Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This site is not an official Fulbright Program site. The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State, the Institute of International Education or the Fulbright Program.

Tomorrow officially starts my time as an English Teaching Assistant here in Germany, hence the inclusion of the disclaimer.  I'll travel back to Köln tomorrow and then board a bus to a teeny-tiny town called Altenberg, where we'll spend three days learning everything possible about what we're supposed to be doing (teaching) as well as dealing with all the dreadful logistics stuff (banks, etc).  Next Friday I'll finallllllllly go to my school and meet some other teachers, observe some classes, and hopefully get an even better sense of how my upcoming year will look.

Until then, a few thoughts: I forgot to write yesterday that Ikea doesn't accept credit/debit cards (ex, VISA), which totally surprised me - H&M, for example, does.  Ikea will only take an EC-Karte,which as far as I can tell is really just the German equivalent of a debit card in that it pulls from a checking account.  I'll have one soon!  I imagine it will make me feel super-German and very legit.

Second thought: In the past, I've extolled Germany's lack of customer service as we understand it in the states - your waiters don't hover, you have to pack your own bags at the grocery store, etc etc.  At the present moment, however, I'm fully in favor of the U.S.'s emphasis on "the customer is always right," after dealing with a zillion (well, only like 7) baggage representatives.  After finally getting to the number that I thought would put me in touch with the German shipping company that is going to deliver my luggage, I found out it was just some other person from the Köln airport.  Forging ahead, I attempted to demand in the best Bob-Conkey-demeanor that I could muster up that they get in touch with the company and get me expedited shipping, pre 8:30 am arrival, for tomorrow (my train doesn't leave til 10am).  The woman had a fit and told me it was absolutely impossible to do that now, so I asked for her supervisor, at which point she asked me "Why do you need to talk to her? There is nothing she can do" to which I answered "I just do.  Please get her."  THEN I hear her tell another woman, in German, that I was trying to change the delivery address.  At this point I entered near-rage-blackout stage and told the woman, also in German (I'd been speaking English before with the other one) that I did not, in fact, want to change my address, then DEMANDED she make the expedited shipping happen and then...my piece of shit prepaid German cellphone ran out of credit and the call hung up.

Being an American in Germany.  Rough stuff.  

Final thought: I hit up church this morning - this one in Detmold has far better acoustics than Tübingen's did, I was amazed at how much I understood! - and we only had one reading before the Gospel.  What's up with that? I think I need to do a little research before bed.

IKEA!

Today I went to IKEA! Susanne continued her tradition of being extremely helpful and thoughtful and brought me along on her shopping trip with her daughters.  I was totally overwhelmed by the size but happily found everything I wanted - pillows, sheets, a comforter, a desk lamp, hangers, a bath mat, and a trashcan - and somehow only dropped 160 Euro.  Great success.

A not great success is the fact that I have no clothes to put on those new hangers.  We got back from shopping at about 3 and there were no suitcases anywhere in sight. So I called Delta again and talked to the most unpleasantly rude person I've ever had to deal with on the phone - and I used to work at our alum calling center bothering people and asking them for money!  The man essentially bitched right back at me about how I'm somehow supposed to automatically know that "industry regulations" mean that Air France, as the last carrier I flew, is now responsible for my luggage.  He then proceeded to offer to find for me the number for the airport I flew into, and became even more agitated when I called him out on the fact that according to what he had just said, I needed to talk to Air France, not the Köln airport...

Vowing never to fly Delta again (joke...my return flight is already set to be booked through them I think) I called an Air France number, where the man was very apologetic (and delightfully French-accented) and checked my phone number and said he would look into it and call me back as soon as he could.  When he hadn't three hours later I called again and discovered they still didn't know anything, although they at least seemed to care.

So, although Susanne had invited me over for dinner again, which would have been fun, I cancelled on her and resigned myself to an hour of searching H&M to find some clothes for the orientation meeting I have next Monday-Thursday back in Köln.  Ironic, no?  And then proceeded to buy all sorts of shampoos and soaps and stuff that I rue using.  And then proceeded to launder the few clothes that I did bring with me that I've already used up.  Fresh jeans here I come!  Also, German laundry machines are disastrously small.  Mom, I promise not to let that become an excuse to wear dirty clothes all the time.

Cross your fingers for my luggage arriving at some point!  I'm moving past the fact that it's so delayed and inching towards a state of terror that it might be lost forever.

"Welcome at Cologne/Bonn Airport"

Actually, it might have said "Welcome in Cologne/Bonn airport."  Either way, I thought they needed a different preposition, and was mildly amused at how those crap translations happen in a country where they speak German as well as they do here.  But I guess that's why I'm here!

Background: Just graduated from WashU with my degree in German, going to spend a year in Germany assistant teaching English at a Gymnasium (German high-school equivalent, college prep), where my students will all know that you say "Welcome to," before I start a German PhD program at UNC/Duke next fall.

The adventure starts with horrible flights, lots of running through JFK, bursting into tears once I make it on the plane, rushing again through the Paris airport, arriving in Köln to discover my luggage is still in New York (still no idea where it is, the clean laundry is down to 2 shirts, 2 pairs of underwear, and 1 pair of socks eeeeeeek), calling the parents from the Köln airport to cry some more, getting on a train and barely being able to stay awake, being terrified I'm going to miss my connection and wake up in Berlin, blah blah blah but I finally make it to Detmold!  And within 24 hours I'm immediately plunged into that "Oh my goodness I love everything about Germany this is great I love everyone how amazing could this be" phase.  Susanne (my Betreuungslehrerin, the English teacher at my gymnasium who is like my intro/guide/overall extremely helpful person) picks me up, takes me to my apartment, we meet my roommate, my room is huge and clean, my roommate takes me on a little tour of the city, I go home to "rest" and discover netflix, hulu, and grooveshark don't work in this country (but fratmusic.com does, and has a country section), Susanne picks me up again for dinner at her house, loans me sheets and a towel, takes me back home, and I pass out.  Next morning she super-kindly takes me to appointments she's made with the Ausländeramt (office for getting documents for foreign ppl, they fingerprinted me!) and the bank, to open a German account so I can get paid (!!!), and everything is way easier than I expected.

Detmold is not as heinously picturesque and Tübingen was but is still pretty cutesy-German, and there is a Schloss (castle) in which an old Fürst (some sort of nobility, the translations for such words still elude me) still lives!  Anyways, I'm in that I-love-Germany-phase probably because I live a stone's throw from the Innenstadt/Füßgängerzone (inner city/pedestrian zone) and have not had to take a bus anywhere yet and have already had delicious Bratwurst for lunch and Susanne is taking me to Ikea tomorrow!  Desk lamp here I come.

Language-wise I'm also doing far better than ever before in Germany in terms of listening (duh) but I can't say anything that makes sense!  I'll go to say something and a horrible rush of German comes out, some declined/conjugated, some not, verbs everywhere (German is very strict about where you can put it's verbs), my accent all over the place, and I've probably said a lot of dumb anglicisms like "I'm cold" instead of "It's cold to me," the former of which means I'm like a cold/unfeeling person...but better than saying "I'm hot" which roughly translates as "I'm horny" (can you say awkward?).

I was able to chat a little with Susanne today about what the hell I'm actually doing here, it sounds like I will truly be an assistant teacher, which is totally appropriate, doing a lot of small-group work with the kids, and if I have ideas for lessons or whatnot I can work them out with the teachers.  So sounds not stressful but hopefully structured enough that I can actually learn a lot!

At the beginning of my attempt at blogging about Tübingen I posted my goals for my time in Germany; I believe they were "wear earrings every day" and "learn German."  I'm gonna stick with both of those, perhaps in a month or so I'll add something really exciting like "put on mascara every day"...and now I will sit in my apartment and hope fervently that my doorbell rings soon and some nice man is waiting outside with my luggage!

The most productive week of my German life

I haven’t done ANY traveling lately (staying in Tübingen has been amazing and totally necessary in that I’ve been writing a Hausarbeit, term paper, and trying to study for exams). I have therefore been unusually productive lately, and thus last week is a great week to highlight how I spend my time here without seeming like a total lazy bum.

Monday: American history at 10am, salad for lunch at the Mensa (student cafeteria), library to jump on the computers and print stuff out, Poverty class at 4pm, home for dinner, back to the library to do some reading, bed. Note: Monday nights are NOT normally spent at the library, but rather at “Tangente” a wonderfully sketchy bar that has karaoke on Monday nights.

Tuesday: Schnitzler class at 10 am, kinda boring, home for lunch, read for my next class, go to the American history sub-section-type-thing, go home, dinner. Not terribly productive.

Wednesday: Wake up, write an intro for my Hausarbeit, meet some other Americans at a café, pound out quite a few more pages, type up notes for two of my exams that I’ll take a week from Monday, dinner and bed. Note: Wednesday nights are also normally spent going out somewhere, sometimes to Tübingens really big club “Top 10.”

Thursday: Wake up late, read a bit for class, go to “Dorfgeschichten” at noon, have some lunch and answer emails, go to Pronunciation Training at 3, meet some people at a café to do work after class, write a few more pages. Have delicious falafel for dinner, do a bit more writing in the library, and then go “Würfel unser Cocktails!” (order a cocktail, roll a dice, how much you roll is how much you pay) at Schöne Aussichten.

Friday: Wake up late, go to the Bürgeramt (Citizens Office?) to un-register from the city (sadness!!!) go to a café and continue the mad writing spree, finish my paper, (WIN, its over 4500 words auf Deutsch), buy some wine, and have a girls-night on the balcony/porch/thing at my apartment.

Saturday: Wake up not too late, go to the library, start revising my paper, have lunch, continue revising, sort-of finish revising, go to a café for some much-needed caffeine, go home and have dinner, then meet some Germans at Tübingens little Bier-garten on the river, and speak lots of German.

Sunday: Wake up late, finish revising the paper/adding some secondary literature, church at 6:30pm, home to dinner and bed.

The week of work really paid off, as I was able to turn in my Hausarbeit this past Tuesday! After my roommate corrected it for me on Monday night – it took her two hours and she had a rather confused/extremely concentrated look on her face the whole time. Hope my professor doesn’t fail me for my crap academic written German...I also went to my last class Thursday (sooo happy that Uni is over) and have just two mündliche Prüfungen (oral exams) next week before I'm done!

Universität

Now that the semester is basically over (I have two weeks of classes left), I’ll let you know what’s going on: school is really, really, really hard. I had no idea how very rudimentary (and honestly, quite crappy) my German was until I got stuck in a less-than-acoustically-wonderful classroom with a German speaking professor and twenty rapid-speaking (and sometimes also heavily accented or dialect-speaking) students. Wayyyyy harder than I anticipated it would be! All semester I anticipated it would eventually get better; sadly, I haven’t noticed a huge change.

For those of you who are interested, here are the classes I’m taking:

1. Arthur Schnitzler in the Context of Viennese Modernism. I freaking adore Schnitzler, so I love reading for this class, but usually get pretty lost during the discussions…it’s frustrating.

2. History of the US in the 20^th Century. This class is great because 1. I’m relearning American history, which is just life-good, and 2. It’s a total confidence-builder for my German. Since I usually have a good idea of what’s going on, since I’ve obviously learned US History before, I can really focus on the German, picking up new vocab and expressions, while at the same time definitely learning some new things. This is a lecture course, but two other “Amis” and I are taking the accompanying discussion section, where the prof loves to ask us stuff as native speakers and real-live-Americans (example: “What holds your country together as a nation?”). We never have a good answer and I’m pretty sure the other German students think we’re absolute morons.

3. Poverty in the 19^th and 20^th Century. Also a lecture, which means all listening and no stress of having to speak. I like this class, because I think the topic is interesting, and the professor speaks pretty quickly, so it’s a good challenge to my German. I don’t like this class because the professor is also really funny, making me feel totally out of the loop and non-German speaking – the reason is know he’s funny is not because I get his jokes/funny comments, but because the class erupts in laughter approximately every 15 minutes.

4. Mass-media and advertising in Germany. This class is not a real-University class, but one offered by the “German as a Foreign Language Department.” This basically means low-stress because everyone speaks the same broken German I do! While the material/readings are interesting, the class is a total joke – we don’t really “learn” anything or do much critical analysis, we just talk about how much and what kind of TV we watch. It was extremely frustrating because I’d had high expectations for it, but over already…hopefully I passed the Klausur (end-of-semester-exam).

5. Village-stories from the German speaking-area (terrible translation, sorry). I’m more auditing this class than taking it, because I think it’s interesting and like the stories, but can never finish the reading and didn’t think I was in shape to write a final paper for it. Might not get a thing from WashU for it, but it’s good to get more time each week reading and listening to German I figure, even though it makes me feel like I’m drowning sometimes.

6. Pronunciation training! Another class I’ll get no credit for but totally life-useful. While 14 one-hour classes certainly aren’t going to get rid of my horrible American accent, I’m hoping it will help a little, and it’s nice to actually learn some rules for pronunciation outside of the basic stuff you get in year-1 German. I’ve already learned quite a lot actually.

So that’s class. It’s hard, totally different from the American system, and demoralizing…luckily lots of other parts of this semester abroad have been wonderful! Since Uni turned out to be an Enttäuschung (dissapointment).