October 29th-November 11th

Last week, I was invited by the head of English to come with her and her 11th grade class on their trip to Prague. Yeah, the schools here don’t just take trips to the next largest city, they actually go to other countries! I would almost venture to say that the Germans are the most traveled of all people in the world, but the Chinese probably top them. Traveling and vacations are very important to most Germans and many save up specifically for this reason. So anyway to get back to the point, she asked me if I had ever been to Prague and I told her that I hadn’t and she said I could come along if I wanted. Unfortunately, I think I will have to pay 320 Euro (she doesn’t know if they will be able to get a discount for me since they already have 2 chaperones), but I still think it is worth it because this includes our hotel and all activities and maybe even meals. So of course I agreed to go. Everyone who knows me knows that I wouldn’t turn down any offer to travel somewhere.

I was also able to finally find an apartment in Kiel so now I will be moving into the city and be closer to everything. I will be living with two students at the university. I think that they both study Geophysics. I know not necessarily my cup of tea, but they are really nice. The boy is from Belgium and the girl is German so I will still be making use of my German skills, even though I won’t be living with my host family anymore. The room is actually quite large and I don’t know how I am going to fill it or make it look homey, but I will do my best. All of the teachers at my school were kind enough to collect furniture and gather up things like bedding and towels and dishes for me so that I don’t have to waste money buying these. This is an extremely big help. It is always amazing how helpful everyone here is with everything.

I am excited about the move because right now, where my host family lives, I am a half an hour bus ride from the city and about the same from my school. This isn’t that bad in terms of Kiel because the city and its surrounding areas are huge, but it can also be a pain when someone calls you and wants to do something. Thankfully, my host mom usually drives me to school in the mornings so that it only takes about 10-15 minutes instead of 30. It is definitely going to be more convenient for me to live in Kiel, but I will miss my host family a lot. I’ve gotten really attached to them and will be sad to leave, but I already promised them I would be around to visit. Now I’ll actually have to cook for myself and do my own laundry… I did cook Chili this week for my host family. I think it turned out really good and they enjoyed it too. They hadn’t eaten it for a while themselves.

This week, I taught a lesson on Australia, which was pretty funny, since I don’t know that much about it. Who would’ve thought, even I can learn from this whole experience!? It was interesting, what the teacher said after the lesson. She said that different kids participate when I teach the class than when she does. I’m not really sure why this is because she is still in the classroom with me, but I found this to be a good thing. I also taught a lesson on American patriotism. The class that I prepared this lesson for is a 12th grade class and I do an hour of conversation with them. I find this really fun because the students are eager to participate and the class is very well behaved, which is not that easy to come by here. Anyway, I try to come up with creative ways of introducing the subject material and then we discuss it and I ask opinion questions, so that everyone has something to say. For this lesson, I printed out an American flag and hung it up. After everyone was in the classroom, I told them to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance and I actually did this. They had all looked at me like I was completely wacko, but it was a good way to get their attention. I explained to them that this is how every day at school started for me and then we continued the lesson from there by discussing this and other patriotic habits of Americans. One thing about the lesson caught me completely off guard. My teacher that I was with asked the class if they had ever seen the German flag being hoisted and no one in the entire class of 20 or so had seen this! I couldn’t believe it because this is something that every American has seen and numerous amounts of times. This just goes to show that nationalism/patriotism and Germany don’t go hand in hand. I personally think it is quite sad that they can’t be proud of their country because of their past. Perhaps this will slowly change over the course of the future, but most Germans are afraid to fly a flag or would find it extremely awkward to sing the national anthem. The only time this was the norm, was when the world cup was here in the summer of ’06. All of this fear of appearing over patriotic because of a past that is over 60 years old, has caused the exact opposite result for the German people. Perhaps I should look at this as a positive thing. I, myself, hate seeing hundreds of flags flying around in the U.S. It seems like every two feet you take you run into one. I think there is a point when plenty becomes too many and the meaning of the flag seems to be lost because it isn’t anything special. I’m not hating on people who fly American flags, to each his own. This is just a personal opinion.

I finally signed up for sports at the university and got a pass for the fitness center there so I can go to aerobic classes. My friend Aenne, who studies English and Spanish for Secondary school invited me to go with her to do aerobics two or three times a week. I am also going to start a trampoline gymnastics course on Tuesday nights, which sounds like fun. The university is really close to where I will be moving and isn’t too far from the school where I teach.

The other teaching assistants and I went to Husum (where my host dad is from, it’s on the North Sea side of Schleswig-Holstein) on Friday night and the whole thing turned out to be quite an adventure. Unfortunately is was dark when we got there so I didn’t get to see much of the city and will have to go back at some point. We had been invited to dinner at one of the British assistant’s places and were planning to leave with the last train around midnight. We ended up missing our train because the line was changed and replaced with a bus and we didn’t know about this until we saw a small sign hanging in the station that notified people of this change. We headed back to Alex’s and had to sleep on the floor for 2 hours and then we came back to catch the bus at 4:00 in the morning. We were the only people on it until the next stop where one other person got on. At the end station we had to catch the train to Kiel and we arrived in Kiel around 6 a.m. I had to wait another half an hour on my bus and was freezing. It is already around 0 degrees C here at night and during the day, so it is cold. Once I got my bus and got home it was already 7 in the morning and my host mom was already awake and working on the computer. She was shocked to see me because I had told her I was staying at Dierdre’s for the night (my original plan, but it was now pointless to do that) and so I had to explain the story to her of how we missed the train which was actually a bus. She just laughed and told me to go to bed.

On Saturday Dierdre had the assistants over for Kraft dinner and a movie (Canadian Bacon, what else?) and on Sunday Ifinally signed my lease for my apartment.