I was going to complain about the rain, but at least it's not going to be 25 and snowing! Or is it close enough to Christmas for me to want that?

And do you think DAAD hates me because I didn't see something on their website?

DAAD and Thanksgiving

(Proving my application arrived in New York)

I applied for the DAAD this month, a scholarship to do my Masters in Germany starting next year. They would pay for EVERYTHING. Cross your fingers or press your thumbs (drück mir die Daumen), whatever you think is going to help. At least wish me luck!

And Thanksgiving was great! I made a pie! My first pie ever.

And then....!!!





I used this recipe for the crust and this recipe for the filling...

And that was a really good idea because I then didn't have to worry about conversions or not being able to find American products. I think it turned out pretty well! This was just another way way my German has helped create something wonderful.

And then some people ate it at my apartment among other things.

And I also went to Chemnitz with the Sagerts (I'll be calling them my German family from now on). We went to a Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market). Also great! And also more or less where I'll be for the next month (although not in Chemnitz)....(I mean at a Christmas market).
Christmas markets are amazing, there is no better way to prepare for Christmas. Since the middle of November Berlin as well as, I'll assume, most German cities, if not all, have been littered with Glühwein (warm wine with spices) and gebrannte Mandeln (roasted almonds) and Lebkuchen (gingerbread) and wooden toys and Räuchermännchen (figures that you put little triangle candle like things into that then smoke up through what is normally the mouth of a guy or girl) and so on and so forth. This is...I pretty sure...my favorite thing about Germany and I'm so happy to be here for it again.

And I got the present of meat from Frank, Father Sagert.



Germany's great.

I am, however, getting pretty bad Heimweh (homesickness) this year. When I was here for 10 months from 2007-2008 I don't remember having really any Heimweh at all. Maybe it's just not knowing when I'll be home again or what I'll be doing next year. Will I see my family in a year? 2 years? 3? 3???!!!! That would be far too many. 1 year is kind of pushing it.

They're doing a Christmas concert at the R.Fox elementary school and they were practicing yesterday. I teared up at "Swing low, sweet chariot" because of how many times they sung "home." I wondered why they're singing a song that was sung by slaves who wanted to die and be brought back "home" (read: to heaven) for a Christmas concert, but to each his own.

What's important, though, is that as an American I can now, with good conscience, start celebrating Christmas (now that Thanksgiving is over).

Übrigens, three Germans mentioned Black Friday to me when I mentioned Thanksgiving, but they didn't know why we celebrated Thanksgiving or what we did on this day. Hm.
(Disclaimer: I mean nothing bad about Germans with this, it's just..interesting)

What I do and 9. November

(Because of the "New Flu" we will be abstaining from shaking hands - The Finance office)

After two or three months of being sick I've decided not to be sick anymore. That's it. No more. In the last two months I've had a fever at least 4 times and have had a constant cold. I also got strep throat somewhere in there. I blame the children. Everyday one third of the kids in every class are at home sick and the rest are...also sick and rubbing their gross germs all over me. Luckily I haven't had the Swine-flu, but I wouldn't be surprised if I got that too! I've heard of at least 8 people at the Elementary schools I work at having it.

Because it seems to be unclear what exactly it is that I'm doing here in Germany, I'm going to tell you in a little more detail! (No, I don't just sit on my ass all day eating bon-bons, I usually stand on my ass).

I have three different jobs and work about 30 hours a week not including preparation time.

Job number one: English Assistant at the Reineke-Fuchs-Grundschule (Elementary school).
I either work in the classroom with the teacher or I take a few students into the hallway and work on conversation (with the older kids) or on reading or exercises. I also do two workshops. I do an English cooking workshop on Mondays with Vanessa, the English girl who also works there but through the British Council (who will be leaving in February), and I do an England preparation workshop on Tuesdays for the kids who will be taking a trip to England in the Spring. I work here three days a week for a total of 15 hours a week.

Job number two: English Assistant at the Hermann-Schulz-Grundschule (Elementary school). I either work in the classroom with the teacher or I take a few students into the hallway and work on conversation (with the older kids) or on reading or exercises. I work here two days a week for a total of 11 hours a week.

Job number three: English teacher at the Volkshochschule-Reinickendorf (adult education center). I teach two lower level English classes mit Muße, which means that the classes are supposed to go very slow and often has older people, busy people and...slower people in it. This also means that I'm supposed to speak more German than I might otherwise in a normal course. So, I teach them in German but try to say most everything in English first so they get used to the sound and words. I work here 4 hours a week.

This job is obviously much harder than my other jobs. Preparation and the execution are both very difficult just because of how different the students are. Some can really speak English (like 4 or 5 out of 27) and some still need to learn "I, you, he, she, it" ect. How am I supposed to make everyone happy? This is very hard on my I-want-to-make-everyone-happy bone. But my boss came in to see me teach and said I was doing well, so...I guess I'm doing well! I'll just work on improving my teaching skills the best I can while realizing that I can't please everyone. I guess. This is, however, particularly rewarding just because it's so challenging. Not to mention that it pays a lot better than my other jobs.

This, below, is at the Reineke-Fuchs-Grundschule. This girl had her birthday. Whenever a kid has a birthday the birthday kid brings in candy or cakes or something for the class. It's unclear whether or not they always get lifted up in a chair. But in Bettina's class they do.

Notice the blackboard. I have yet to see a white board or a projector in an elementary school here, let alone a power point presentation. : ) Desks are tables for two and school bags are box-like. I should've written about the schools here earlier...most things are starting to seem normal now, so I'm forgetting the differences. Pencil cases seem to be more important, but possibly because they don't really have the desks that we have where you can leave all your stuff. They have cubbies, though. As far as how the class is taught it's surprisingly the same, as far as I can tell. University in Germany is so different from University in Minnesota that I expected school to be different too, but I find nothing odd about the way the classes are taught here.

There are some small differences like the shape and look of notebooks (no spiral notebooks here) or the fact that every child uses a fountain pen, something I find to be romantic, but not normal. To go along with this they have jars full of cartridges of ink and a thing called Tintenkiller, one of my favorite Denglish words. Tinte meaning ink, Tintenkiller means ink eraser and only erases the ink from these ink cartridges. Handwriting is very important here apparently. At first I bought a Tintenkiller and thought it was just an erasable pen. I tried writing with the pen-side then erasing it with the other side, but apparently the pen side is for writing on the part that you already erased. This was very confusing to me and I spent 23 minutes trying to get my new fountain pen to work. I, of course, ended up with ink all over my hands...in fact, every time I use it I end up with ink all over my hards. I like to think it's the quality of the pen. I also write in cursive now. I think it might look better than my normal handwriting. I remember my 2nd grade teaching saying my handwriting was horrible and that I needed to fix it and it hasn't really improved since then. But I was writing a letter at school the other day, in cursive, and this girl said my handwriting was...nice. That had never happened to me before. Very exciting.

The teachers at the schools are really great and supportive. I was very happy when I found out that I would need to speak German at school with other teachers. I feared that I would be speaking English the whole day if I was teaching English, but luckily that's not the case. My German is still improving rather slowly, but I think I've just reached that time with it. In the beginning it's so easy to notice improvements, but now that I'm relatively confident that I can express pretty much anything I want to German the next noticeable step seems to be being able to do that without making any mistakes, which won't...ever happen : ) So I'll just be happy with the opportunities my mistakes are giving me to learning new vocab and sayings for now. I'm starting to give my German learning some gas since I applied for the DAAD study scholarship last week (it would pay for my living expenses while I study). It's only like 10 months until I, hopefully, start my Masters program in German as a Second language (like ESL for German) and I really would like to do it well with minimal German mistakes. I'll be making enough of the other kinds of mistakes. : )

9. November

The 9th of November was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and there was a big celebration on Brandenburger Tor and Potsdamer Platz. They set up all of these Dominoes painted by different school groups and youth groups. It was supposed to symbolize, you guessed it, the falling of the wall. It was pretty neat. It's just too bad that it was raining and cold. We waited for the three hours for it to fall anyway.

At times with Glühwein.

And then, I think an hour after it was supposed to, it fell. I have a video, but it doesn't want to load. It took forever for it to fall because every person on earth had to say something about the fall of the wall first. Apparently the wall was bad. (Although not according to some West-Berliners I know).

Hillary Clinton was there too. I'm a little surprised Obama didn't make an appearance.

(Random party, pants on the ceiling)

(English/German Vocabulary Book)

My room and general update

(-I'm so happy to be here! -Me too!)

I actually moved into my apartment at the end of August, but it has only recently started to feel like my room. I just need art and curtains.

I ended up looking at about 9 apartments. When I visited this one I put a star by my name when I wrote down my name and phone number next to the other dozen people who had already come over. They said the star really helped.

The sofa and two armchairs I bought on ebay for one Euro. Whoa.
Any idea on what I should name my new yellow cat (see rug) would be appreciated.

And I am, by the way, very lucky to know the Sagerts. They're the family of a German girl I met when I was 17 in Ireland (hi, Hanna)! They were nice enough to loan me the mattress, the table, the small shelves, as well as doing countless other things for me. I'm sure my Heimweh (homesickness) would be much worse without them.

(Yes, those are beds)



Oma! (Grandmom)

So anyway, this is the biggest room I've ever had in my life.

It's in a nice Altbau (old building) and it's with two great roommates (find my blog yet, Flo? : ))

It's in a great area. Very far from my work, but I wasn't going to live anywhere near my work anyway.

The Euro signs are where are work, the green house is where I lived 2 years ago, the volcano is where I live now and the 'i' is there I studied. And these two fucking little yellow stars I just can't get rid of.

Why is everything so crazy far from where I want to live?

It's really been ok, though. I only have to change trains once, which just gives me time to people watch and read. At the moment I'm reading Russian Disco by Wladimir Kaminer, I very much recommend it. It's particularly great if you know Berlin.
I've finally opened a library account (I needed my visa first). It's amazing, they have all sorts of books and magazines for German as a second language (DaF). I'm also reading these Deutsch Perfect magazines from the last couple of years, I really wanted them before but they're like 6 Euros. They're really great, because they give definitions of the hard words in German at the bottom of the page and all the topics have to do with Germany (obviously). Also highly recommended.
I also took out a beginners French book and CD, a book on how to write love letters in German, which is pretty hilarious, and at least 6 other books. Two weeks for magazines and 4 weeks for books. Seems reasonable. They charge you 2 Euros for anything that's on the bestsellers list, so it's going to be classics and just plain old books for me, but that's fine.

Berlin's changed a little bit. It's always so weird when I see something new. This guy here for example was not there before (see picture at the top of this page). Not SO many things are different, but I also just forgot how some things are and I'm not going to pretend it didn't take a little effort to get used to everything again. A lot of my friends had moved away, I'm not going to school anymore, so making new friends is harder and just the paper work in general was crazy.

So having a couple Minneapoliser here when I got here was nice.

Micah BF and I got to hang out a couple times, including at the Fuck Parade ("less commercial Love Parade", sure why not).

Make it a parade against Nazis? Sure, as long as we're protesting against SOMETHING.



Then Micah left.

I also got to hang out with Kiley.



...but then she left too.

Now I spend my time working and trying to get myself to do anything else. I had been sick for a couple weeks, so I'm excited to have some energy again.

Be excited to find out more about the school system in Berlin.

VISAVISUMVISAVISUMVISAVISUMVISAVISUMVISAVISUMVISAVISUM

I know I said post about something but visa...but...VISA.

As I said, they expected things from me they didn't tell me about. I had to wait another half an hour in the waiting room (number 343) before I was called in.

This was in German of course, but I'm pretty sure my translation is right on the nose.

Big German Lady: Ok, so what in zee hell makes you zeink you have zee right to teach English? Where did you study it? Where is you certificate?

Me: Um. I speak English, here is my CV, it says right here I speak English.

BGL: Zeat is not enough. Other German Lady, is that enough? You don't know? I must ask my other colleague, please wait in the waiting room.

Me: AHHHHHHHHHHHH

I wait in the waiting room and write frantic-scared-shit text messages to Jens. Start to fantasize about having to leave my wonderful apartment and go back to Minneapolis and having to tell the school that I can't work for them after all and having to tell everyone I know that life sucks and is not worth living. 11 years, 2 months, 4 hours, 30 minutes and 7 seconds later they call me back (343 flashes again on the score board).

BGL: Insurance?

Me: Yes, here.

BGL: Go pay 50 euros.

Me: Ok! Sure you don't want 500???!!!

(Me: Mench, das hatte mich aber erschrocken.
BGL: Ja, ist schon ok.)

Whoa. Not only does she show me the visa she's about to put in my passport, but it costs 10 Euros less than they told me it would! That's like getting 16 German Biere.

The other 23 doctuments they of course didn't actually need and the photos I paid like 20 dollars for were also useless, they used mine from before.

That means that I LIVE HERE IN BERLIN. No one's kicking me out! And I'm not on a program, I really just live here and work here! That is so unbelievably weird. It expires next Oktober, but I should be studying by then and not need it.

This means it is now illegal now that I'm working at a community college equivalent (Volkshochschule) on Fridays teaching two English classes for beginners (often in German!).


Look at that there. I'm a teacher. My name and everything.
Right between Bier and Fürk (not at all German names).

This is all very exciting.