I'm sorry I haven't given you anything exciting to read in a few weeks. Things here have been quite busy for me and seem to be staying that way, but here is an update.
January 26
I was invited over to one of my English teacher's that I work with for cake and tea in the afternoon. She wanted me to read an article out loud and record it for the English department so that they could use it as a listening exercise. I left my apartment at 3 for her place which is about a ten minute walk down the street from mine. I didn't arrive back here until 8 and could have stayed longer. In the five hours that I was there, we had tea and Darth Vader Cake (left over from her son's birthday party), recorded the reading of the article, played games with her two children (Mathilda 4, Aurthur 6), ate dinner, and conversed. It was a very nice day spent there. She even sent me home with lots of sweets, Darth Vader cake, muffins and fudge. I think they (her and her husband, Kirstin and Julianus) would like for me to babysit for them because they asked if I have any experiecne doing that and because their kids really seemed to like me. Mathilda was begging me to spend the night and asked when I would be coming back. She also invited me to her birthday party, which will happen sometime in February. She told me that I was welcome to stop back anytime that I felt like it. I spent the rest of the evening talking to family and friends from home.
January 27
Mondays I have off and so do most of the other assistants in the area so we decided to head to Preetz a very small town not too far from Kiel to visit a friend of ours from England. We hadn't ever been to his place so we decided it was time to check it out. We took the bus and when we arrived at the stop where he told us to get out, I had to laugh. It was literally in the middle of nowhere. It looked like farmland with very few houses to be seen. We started walking down a grassy path and my friends told me that this was how we would get to Chris' place. After a while, we reached an open field and there was a concrete path. We saw Chris walking toward us from a distance and were being followed by two women on horseback. We walked from there another 4 minutes or so and arrived at Chris' interesting apartment. We decided that he lived in the most remote place of all the assistants that we know in Schleswig-Holstein. It was really quite random as the building looked like a big farm house turned into apartments. There were dogs, cats, chickens, cows and horses to be seen and the best of all is that there are also peacocks/hens on this farmland. We all found this strange yet intriguing. His apartment is actually really nice. When we went to leave to walk the hour to town, we got to meet his teacher and landlady, who might have the strongest grip/handshake that I have ever experienced!! I thought she might break my hand! We walked the roads through the fields of Preetz and finally made it to the city, where we had dinner at a bar/restaurant that we had been to once before that is cheap but has a great selection. I ordered gyros which were very delicious. After this we headed back to Kiel, this time by train and walked along the harbor for 2 hours, which was a calm and relaxing end to the evening even if we did have to walk through a deserted and dark park lit with the flashlight that Alex had on him to return to our apartments.
January 28
Dee Siobhan and I had planned a Brunch at my place for the day. This involved first going to the store and buying different sorts of bread rolls and toppings for the bread. We made coffee and had invited two other friends to join us. One being Dee's German roommate and the other being Heather, the teaching assistant from England in Kiel. We spent literally the whole day eating and watching tv. We have two favorite shows. One is called Auf und Davon which means Up an Away and is about students who leave Germany to do internships or study abroad. We like this perhaps while we ourselves are doing it. It is interesting to see all of the places that they go to and how different the experiences are for each individual. The other show is called Das perfekte Dinner in which 5 candidates cook a three course meal for each other. One person per day of the week and at the end they vote who did the best job and the winner recieves 3,000 Euro. It may sound stupid, but it is actually really interesting.
January 29
Today I recieved a new schedule at school so I am not sure how things will go. Hopefully just as well as the last half-year.
January 30
I prepared a lesson on hyphens for my year 13 because my teacher told me to. Yay, how exciting...it went well though. The kids have problems understanding when to use them so I gave them a few exercises and we went over the rules together. In the afternoon, I was invited by the mother of a girl that I will be tutoring to come to their place for tea. I found this a bit odd at first, but then assumed that she didn't want just anybody tutoring her daughter if she was going to be paying for it. I went over to their place after school. The mother is Turkish and so is the daughter. She is married to a German man now and has a 6-week old daughter to him. It was a great experience for me to be invited to their house because this is exactly what I wanted to do my research on while here in Germany, the identity of Turkish-Germans or Germans with migration backgrounds in general. The mother was very nice and offered me Turkish tea and sat out a plate of cookies as soon as I had arrived. We talked a bit about ourselves and then about her daughter, who I will begin tutoring next week. I was impressed with her German skills, but did find out that she has been living in Kiel for 30 years. Her mother called while I was there and the two of them spoke Turkish to each other. Her mother understands very little German. When the daughter came home, it was interesting to observe their interaction. The mother was speaking in Turkish to her daughter and the daughter was answering in German. I found this intersting. Later the husband came home and shortly after, I left feeling that there was not much more to talk about and not wanting to overstay my welcome.
January 31
I started tutoring my Turkish student and also another girl in the eighth grade, who one of my teachers recommended me too. Now I have three students, whom I tutor. Other than this, the day was spent packing and preparing for Karneval (German Mardi Gras), since I am leaving tomorrow for it. I have been wanting to go to German Karneval ever since I learned about it in my German classes in High School and at Bethany. I decided to send out an email and ask if any of the other assistants wanted to join me and 4 others responded. Together, we planned the weekend and booked a hotel.
February 1
I taught my 12th graders about the American Education System today. Talk about a difficult topic to explain because of its non-consistency throughout the U.S. For almost every question that the students asked, I had to respond that it depends! The American Education System is so diverse and the regulations differ state-to-state and therefore are impossible to generalize. This not only makes explaining it difficult, but also understanding it. It was a great class, however. My 12th graders are on of the best classes that I have, in that they are so curious and ask many questions without having to be pushed to participate. This makes me happy. My next class was conversation practice again and we discussed the film Forrest Gump. This also went smoothly and afterwards, I had to bolt out of the school, to make sure that I would catch my bus. I had less than an hour to get back to my apartment, pick up my stuff, get to the train station and catch my train. I was in a hurry and the bus took a bit longer than expected. I had to check the address for the hotel that we were staying in on my computer and in doing so forgot my ticket which was lying near it. As I boarded the bus to the station, I realized this, but there was no turning back or I would miss the train and throw us all off schedule. I decided I would just get a new ticket ticket if need be and use the other one some other time. I had to take the train to Hamburg to meet the others because I was the one with the latest day of classes. I made it to Hamburg just fine and met up with three of the others, but Andrew hadn't arrived yet. He told us he would meet us on the train, but didn't end up catching it. He arrived as it was pulling off and had to find his on way down with the latest version of hitchhiking in Germany. This is called "Mitfahrgelegenheit" which translates to Carpooling. This is another form of transport often used in Germany. I have to admit that I have never used it, but many of my friends have. Basically, people post on the internet that they are driving from one city to another and that they are willing to take other people along and then the people pay them a certain price for the trip for gas and such and get dropped off at a destination. I know you are thinking that this wouldn't work in the U.S. because people would get robbed, but guess what...Germany doesn't have a right -to-own-guns law! this makes the chances of this happening slim and to be honest crime in general is not a problem in Germany like in the U.S. Anyway, we took the slow trains and had to switch 4 times in places I had never heard of (also in the middle of nowhere) because we bought cheap group tickets that are only valid for the regional aka slow trains in Germany. It took us 7 hours to get from Kiel to Duesseldorf, but we paid less than half the price we would have had to pay if we had gotten there quicker. I was a little disappointed when we got to the main station in Duesseldorf, as I was expecting craziness to already be taking place. This was however not the case because the station is not in the center of the city where Karneval takes place, and because it was Friday night instead of Saturday. After arriving, we went directly to our hotel, which was not at all hard to find. We checked in and waited to hear from Andrew, who would be arriving soon. He finally got there an hour or so after we did and we brought his stuff up to the room. We were hungry after the long day of traveling and went in search of food. We ended up at a Chinese place. The food was good and the owner was complimenting us on our German. I had to laugh about this because here is a Chinese man who speaks broken German complimenting us on how good we speak. Well it was sweet anyway. He was a friendly man and we talked with him for a little while. Afterwards we went back to the hotel and crashed so that we would be ready for the next day.
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