Back to school

Well hello again! Currently celebrating my first day of feeling really, truly healthy and fit in 2011. A day or two after New Year's I finally caught my one big cold of the year. Every season one comes around that absolutely lays me out, so after having avoided it for months it finally caught up with me. The timing was pretty bad too, since it coincided right with the beginning of school after winter break, so I got an unwanted extension to the winter holidays. I was actually pretty stoked to go back to school, so it was disappointing to have to stay home. I finally ended up visiting a doctor after a while, and they set me up with various medications and things, which are starting to kick in.

Also, quick aside: very interesting experience visiting the doctor in Germany. No copay, reasonably short wait (30 mins.), and as I understand it the whole cost of the visit, about 50 Euros, gets covered in full by my health insurance. And the antibiotics they put me on (a week's worth plus some other pills for fever and headache) cost a whopping 14 Euros, also covered in full. They take pretty good care of you over here, and surprisingly enough this country hasn't fallen apart yet in spite of its job-killing socialized health care system.

In other news, school has been going pretty well. These students are a little crazy sometimes, difficult to teach and keep quiet, but when you get down to it they're all fundamentally decent, sweet, friendly little people, so I missed them over the holidays. Last week I tried heading into school a couple times (inadvisable, but I was incredibly bored), and it was good to be back. An added bonus to the holidays is that nobody wants to be in school for the first couple weeks back, so they've all actually been pretty well behaved out of sheer exhaustion. Right now the younger classes are all working on abridged and simplified versions of some famous English-language novels. The seventh graders are reading White Fang by Jack London, the eighth graders are reading this really cool graphic novel adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and the ninth graders are reading The Street Lawyer by John Grisham. It's actually kinda funny that the seventh and eighth graders are reading White Fang and Romeo and Juliet right now, because I read both of those books when I was exactly their age. Quite a twist of fate that I'd find myself all the way on this side of the world ten years later doing lessons on those same books.

Otherwise not much to report. It was super cold and snowy in December (very out of character for Hamburg as I think I mentioned), but now it's warmed up a little bit, so I can walk out of my front door without wanting to cry and I'm not slipping and falling all over the place anymore. Much as I love this city, they don't have the infrastructure around here to, you know, clean the snow off of their sidewalks. I think I've seen exactly one snowplow this entire winter.