Oh yeah, work...I know what that is, at least I think I can remember!!

Monday

Today it was finally back to school after three weeks of pure traveling. I wasn't sure if I really felt like starting work again, but when I got there in the morning, I realized that I was happy to be back. I usually don't work on Mondays, but a teacher that I work with is on a six week leave and I took over her grade 13 class. I've planned a unit on job searching, applications, and interviews, so I hope it goes well. When I walked into the staff room, I received a very warm welcome from my colleagues and a collective “we missed you!” Frau Redlin gave me a hug because I hadn't seen her during the break. In general, everyone was in a great mood. Even walking through the halls, seeing some of my students put a big smile on my face, as they were apparently happy to see me back at school too. This made me realize how much I like the school and how well I fit in there and feel at home. It is a great feeling. I'm sure if I didn't feel this way, it would have been a long year. So I went to the one class that I had that day with my year 13. Half of them were for some reason or another missing, but the class went really well. We discussed actions that need to be taken before applying for a job and with this looked at my resume. We also pointed out the differences in German/American resumes. The class has to make their own, which will be graded by their teacher, when she gets back. Tonight there was play at the school, and I took Dee along with me, since she came to the last one. This time the 12th graders were performing Handke's “Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten” (The hour in which we knew nothing about each other). I thought that it started at 7 but it ended up being 7:30. I was glad we were early though because we were able to get tickets, since there was limited seating available. The play was great and the performance and performers did a fabulous job acting and made the piece very realistic. There was hardly any speech throughout the entire piece, only on occasion. There was audience interaction and the piece was very comical and its purpose is to invoke memories and think about the interaction of people in general. Dee and I's favorite part was when one of the boys ran across the stage in his boxers...haha!

Tuesday

Today we had great weather and I got done an hour early because I moved my tutoring with Moritz up. My unit with the 13th graders continued with looking at their resumes and filling out application forms, which is not common in Germany. Their resumes looked good, but I told them I would collect and correct them so they would get good grades. The rest of the day I just spent doing laundry and cleaning, since I was desperately needing to do both after all the traveling. I also realized it was nice to know I would be in one place for a while, even if only for two weeks!

Wednesday

Today I finally got my fourth tutoring student, Niko to come to tutoring. It actually went well. He's a smart kid, but just needs help in some areas. I didn't do too much after school. I just spent some time reading and researching.

Thursday

Today I had a long day of classes, although it went fairly quickly. I had tutoring after school and my second student didn't show up. I'm not sure why, but I'm sure she had a good reason. It's not like her to just not come.

Friday

I did a gun debate/role play with my12 graders, some of whom were in the play. I told them they did a great job with their performance and that since I now know that they can act, that I expected them to do a good job with the role play. I assigned each student a different identity and asked them to determine whether or not they would be for gun ownership and then they had to find the other members of their side of the debate. I then had them introduce themselves so that everyone knew who they were up against. To give you some examples of the identities: a pope, an old hippie, a lobbyist, a supreme court member, an arms producer, a hunter...etc. I then asked them to attempt to stay in character throughout the entire debate. This lesson turned out to be great! The hippie talked about peace and love, the pope about the bible, and the supreme court member about the constitution. Successful! The only thing that I didn't like about the lesson was that some people participated much more than others. With my 13th graders, I also had a role play planned. Theirs was on interview don'ts. I made them split up into groups of two and gave each group a list of interview don'ts to incorporate into a role play. The audience had to figure out what exactly the group did wrong. This was also very successful and hilarious! Some of the kids in this class are also good actors/actresses.

After school, I went and bought chocolates and caught the bus to Altenholz to pay a surprise visit to my host family. Of course I wasn't sure if they would be there, but it didn't matter much. When I got there, both my host parents and host grandma's cars were gone. I decided to try at grandma's anyway because I know that she sometimes lends them her car, when they need two. I rang the doorbell and sure enough, she buzzed me in. I could tell that I had just woken her up because she was messing with her hair as she stood in the doorway. I felt bad because most Germans don't like if you drop by unannounced, but they also told me that I was one of the people who has this privilege, when I moved out. Grandma Petersen was happy to see me and immediately asked why I had brought chocolates. I told her that they were for Silke, my host mom, since her birthday is tomorrow. She smiled and told me she was out getting her hair done, but would be back soon. We chatted a bit and brought each other up to date on the past few weeks and then she made tea and got out her usual tin can of cookies for me. After two hours, Silke finally got back from the hair salon. Grandma called over to tell her she had a visitor and she came over. She was happy to see me too and I gave her the chocolates that I had brought her for her birthday. I told her that I know it is unlucky to wish someone an early birthday in Germany, but that in the U.S. it isn't. She said it wasn't a problem. We talked for another hour and a half and then her and my host dad were heading into town on the bus to meet up with some friends of theirs and so we all rode the bus together. It was great to see them again and we said good bye until next time. Since the weather was so nice, I decided to go for a bike ride along the harbor before having dinner. The weather has actually been nice all week, with the exception of Thursday and I was beginning to wonder what happened to the normal dreary cloud covered sky...I didn't miss it though!

Saturday

I went with Helen and Rebecca to Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the state beside mine and in the former the East. I have never been to this state, so I thought it would be interesting to see if it differs much from the others. It has suffered because is the state with the highest rate of unemployment since it is lacking industry. It is trying to combat this problem by promoting tourism. The three of us met up at the station in Kiel and were off to Bad Kleinen where we had to change trains. Unfortunately, none of us had looked up the connection and our train was running late, so we missed our second train and were stuck in Bad Kleinen, where there is absolutely nothing to do for an hour. We thought maybe we could find something, but after seeing the Hauptstrasse (main street) which was covered in dirt and being reconstructed and had nothing but small square, typically GDR houses on it, we realized that there isn't much to do. Bad Kleinen as the name suggests, really is klein, small. But of course leave it to a man from Liverpool, England to come along and make things interesting. He was in search of a ticket machine and we helped him purchase his ticket, as he didn't really understand the questions that it was asking him. He apparently does a teaching exchange in Wismar every now and then, a town not too far from where we were. I couldn't figure out why his German was so bad, if he has been here numerous times...He is a mathematics teacher and was interested in what we were doing in Germany and gave us a bit of a history lesson on Wismar, the city where he teaches. After about twenty minutes, he left to catch his bus and we went to get on our train that had now arrived, but wouldn't be leaving for another twenty minutes.

After another hour train ride, we arrived in Schwerin. When we exited the station, we immediately had a feeling that it was going to be a beautiful city. We walked along the waterfront to the old part of the city, where we wandered around and then went to the dome. We decided to climb the tower of the dome so that we could get a good view of the city from above and orient ourselves. We climbed the 220 stairs to the top of the tower, not so willingly. Helen gets dizzy on the stairs that spin around and Rebecca and I were not at all fond of the stairs where you could see below you, or of the wooden ones that did not sound very sturdy. We also didn't like the fact that when you got to the top, you could see through the wood panels and they creaked!! We quickly made our way to the concrete and more sturdy outside to take pictures. I'm not very keen on heights, but managed to get used to it after a while. It's always better when I have people with me than when I go it alone! From atop the tower, you could see the entire city and the giant castle of Schwerin. After we managed to make it back down the tower, we made our way to the tourist info to get a map of the city. From here we walked to the castle. It was unlike any castle I had ever seen before, in Germany or elsewhere and it was very large. It was these things, that made the castle appealing, attractive, and unique to me. We decided we would take a tour of it, if it wasn't too expensive. Of course we should have realized it wouldn't be. It was only Euro 2,50. The inside was also very impressive. I overheard a tour guide say that some of the rooms had been burnt and restored, but only the first two.

When we were finished touring the inside of the castle, we walked out into and around the gardens, which were also very nicely laid out and designed. When we were done here we headed back through the old part of the city, this time wandering down alleyways lined with beautiful buildings. Here we found a Schnitzel restaurant, where we decided to sit down for dinner. The first thing we noticed when we walked in, was that the people were still smoking in the restaurant. The smoking ban has apparently not yet been enforced in Mecklenburg- Vorpommern. Dinner was delicious and we paid and took a route that led us back past the waterfront and toward the station. We went into the book store because we had some time before our train would be leaving and here I found a Spiegel Magazine on Islam in Germany and the Identity of Turkish-Germans. I bought it because it applies directly to the research that I am doing. This was the second motivating thing in the past two weeks. First the mosque tour and then this. We left around 6 so that Helen would arrive back in Flensburg around 11. We weren't sure if the train that we took went through Niedersachsen or not because we had never heard of some of the places before and were a little concerned because our ticket didn't cover Niedersachsen, just Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but the woman checking tickets, stamped it and never said a word to us so we assumed she must have either been in a good mood or we were not in Niedersachsen. Now that I have been to Mecklenburg, there is only one state that I haven't yet been to in Germany and that is Saarland...

Sunday

The weather was once again great today and this time a bit warmer, as it was pretty cold yesterday in Schwerin. I ended up going for a walk along the harbor with Siobhan, Dee and Heather. We sat on the stairs in front of the Landtag (state parliamentary building) and then walked some more to a cafe that we like to go to on the waterfront. It was a nice relaxing day.