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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