Fall Break

So, my German students have been in school for about two months, and we just had a two-week-long fall break!  I found the timing quite unfortunate, since I still feel like I barely know my students and would have liked to have had some continuity with going to school, but such is life. 

That being said, as I previously mentioned, I used the time to do a little travelling.  The first week I just hit up some of the cities nearby, Paderborn, Bielefeld, and Oerlinghausen…Detmold is the prettiest of them all!  But Paderborn and Bielefeld have far better shopping options, as they’re bigger.

Then there was Zürich.  Upon landing at the airport we were greeted with a barrage of Swiss watch ads, which was mildly amusing.  Amusing stereotypes aside, though, this was one of the least fabulous trips I’ve taken within Europe.  It was ridiculously expensive, there weren’t that many “attractions” we wanted to see, and the ones we did see were a bit disappointing.  The zoo was small, the art museum was rather boring, and even the opera we saw was an oddly modern production that just confused us both (“us both” being me and Kate, another English Teaching Assistant who lives in Paderborn).

The trip did have one great part though: Luzern.  Or Lucerne, depending on how you wanna spell it.  It was an absolutely gorgeous city, set on a river that opened up into a lake, just like Zürich.  While I wouldn’t recommend planning a trip to Switzerland to anyone, I would totally tell people travelling around Europe to stop in Luzern for an afternoon or a day.

Disappointments aside, the trip was an interesting chance to compare Switzerland and Germany.  First, the language, while still “German,” is really Swiss German, and pretty damn incomprehensible to me – Kate was doing a great job understanding it, though.  I think that Swiss German fits the bill for what a lot of Americans imagine as stereotypical, ugly German.  It’s guttural, filled with a lot of harsh back-of-the-throat sounds, and had what I found to be a very strange cadence.  Coming back to Germany and the very standard German of my region was a relief! 

Some other differences I noticed:

In Zürich, although not Luzern, there was free wireless internet in almost every café and restaurant we were in!  Germany is disappointingly not-wired (my old dorm in Tübingen didn’t even have wireless), so it was a nice change to be able to pop onto Facebook or check emails during the day. 

The Swiss cross the street when the pedestrian light is red!  Germans DO NOT do this.  If you do, the old ladies and people with children will glare at you, and you’ll likely get fined if a cop sees you.  I was absolutely loving how the Swiss just crossed the street whenever and wherever they wanted to.

There are Starbucks everywhere. Truly on every street corner. 

You don’t have to pay to use the bathrooms in department stores like you do in Germany!  So greatly appreciated.

The Swiss don’t appear to separate their trash in airports and train stations.  Again, very un-German (here, we separate trash from paper from glass from plastics, and can bring beer or other bottles back to grocery stores and receive deposit money.)

They had “Butterbrezeln” in Switzerland!!…We had them in Tübingen as well, but when I tried to order one up here in Detmold, I just got a funny look.  Someone later told me that’s a very Southern thing (someday soon I will try to devote a post to Northern v. Southern Germany – I miss the south!).

Surprisingly, the beer in Switzerland – and I mean Swiss-brewed beer – was absolutely delicious!!  Not something I expected coming from Germany, but true.   

Tuesday, it was back to school – during my first two hours with the 10^th graders, I was allowed to take half the group alone and work on some literary summaries and analyses!  It was pretty challenging, the kids don’t want to seem to speak with me that much.  I’ll keep working on it.