someone asked me what I’d be taking with me from this year…and there was more crying.

Since then, it’s been a stream of goodbyes, tears, promises to come back and visit soon, really thoughtful gifts (recipe book for German bread included!!!), cakes and cookies and German treats from my students, and the crazy part of my brain trying to decide if I should move back here and try to teach permanently – not currently the plan, but I suppose having options in life never hurts?

I’m in the middle of packing panic at the moment.  Tomorrow, Saturday, I head to Cologne, where Rebecca and I will have one last night out (or at least a bier or two).  Sunday morning will be the dreadfully long Köln-Amsterdam-New York-Cleveland trip…and then the reverse culture shock can set in. 

To those of you in America…I CANNOT wait to see you all.  It’s the only thing that’s going to get me on that plane Sunday!

School Exchange

As I mentioned, last week Jarrett and I visited each others’ schools, as I have Mondays free and he’s off on Tuesdays.  After the two days, I had the feeling that things are far more similar between our schools than I’d anticipated.  Over in Oerlinghausen, they’ve also got a cramped staff room and rowdy (in American terms, unacceptably loud) kids!  Jarrett also seems to be used pretty much the same way I am; sometimes he’s just in a class and helping kids with work, other times he’s leading a special lesson on a US topic – last week, it was US geography with the little ones. 

Mondays is his AG (basically a lunch-time extracurricular extra lesson in English), so we did a swearing lesson with them based on materials I’d used before with another class.  It was a group of 7 ninth-grade boys, so they were a little wild, but did genuinely see the reason behind us doing an entire lesson on swearing – they didn’t have a sense of how offensive some words are, but I really think they did by the end of the lesson. 

The next day, it was really cool to have him at my school and see how the kids reacted.  My 9^th graders were pretty normal, but one of my 6^th grade classes seemed quite fascinated by him, and spent a good bit of time asking him questions.  My 5^th graders were even more intrigued, and spent literally the whole class period asking him everything from “What’s your favorite class in school” to “Are you rich?”… we let the teacher tell them that’s not actually an apprpriate question to ask someone, but it was a bit funny nonetheless!

Visitor!

After being jealous of all the British assistants who had friends visiting throughout the year, I finally had a visitor of my own.  Vanessa, another WashU student from my sorority who is currently living in Switzerland headed up to Berlin for a long weekend and made her way over to Detmold to spend a bit of time in NRW. 

It was really really really fun having someone from WashU around, and I enjoyed the chance to be a bit touristy again in NRW/Detmold.  Saturday, we headed to Düsseldorf for the day, as Vanessa wanted to check out some art museums.  While she and Jarrett visited one, I spent the first part of the day wandering around cute little neighborhoods, getting lost, happily stumbling upon a fro-yo place and less happily getting caught in a wicked, 5-minute downpour – but what’s a week in Germany without ridiculous weather, right? I visited the second museum with them and it was great, as Jarrett has studied quite a bit of art and art history, so walking around with him left me feeling pretty well informed.  After a proper German dinner and a few Altbiere – Düsseldorf’s local brew, dark and delicious – we ran for our lives to catch a train back to Detmold, and somehow made it.

Sunday, after a ridiculously long but lovely proper German breakfast at the apartment with the roommates, we hit the Regional Museum in Detmold to check out an exhibit on art during the National Socialist regime; it was both informative and artistically great at some points.  On Monday we had to make an early start of the day, as Vanessa headed back to Berlin and I made my way to Oerlinghausen to visit Jarrett’s school…but I’ll update on that later!  

Weather weather weather

My last post ended with an ecstatic “the sun is shining!” and while it’s still shining here in Lippe, the disastrous weather in Germany has somehow struck again…

This weekend, I was supposed to road-trip down to Vienna with a friend, for a weekend of clubbing/dancing/museums/delicious food/gorgeous architecture/general big-city fun.  Most of you probably know that Vienna is, without a doubt, my favorite European city – so I’m pretty bummed not to be there.  What went wrong? Parts of southern Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and even Hungary are having serious flooding problems, due to, you guessed it, rain.  Highways down south have been either closed or so traffic-jammed that we decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to drive into the unknown…we’d also heard that the night before people were stuck on the roads and sleeping in cars.

So, I spent the weekend in Detmold, and as it was sunny and beautiful here, chilled in the park on Saturday reading and working on my tan (I’m sadly still freakishly pale).  I’m sort-of over the fact that what was supposed to be my last travel-hurrah of the year was cancelled, and for such a boring reason, but I’m also sure that, when I look back on this year in Germany, the terrible weather will be something that really stands out.  From this cancelled trip, to many many many days exploring a new city from under an umbrella, to the fact that I’m pretty sure my mom and I saw snow nearly every day of her trip here, the weather has influenced a good bit of my time here.

On a slightly related note, the sun here sets later than in the States – and I funnily don’t remember that from Tübingen.  Today, for example, the sunset time is 9:43, while at home in Cleveland, it’s 9:00.  Somehow it really makes a big difference, and the light evenings have been messing up my schedule a bit – it seems really silly to get ready for bed at 10 when it’s still light out!

Belgium

This past weekend, we had the last of three four-day-weekends in the month of May, and took the chance to head to Belgium.  We packed two cities into the trip, Antwerp and Ghent, and both were quite different than what I had expected.  I thought Belgium would be a bit like Luxembourg, and the southern, French-speaking area, might be. We, however, were in the northern, Dutch-speaking area, and it was like a grittier, non-touristy version of the Netherlands.  There were definitely beautiful sections, but both cities felt very “real.”

Our train tickets for the entire trip – there, back, and one day from Antwerp to Ghent – were quite inexpensive, in part because being under 26 years old in Belgium has a lot of advantages, one being ridiculously inexpensive (in comparison to Germany) train tickets.  Young people under 26 can travel between any two cities in the country for only 6 EUR, even on higher-speed trains like the ICs.  Museum entry was also always just a single euro, which was great as I visited two and Jarrett managed to pop into at least five. 

Aside from museums and walking around seeing the beautiful squares and churches, we spent a lot of time eating and drinking.  The waffles and fries from street vendors were just as delicious as we expected them to be, and Belgian beer is truly different and exciting.  While I found a lot of the beers too sweet, I also had some excellent hoppy ones that were very different from American beers – and very very very good.  We also unfortunately discovered the absolute worst beer any of us had ever tasted before, Delerium Tremens.  I’d heard of it before and later read that it’s considered one of the greatest beers in the world, but we all frankly thought it tasted a bit like vomit.  Sorry for the unpleasant image there, can’t win them all! 

Yesterday, it was back to school, where I talked about American High Schools, read a Shel Silverstein poem with the little ones, discussed Macbeth with the 11^th graders, and finished off the day with a nice chat with my other group of 11^th graders. 

And, FINALLY, the sun is shining in Lippe!