Herbstferien (fall break)

Well, we're officially at the end of the first phase of this whole adventure. There have been a few occasions to mark off the past few days as special: the fall break for Hamburg schools started on Friday, and goes for the next two weeks; today is the 20'th anniversary of the German Reunification; and in two days I will have been in Germany for one month. On one hand it seems a little crazy that I've already been here for one month of my ten month stay, but when you stop to think back, the time has actually gone kind of slowly. I've had to learn and adjust so much to life over here, and each day is full of different challenges and new things, so it seems that things that happened even a week ago are way in the past since there's been so much that has happened in the interim.

For the next couple weeks I'm going to be traveling around a little bit, seeing as I've got the whole fall break to myself, and don't have any particular desire to just hang around here with nothing to do. Last fall in Ithaca my roommates and I hosted a couple Couchsurfers from Germany and Austria for about a week, and had a really great time hanging out with them and showing them the town. They both go to school in Innsbruck, so I'm gonna try to arrange a trip down there to see them again. One of the girls I was in Berlin with last summer, Patty, is still living in the city and working there as a bartender, so I'm going to head up there for a few days as well.

Still clipping right along and picking up a lot of German. One of the interesting things that happens when I speak a lot of German is that I really stop to take a second look at the things I say in English. I wrote an email earlier today and used the phrase "as luck would have it." When you sit down and think about it, "as luck would have it" doesn't make a lot of sense, at least through the lens of the German language. I know intellectually that it's a synonym for coincidentally, but at the same time it takes a lot of thought to tease out the meaning. I've also been making my way through The Lord of the Rings (aka Der Herr der Ringe) in German. I read it in English this summer, so I thought that reading the translation would be a good way to pick up more vocabulary. So far it's actually going pretty well, I'm about 50 pages and two chapters in. Initially it took a ton of time to read just a single page, and I had to stop and think about certain words for a long time for a sentence or paragraph to make sense, but I've been getting faster as I've been going along.

Also, if I can make an aside, noticed something funny about that last sentence when I went back and read it. I wrote "it took a ton of time to read just a single page," which is more of a German sentence construction than an English one (in German: "Es hat viel Zeit gebraucht, nur eine Seite zu lesen."). If my brain was in English mode I would have written "it took a ton of time JUST to read a single page." I catch myself doing stuff like that all the time.

And, lastly, I've thrown in the towel on the apartment search for the time being. Things are just too ridiculous right now with the semester starting and so many students looking for places to stay. Gesche has said it's no problem if I stick around a little longer, and a lot of the teachers at school have said that they have extra rooms if I need a place to stay, so I'm gonna take advantage of the options available to me and try to wait out this first wave of apartment searchers. Plus I'm not going to have an opportunity like fall break to travel around for a while, so I figure I'll let it rest for a couple weeks, go out and have some fun, and come back refreshed. Better than staying here hitting my head against a wall and stressing out.