So, I'm starting to settle down into a daily routine here, which is always good. I tend to get tired early and therefore go to bed before 9 which means that I can wake up between 5 and 6am, which is nice because it gives me ample time before class to do things like check email, blog, do my homework or Bible study, and perhaps Skype my more night=owl-ish friends. Class is Monday through Friday 9-12:30 with a 30-minute break at 10:30. I eat breakfast in the Wohnheim, usually cereal (so far it's been cornflakes but I'm looking for inexpensive alternatives), yogurt, and sometimes also toast with butter. I also pack my lunch, a cheese-and-butter sandwich and an apple, though I often also supplement that with a pastry or something after class (I know, I'm eating so healthy, right? :P). There's usually a group going somewhere and doing something in the afternoon, and depending on their choice of activity and the weather I either go with them, go shopping, or just go back to the Wohnheim to do more homework/email/blogging until suppertime. I've made my own supper every night thus far, and it's usually pasta something. I try to get all the food groups in by cooking chicken to go in it or adding canned vegetables, but pasta is one of the cheapest and easiest things to prepare, so it's a staple for this poor college student trying to save her money for more exciting things like museums and day trips. The nice thing about preparing my own meals is that I eat when I'm hungry, a strong contrast to last summer for those of you who have read the first part of my blog where meal timing was a frequent complaint. After supper I go back to homework and such, unless there's an evening activity planned, which I tend to participate in much less frequently than the afternoon excursions. Finally around 8 or 9 I'm tired enough to go to bed, and what time I go to bed generally determines how early I set my alarm for the next morning. I try to get a solid 8=9 hours of sleep every night; it doesn't make any sense to get overtired and not be able to fully enjoy all of the opportunities we have here in Munich.
So, Tuesday was the first day of class. The group is split into three classes: one group of German 105 and two of German 107. In my group are some from my German 102-5 class in the spring (whom I already know) and several from the other class whom I had never met before, a good mix. In total there are twelve people in my class, though there are supposed to be thirteen - I'm not really sure why one of the students never ended up coming. The most interesting story within our group was one girl whose passport apparently expired a couple of months ago without her realizing it...? She had to expedite a new passport and catch the next possible flight to Munich, whether at her own expense or the arranged ticket was able to be cancelled I'm not sure. I'm still a little confused as to how, when planning to travel out of the country, one neglects to notice the expiration date on one's passport, but I suppose it's a simple enough oversight especially if you don't travel often. She's here now, in any case, but I don't envy her having missed two days of class and traveling here alone.
Our teacher is a grey-haired man, probably in his sixties - actually, he reminds me startlingly of Mr. Girodet, my French/Spanish teacher in high school, although he's German and not French. If you took Mr. Girodet with all his quirks and teaching methods and exchanged all the quintessentially French qualities that he has for equally stereotypical German ones, I'm pretty sure you would have Professor Földeak. (Though that would be a substantial difference, considering the obvious contrasts between French and German personalities...) Professor Földeak is a linguist and he studied English in college, a refreshing contrast from my PiP professors who barely spoke anything but Russian. He is very interested in the etymology of the vocabulary we are using and often links the German history of a word to its English counterpart, which is quite helpful for understanding and remembering what we're learning. His method focuses more on learning words in context rather than giving us lists of vocabulary to commit to memory, which isn't the way I've learned most languages, but I see how it would be helpful. We have pieces of yellow paper on which we are supposed to write important new vocab in the sentences he gives us. Our homework every night is to memorize these sentences so that we learn the new vocabulary, and every day we spend the first hour or so reviewing these sentences. It works most of the time, but for some completely new vocabulary the simple sentences he gives as examples aren't enough to cement in my memory the meaning of the words, so I also keep a notebook in a more traditional "dictionary" style where I write down the new word and its English translation. I tend more to make flashcards on Alek and study them instead of memorizing the sentences, though I do make sure to familiarize myself with those as well. On the first day of class we started reviewing basic things like common verbs and question words, so that Professor Földeak could get a sense for our knowledge level, and I realized just how much that we had studied during the academic year I had already forgotten in the intervening month, particularly the past-tense forms that we don't tend to use so often in conversation (a surprising proportion of conversation refers to the present). If I was really motivated I would go through the reference book that I brought with me and review all of the grammatical topics with which we are supposed to be familiar, but if you can keep a secret, this "intensive" language program really isn't so much, and I could and possibly will squeeze by with knowing the bare minimum and bluffing the rest. Call it a sacrifice for the sake of cultural education - I can't very well experience Germany if I'm always in my room studying, right? This is, after all, an immersion program... Overall the work is not too much and the class is interesting, though after coming off a hard year at Princeton I'm a little burned out and I sometimes find it hard to muster the motivation to study in the evenings. Hopefully either this will pass or I will find a good balance so that I don't resent my studies, but can keep the end goal of becoming fluent in German in mind. I would say the most advanced of us are basically conversationally fluent in that we can say most of the banal, ordinary, everyday things we want to say to each other in German, but there are all kinds of things we don't talk about because we don't have the vocabulary, and reading instructions or understanding native speakers is still sometimes difficult if you don't know what they are supposed to be saying (context clues save my LIFE, which I'm pretty sure is the only reason I ever thought I could speak Russian to any degree).
One big example is Christian vocabulary - having grown up in a churchgoing family, "religious" words were such a part of my life that I never realized how much specialized vocabulary we use until I started trying to think about it in another language. My very best friend gave me a German version of the Bible last Christmas, so of course I brought it along, and I've been reading Colossians. Even though I know basically what it says I was really shocked by the number of words (mostly nouns) that I didn't recognize, so I started making a list of them and discovered that they are mostly very basic words that I would use in any discussion of religion/faith - hope, love, faith, sin, forgiveness, grace, gospel, minister, etc. I'm really enjoying studying this vocabulary, though, and hope to have the opportunity to attend a German church one of these Sundays to see how much I can recognize. I researched and unfortunately all of the several Calvary Chapels (the group of churches I attend, and one of which I was fortunate enough to find in St. Petersburg last year) in Germany are at least an hour's drive from both Munich and Clausthal, where I will be for July/August doing my internship. The leader of the Princeton in Munich program, Jamie Rankin, is a strong Christian who plays the piano both at PEF and Westerly Road Church back in Princeton, so of course he knows of a good church here in Munich, but since most of the group is (naturally) not interested in attending church on a Sunday morning we've planned an excursion to Neuschwanstein (the castle that inspired Disneys' trademark Sleeping Beauty castle) which leaves at 7:45am, and next week we'll be in Berlin for our mid-term excursion, so I'll only get to attend once at most. Hopefully I'll be able to find a good Bible-preaching Evangelical Christian church in Clausthal-Zellerfeld to attend.
Let me tell you about my first week of classes, and then you'll see what I meant about there being excursions or activities of some type every day. Tuesday was the first day of class, and afterwards I had a couple of errands to run, primarily equipping my cell phone with a German SIM card. Unlike PiP, PiM does not make cell phones mandatory for everyone, which I still haven't decided how I feel about. On one hand it's easier because not everyone has to buy a $30 cell phone that they'll only use for a month and can spend their money more freely on what they want, and it certainly makes for more adventures, but on the other hand it makes communication between members of the group difficult if not downright frustrating. This was especially true during the first three days before our monthly passes went into effect (now we are basically independent, which I like very much as most of the time I prefer to do my own thing rather than stick with the group). In any case, I both wanted an opportunity to use the phone I bought in Russia again and wanted to be able to communicate with other members of the group/the group leaders, so I went to vodafone and bought a pre-paid SIM card. When it comes to cellular phone service, the Europeans know what they're doing. Instead of pricey and confusing monthly plans, cell phones can be as simple as buying a SIM card for 10€ and adding money to your account whenever you need to. Calls within the network are 0,05€/min and to other networks 0,15€/min. Texts cost 0,19€ each, and I'm not sure if vodafone works like the Russian networks in that incoming calls are free (but I rather hope so). In any case my Russian phone was unlocked (thankfully) so I bought a SIM card and put 15€ on my phone, which will most likely last me through the whole summer (and it's nice to have a cell phone just in case of emergencies, especially since I usually do my own thing and will not be with a group during my internship). So after successfully navigating that purchase (by myself and in German, I might add, though not without many blank stares and pantomiming...) I returned to the Wohnheim to meet the group for our next adventure. Since Tuesday was the last day of the month and our monthly passes were only good for the two inner zones of the city, I suggested that we visit one of the two large lakes in the region (Starnbergersee or Ammersee) while we could without purchasing extra tickets, and especially because the weather was very nice here on Tuesday. So a majority of us decided to take a trip to Starnbergersee, which was only about 30 minutes by S-Bahn from the Wohnheim. It made me glad I had brought my swimming suit (I considered leaving it since I only swam once while in Russia last year). The lake was nice as promised, and the snow-topped Alps were faintly visible at the southern end, but any visions we had of sandy beaches lined with umbrella chairs were sadly disappointed. The only swimming area we could find was a stretch of rocky shore with a dock that stretched a few dozen feet into the water, a mile or two down the shore from the train station. However, the important part was swimming, so most of us (mostly boys) eagerly derobed and rushed into the water. In some strange lapse of forethought I had neglected to put on my swimsuit while still at the Wohnheim, and changing at the swimming area was an interesting challenge. There were no easily-accessible changing rooms and the nearest bathrooms that I knew of were nearly a mile down the road back toward the train station. However, there were plenty of trees and walls and buildings around, so I just had to be quick and creative about it. Unfortunately my 16x30" travel towel was of no use in this matter, so I borrowed a female friend and a full-sized towel and snuck off behind a tree. I had an interesting close call when another member of the group unwittingly wandered over, but crisis was averted and I was soon running down the dock into the water, safely and modestly covered. The water was cold!!! And this is coming from a girl who lives in Maine, so I know what cold water is. I've been swimming in the ocean in May and in snowmelt rivers in April, so I have felt cold water. This wasn't nearly THAT cold, but it was certainly chillier than expected. I half-heartedly paddled a few hundred yards away from shore but the ominous-looking clouds on the other side of the lake and the lack of willing company discouraged me from a true long-distance swim. So I contented myself with standing in the shallows and observing the multitudes of small fish which swam around me in circles, occasionally venturing close enough to brush me with a tail. I had my goggles, of course, and a few times I dove under and swam amongst the fish, which always kept just out of reach but didn't seem otherwise too bothered by my presence. Soon the rumbles of the promised thunderstorm reached our ears and we (I, at least - most people were shivering) reluctantly clambered out of the water and dried off. We trotted back to the train station rather more quickly than we had come and returned to the Wohnheim without getting wet, if barely. I then turned my attention to making supper, which was an improvised combination of instant potatoes and instant soup (but still pretty good ;]). I was surprisingly tired, so though I had grand ambitions of writing long emails and blogging and doing my homework, I ended up going to bed at 8 and planning to do it all in the morning when I would be fresher and more efficient.
I did end up getting up at 5 and getting a great deal done before class, almost at the expense of my punctuality. I posted my blog entry at 8:33 and rushed off to the train station - it takes a little more than 20 minutes to get from the Wohnheim to the Institute on a normal day and Wednesday was gloomy and rainy all day. The most interesting part of class was when our professor offered to buy us ballet and opera tickets and claimed that he could do so in about ten minutes - whoever had interest gave him 10€ for the ticket and in the middle of class, after setting us to begin a grammar exercise, he slipped out to buy the tickets. He tends to do that - disappear with little or no explanation in the middle of class, almost in the middle of a sentence - usually he comes back right away, because he just has copies to make or something. This time he said ten minutes, but he actually didn't return for FORTY - and by the time he did, class was nearly over so all he could do was give us our homework for the next day (I didn't really mind). After class I went to explore a store near the Institute that had caught my eye - it was called "Euroshop". Turns out it is just what it sounds like - the European equivalent of a dollar store. EVERYTHING is one Euro - and there's some pretty good stuff there! Not just because 1€ = $1.42, either. I'm sure I'll be back to that store many times this month. :) Then it was back to the Wohnheim, where I spent the rest of the day in frustrated attempts to call home - the weather being bad both here and in Maine, my Skype calls with Mom were nothing more than an exercise in frustration, and other friends whom I tried to contact weren't available. I eventually gave up and began researching activities in Munich that would potentially interest me, in hopes of not leaving this city feeling like I had wasted my time here or not seen all the things I wanted to see. The best discovery which followed from this exercise was that most museums in the city are quite inexpensive for students, and a few are even free! Now I have lots more ideas for adventures, and whether I can find companions with which to share my experiences or not, I will be sure to at least inform you well of the ups and downs.
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