Well, now that we're nearing the end of Hamburg's winter break I suppose I should take some time out to actually write about it! At first I was a little sad to not be celebrating with family this Christmas season, but the surrogate families that I've found here in Germany were more than willing to take me in and let me celebrate with them, which I was exceptionally grateful for.
Christmas Eve ("Der Heiligabend," or the holy evening around here) I spent with one of the teachers at my school, Ute, and her family. All assembled were Ute, her husband, a couple sisters in law, grandpa, and Ute's two children Gerthe and Jasna, who I think were 3 and 5 respectively. Unlike in the USA, Germans actually do their celebrating and gift opening on the night of the 24'th, so the atmosphere around the house with two little kids opening up presents was pretty exciting. I brought over a bottle of wine and some flowers for Ute, and in return I got a book of short stories (always grateful for German reading material, great way to learn new words). Germans also light their trees with actual little candles situated on the ends of branches and held to the tree with clamps, which gave me a bit of a shock when I walked in and saw it for the first time, but thankfully nothing burned down.
Gerthe and Jasna were particularly excited to have me around, and after dinner they brought me some books out of their toy room and asked me to read for them, which--believe me--was super precious. The first book they brought me, though, was actually really challenging, ironically enough. The hardest thing about German for me is just pronouncing words, and the book (I forget the name) was about zoo animals getting onto a train, which went alphabetically from A to Z. Each page was full of these really terrible and confusing alliterations and rhymes and other such linguistic tricks and twists which are no problem for actual Germans, but bring non-native speakers such as myself to their knees. They got a kick out of the trouble I had with it anyway (as did their parents), so I suppose that will be a particularly memorable iteration out of the thousands of times they'll probably have Ute read the story to them. After that we read a story about a gorilla letting animals out of their cages at a zoo (they're big into zoos I guess), and thankfully that one wasn't as hard. The rest of the evening was spent sitting around the kitchen table and chatting, showing everyone where Ithaca and Salt Lake City are on the atlas, and attending a midnight service at a church around the corner, where Ute was playing violin for the orchestra.
Christmas day went well too! It was a bit strange waking up alone in my and Loic's section of the house, and I had forgotten to go shopping before the holidays, so breakfast on Christmas morning consisted of spaghetti with butter (didn't have the luxury of tomato sauce unfortunately), but aside for that everything went fine. I recorded a bunch of little videos for all of my friends this year to say hello and see how things are going, so I spent most of the morning doing that. At 3:00 I headed up to the Ketels' place to have a holiday lunch with them and some of their family friends, and, as always, it was really good to see them again and spend a little time with them. After I was finished with that I headed home and called it a night.
Anyway, have another post on winter break itself coming up, as well as a little something about New Year's Eve in Hamburg, so stay tuned for that!
Friday, December 31, 2010
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Also, I'll just make a quick shoutout to my former a cappella group here. Some of the videos from their last concert are going up, and I am just crazy impressed with how they've been doing this year. The song in this video is the last arrangement I did for the group, and they just did a stupendous job on it! I've been watching it on repeat for a couple days now, and I love how much fun they have with everything. So enjoy! :)
Friday, December 24, 2010
A Happy Christmas I Wish You
Well, it's 11:00 AM on Christmas Eve over here in Hamburg. We've got about six inches of snow on the ground (very unusual for Hamburg), it's a cold but tolerable 28 degrees, and good old Wilhelmsburg is sleepy and quiet (which isn't really any different from the norm around here, but whatever). This will be the first holiday season in my life that I've spent away from family, which is a bit of an odd sensation. I can withstand about two weeks of SLC before going crazy over the winter holidays, but at least those first two weeks were really nice--fireplaces, Christmas trees, friends, family. It's quite a different experience to be out on "the end of the limb" as my Dad puts it; out in far away, distant lands, miles away from the familiar.
It is a bit sad on one hand, but then again it's not like I'm totally 100% removed from everyone back home. There's phone calls and emails and video chatting and international shipping for gifts, so if I can't be right back there in the action at least I can say hello from afar. Nor will I just be huddled up with my computer alone in the dark on Christmas Eve: tonight I'm going to be having dinner with one of the teachers at my school and her family, and then on Christmas morning I'll be having lunch with the Ketels. So I'll be celebrating at least, with a new crowd and thousands of miles away from the usual venue, but celebrating none-the-less!
The school week leading up to the break was pretty nice. A lot of classes were taking tests, so for a few periods I didn't have to show up, and then when the students had finished with their work the pace slowed down a lot, so class was pretty informal. On Monday night I actually went to a movie night at another teacher's house to bake cookies and spend some time with her 11'th grade class. It was a bit of a trip hanging out with a bunch of 17 year-olds, but the evening wasn't half bad. We drank hot chocolate and made little Christmas tree and angel shaped cookies, played this karaoke game for a while, a couple of the guys brought guitars over and we jammed for a little bit, good times all in all. Tuesday was our traditional game night at Sausalito's, a restaurant down in the city center, and that was a good opportunity to get together with everyone for one last time and say goodbye for the holidays.
And finally, on Wednesday there was a big "Weinachtenschulfest" (Christmas school party), so all of the classes spent the whole day playing games and hanging out. I got to play musical chairs on two separate occasions with the sixth and seventh graders, proctored a make-up test for some of the upper-level students who had missed the in-class test, ate a ton of snacks, it was a good time. At the end of the day there was a big faculty party in the teacher's lounge, and that was a good opportunity to just hang out with some of the other teachers and breathe a collective sigh of relief that the holidays are finally here! One of the teachers from one of my favorite seventh grade classes also gave me a little Christmas gift at the party--a 11x17 piece of paper with little messages from the students in the class. That was a great gift, and all the messages were really, really nice. Some of my favorites:
"He is a best teacher :P"
"He love beer"
"I heart you x4"
"You are sehr witzig and hilfsbereit" (you are very funny and helpful),
and "hat schnell Deutsch gelernt" (learned German quickly. At the beginning of the year we told them that I couldn't speak German, so I guess whoever wrote that thought I learned the whole language in the past three months.)
Happy holidays from the Vaterland everyone! Or, as one of my well meaning but slower 10'th graders phrased it to me, "A happy Christmas I wish you!" I'll be sure to fill you in on holiday activities and New Year's goings-on. Be merry, stay safe, eat lots of food, and enjoy the company of your friends and family!
It is a bit sad on one hand, but then again it's not like I'm totally 100% removed from everyone back home. There's phone calls and emails and video chatting and international shipping for gifts, so if I can't be right back there in the action at least I can say hello from afar. Nor will I just be huddled up with my computer alone in the dark on Christmas Eve: tonight I'm going to be having dinner with one of the teachers at my school and her family, and then on Christmas morning I'll be having lunch with the Ketels. So I'll be celebrating at least, with a new crowd and thousands of miles away from the usual venue, but celebrating none-the-less!
The school week leading up to the break was pretty nice. A lot of classes were taking tests, so for a few periods I didn't have to show up, and then when the students had finished with their work the pace slowed down a lot, so class was pretty informal. On Monday night I actually went to a movie night at another teacher's house to bake cookies and spend some time with her 11'th grade class. It was a bit of a trip hanging out with a bunch of 17 year-olds, but the evening wasn't half bad. We drank hot chocolate and made little Christmas tree and angel shaped cookies, played this karaoke game for a while, a couple of the guys brought guitars over and we jammed for a little bit, good times all in all. Tuesday was our traditional game night at Sausalito's, a restaurant down in the city center, and that was a good opportunity to get together with everyone for one last time and say goodbye for the holidays.
And finally, on Wednesday there was a big "Weinachtenschulfest" (Christmas school party), so all of the classes spent the whole day playing games and hanging out. I got to play musical chairs on two separate occasions with the sixth and seventh graders, proctored a make-up test for some of the upper-level students who had missed the in-class test, ate a ton of snacks, it was a good time. At the end of the day there was a big faculty party in the teacher's lounge, and that was a good opportunity to just hang out with some of the other teachers and breathe a collective sigh of relief that the holidays are finally here! One of the teachers from one of my favorite seventh grade classes also gave me a little Christmas gift at the party--a 11x17 piece of paper with little messages from the students in the class. That was a great gift, and all the messages were really, really nice. Some of my favorites:
"He is a best teacher :P"
"He love beer"
"I heart you x4"
"You are sehr witzig and hilfsbereit" (you are very funny and helpful),
and "hat schnell Deutsch gelernt" (learned German quickly. At the beginning of the year we told them that I couldn't speak German, so I guess whoever wrote that thought I learned the whole language in the past three months.)
Happy holidays from the Vaterland everyone! Or, as one of my well meaning but slower 10'th graders phrased it to me, "A happy Christmas I wish you!" I'll be sure to fill you in on holiday activities and New Year's goings-on. Be merry, stay safe, eat lots of food, and enjoy the company of your friends and family!
The tree outside my window, totally frozen over.
The big Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market) in front of City Hall.
Faculty party on Wednesday.
My little present :).
End of school/pre-holiday dinner at Jim's Burritos with the guys.
Day trip to check out the Lüneburg Weihnachtsmarkt with some of the other teaching assistants.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Monday, December 13, 2010
Three months! Part two.
Well, the hotly anticipated part two of our three months post. Here’s a few more blurbs on what’s been going on recently:
-Tutoring. I’ve picked up a few extra students outside of school to start earning a little extra money. Eight-hundred Euros a month is a surprisingly livable wage in Germany, since a lot of things end up being cheaper than their American counterparts, but that’s still not a lot of money. Anyway, my landlady is pretty well connected in the neighborhood, so I ended up landing three tutoring students through one of the Turkish families on our street: Memet, Betül, and Esra. Immigrants in Germany kind of get a rough deal in school, since English is a mandatory subject, and they have to take another foreign language on top of that. So your standard immigrant student speaks their parents’ language at home, German around town, and English + Spanish/French/Italian in school. In a lot of cases the immigrant kids actually speak the best English in class, since they’re already used to learning foreign languages, but for the most part it’s just confusing and frustrating for the kids to be stuck between 3-4 languages.
But anyway, it’s been fun helping out with the three kids’ homework. The family is really nice too. They always take my coat when I walk in the door, give me coffee and tea, let me try out a bunch of different Turkish foods all arranged out on platters in the living room. Sometimes I stick around and chat a little bit after we’re finished.
-Classy Parties. The other Fulbrighters and I got invited to a holiday open house at the US Consulate yesterday afternoon to meet and greet, and that was quite an experience. Walking up to the building was pretty stressful--lots of police with guns and vests and metal detectors, and then a bunch of Secret Service-looking guys on the inside. The building itself was very impressive: vaulted ceilings, hardwood floors, great outlook right onto the Alster (the big lake in Hamburg). At first the party was a little weird, since I was the first Fulbrighter that showed up, and was at least 20-30 years younger than everybody else there. I chatted up some guy in a suit for a little bit, drank some eggnog, and then fortunately some other people from Hamburg/the surrounding area showed up, so I had some people to talk with. We all introduced ourselves to the Consul General before we left, and she turned out to be a really friendly lady.
-Christmas Plans. Gonna stay in Hamburg for Christmas I believe, at any rate I’m not going home for the holidays. Having suffered through 25 hours of planes and airports upon first arriving in Germany, I definitely don’t want to repeat the experience two more times in a week and a half! I’ve got a few friends who are staying in town, and I also think I’m going to be celebrating Christmas itself with the Ketels (note to self: send that email soon), so I won’t be totally alone. That would be terrible and a little depressing around this time of year. Thanksgiving away from America turned out pretty well, so hopefully the first Christmas away from family will be good too.
-Tutoring. I’ve picked up a few extra students outside of school to start earning a little extra money. Eight-hundred Euros a month is a surprisingly livable wage in Germany, since a lot of things end up being cheaper than their American counterparts, but that’s still not a lot of money. Anyway, my landlady is pretty well connected in the neighborhood, so I ended up landing three tutoring students through one of the Turkish families on our street: Memet, Betül, and Esra. Immigrants in Germany kind of get a rough deal in school, since English is a mandatory subject, and they have to take another foreign language on top of that. So your standard immigrant student speaks their parents’ language at home, German around town, and English + Spanish/French/Italian in school. In a lot of cases the immigrant kids actually speak the best English in class, since they’re already used to learning foreign languages, but for the most part it’s just confusing and frustrating for the kids to be stuck between 3-4 languages.
But anyway, it’s been fun helping out with the three kids’ homework. The family is really nice too. They always take my coat when I walk in the door, give me coffee and tea, let me try out a bunch of different Turkish foods all arranged out on platters in the living room. Sometimes I stick around and chat a little bit after we’re finished.
-Classy Parties. The other Fulbrighters and I got invited to a holiday open house at the US Consulate yesterday afternoon to meet and greet, and that was quite an experience. Walking up to the building was pretty stressful--lots of police with guns and vests and metal detectors, and then a bunch of Secret Service-looking guys on the inside. The building itself was very impressive: vaulted ceilings, hardwood floors, great outlook right onto the Alster (the big lake in Hamburg). At first the party was a little weird, since I was the first Fulbrighter that showed up, and was at least 20-30 years younger than everybody else there. I chatted up some guy in a suit for a little bit, drank some eggnog, and then fortunately some other people from Hamburg/the surrounding area showed up, so I had some people to talk with. We all introduced ourselves to the Consul General before we left, and she turned out to be a really friendly lady.
-Christmas Plans. Gonna stay in Hamburg for Christmas I believe, at any rate I’m not going home for the holidays. Having suffered through 25 hours of planes and airports upon first arriving in Germany, I definitely don’t want to repeat the experience two more times in a week and a half! I’ve got a few friends who are staying in town, and I also think I’m going to be celebrating Christmas itself with the Ketels (note to self: send that email soon), so I won’t be totally alone. That would be terrible and a little depressing around this time of year. Thanksgiving away from America turned out pretty well, so hopefully the first Christmas away from family will be good too.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Three Months! part 1
And, yet again, no blog posts for another two weeks. Really falling behind on this whole thing, sorry for that. Looking back there's a scant three entries between Month Two and Month Three, so gonna have to get back into the proverbial swing of things.
So, to make up for lost time, I'll include a bunch of pictures for you as well! Anyway, the Cliff Notes for the past couple weeks are:
-Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was actually a huge success. As I mentioned last time, a little "skeptisch" on what we would be able to come up with, but the meal actually turned out to great. We had all the essentials: turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, stuffing, and carrot cake for dessert. All hand-made, and all delicious. We even got to treat my roommate Loic and one of Karl's friends (also French) to their first Thanksgiving dinner, and they walked away appropriately stuffed and barely able to walk. The only downside to the whole ordeal was the irate Slavic people that were in and out of the kitchen while we were cooking. We did it over at Karl's student dorm, which had a shared kitchen, and apparently the festivities didn't sit too well with some other residents in the dorm. From time to time the Slavs would come in to cook as well and cuss us out in languages we didn't understand since the meal took so long to prepare. Didn't put a damper on the evening at all though.
-School. Has been going very well, of course. After a few months of doing this I've worked up a really good relationship with all (well, 99% anyway) of the kids at school, and I've definitely learned a few more little teacher tricks, so the job's getting easier. The students are always (well, usually) really stoked to work with me. Last week in a couple classes I had the seventh and eighth graders practically dying to answer questions. It is really damn cool to be up at the front of a class and watch kids almost fall out of their seats with their hands as high in the air as they can go when you ask them to answer a question out of the book.
In one seventh grade class in particular I had a really awesome session. Last Wednesday I took some of the weaker students out to a different classroom to work with them on the simple past (e.g. I watch TV -> I watched TV, or I go -> I went, stuff like that). They should have learned this in the sixth grade, but for whatever reason it didn't really come together or make sense for them, so we took some time out to go over it again. I find I've got a bit of a thing for boiling down difficult grammar for the younger students and explaining it to them in terms they understand, and it was just awesome to see it finally clicking in their heads. They've spent pretty much a year and a half being confused as hell by everything, and when they finally GOT it they could barely contain their enthusiasm, doing the falling-out-of-their-chairs thing I mentioned earlier. It was actually kind of hard to keep everything in order, and I had to make sure that everyone got their fair chance to answer questions. One of the kids actually got a little angry since I didn't call on him when he knew the answer. That was a really special moment for me--getting a bunch of little 12 and 13 year-olds fired up about a pretty mundane and simple piece of grammar.
-Traveling. Mentioned in the last post that I went to see my friend Ally for the weekend in Cologne. That was a great trip, really great to get out of Hamburg for a couple days and see something new. Plus it was nice to spend some time with someone from IC. New people are a lot of fun of course, but it's great to be with someone who comes from your own background, you know? Or, as Ally puts it, "It's really nice not having to explain everything all the time when you're talking about college or home." Even though I've been to Cologne a total of three times now, there was still a bunch of stuff that I've never seen, so it was a lot of fun to check out parts of the city I still hadn't visited. Had a bunch of great beer (the city specialty is Kölsch, a beer that's kind of rare outside of Cologne), great food, got to see Harry Potter 7 in English, got to see my friends Matthias and Sabine (my Couchsurfing hosts in Cologne from summer 09) again, good times.
Still to come: this past weekend, more thoughts and reflections (since I missed out on the big ponderous month-marker post this time around), and some other bits and pieces. Stay tuned.
So, to make up for lost time, I'll include a bunch of pictures for you as well! Anyway, the Cliff Notes for the past couple weeks are:
-Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was actually a huge success. As I mentioned last time, a little "skeptisch" on what we would be able to come up with, but the meal actually turned out to great. We had all the essentials: turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, stuffing, and carrot cake for dessert. All hand-made, and all delicious. We even got to treat my roommate Loic and one of Karl's friends (also French) to their first Thanksgiving dinner, and they walked away appropriately stuffed and barely able to walk. The only downside to the whole ordeal was the irate Slavic people that were in and out of the kitchen while we were cooking. We did it over at Karl's student dorm, which had a shared kitchen, and apparently the festivities didn't sit too well with some other residents in the dorm. From time to time the Slavs would come in to cook as well and cuss us out in languages we didn't understand since the meal took so long to prepare. Didn't put a damper on the evening at all though.
Thanksgiving crew!
-School. Has been going very well, of course. After a few months of doing this I've worked up a really good relationship with all (well, 99% anyway) of the kids at school, and I've definitely learned a few more little teacher tricks, so the job's getting easier. The students are always (well, usually) really stoked to work with me. Last week in a couple classes I had the seventh and eighth graders practically dying to answer questions. It is really damn cool to be up at the front of a class and watch kids almost fall out of their seats with their hands as high in the air as they can go when you ask them to answer a question out of the book.
In one seventh grade class in particular I had a really awesome session. Last Wednesday I took some of the weaker students out to a different classroom to work with them on the simple past (e.g. I watch TV -> I watched TV, or I go -> I went, stuff like that). They should have learned this in the sixth grade, but for whatever reason it didn't really come together or make sense for them, so we took some time out to go over it again. I find I've got a bit of a thing for boiling down difficult grammar for the younger students and explaining it to them in terms they understand, and it was just awesome to see it finally clicking in their heads. They've spent pretty much a year and a half being confused as hell by everything, and when they finally GOT it they could barely contain their enthusiasm, doing the falling-out-of-their-chairs thing I mentioned earlier. It was actually kind of hard to keep everything in order, and I had to make sure that everyone got their fair chance to answer questions. One of the kids actually got a little angry since I didn't call on him when he knew the answer. That was a really special moment for me--getting a bunch of little 12 and 13 year-olds fired up about a pretty mundane and simple piece of grammar.
-Traveling. Mentioned in the last post that I went to see my friend Ally for the weekend in Cologne. That was a great trip, really great to get out of Hamburg for a couple days and see something new. Plus it was nice to spend some time with someone from IC. New people are a lot of fun of course, but it's great to be with someone who comes from your own background, you know? Or, as Ally puts it, "It's really nice not having to explain everything all the time when you're talking about college or home." Even though I've been to Cologne a total of three times now, there was still a bunch of stuff that I've never seen, so it was a lot of fun to check out parts of the city I still hadn't visited. Had a bunch of great beer (the city specialty is Kölsch, a beer that's kind of rare outside of Cologne), great food, got to see Harry Potter 7 in English, got to see my friends Matthias and Sabine (my Couchsurfing hosts in Cologne from summer 09) again, good times.
Ally and me at one of the Weihnachtsmärkte in Cologne.
Cologne from above, with the Rhein down at the bottom.
Still to come: this past weekend, more thoughts and reflections (since I missed out on the big ponderous month-marker post this time around), and some other bits and pieces. Stay tuned.
Hamburg's harbor in the winter. Getting a little cold over here.
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