Lazy week

February 18-23

The past week has been pretty calm in comparison to the previous weeks. I didn't travel anywhere this week. I actually spent the whole week in Kiel. I didn't have a whole lot to do with my classes this week, as many of them were taking tests and such.

Tuesday, Kathrin, a friend I made in Heidelberg, sent me a message and is now coming to visit me on the 19th of March before Natasha gets here! I'm really excited to see her again and to show her around Kiel, even though she has been here before. I also talked to my host family on this evening because I had been wanting to invite them over to show them my apartment and cook dinner for them. The end result was that I now have a lot of things planned for the month of March, which will be fun.

I was late to school on Wednesday. This was the first time I have been late to class. There wasn't really a reason, I just for some reason thought that I didn't have class until 4th period and on the way to school remembered that it was only like that the week before because my 3rd period was cancelled. After realizing this, I tried to cycle as fast as possible to get to school halfway through 3rd period. When I walked into the classroom, the kids all started clapping and shouting"Vanessa is here!" I thought this was really sweet and funny at the same time. I had felt like an idiot for being late, but this made everything better. To top it off, my teacher didn't even ask why I was late. He just said "no problem" and we continued with the lesson. He is very laid back and therefore didn't want to make a big deal about it.

Wednesday night, I called a friend, Katharina, who is teaching near Nuernberg, in the south, because I am planning to visit her in April. It was nice to talk to her again, as the last time I saw or talked to her was when I left Heidelberg in January of '06.

On Friday, I had prepared a nice lesson for my 12th graders on "The New Colossus," the poem at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. We discussed the poem and talked about immigration and then I gave them a caricature that had George Bush as the Statue of Liberty with a satirical comment on immigration and migrant workers replacing the poem. The kids loved this. Bush is not very popular in the image of Europeans and they therefore get a kick out of caricatures like this one. We compared the two and discussed problems associated with immigration.

Friday night, the other assistants and I went over to Dee's and we cooked a meal together. I brought over a cherry cake that I had made and together we made chicken curry, rice and stir-fry veggies. It was delicious. We spent the rest of the night just laying around and relaxing. Siobhan played the guitar and sang us some songs and we even made up some lyrics.

Saturday we went for a walk in Schrevenpark. It is one of the biggest parks in Kiel (there are many) and is very pretty. We spent a lot of time just being silly as usual and then we went food shopping and headed home.