Back to school

Hello again everyone,

Things here in Germany are still going quite well. Last week was my first week back to school after the Herbst Ferien. The week itself was mostly uneventful, but it was nice to get back into a routine after two weeks of vacation. Some highlights included making homemade marmalade from Quitten (a strange German fruit that I'm not sure we have in America... photo here: http://www.frau-mutti.de/bilder/blblog/KASTANIEN3.JPG ) from the garden and swimming a 400 meter (approximately 430 yards, I think) test for sport class. Thanks to my days of swimming the 500 yard event in swim team, it was a breeze and I received another 1+. Sport and math class are so nice because for once I don't feel totally incompetent (I think that's spelled incorrectly... my English is definitely going downhill).

On that note... School is starting to feel normal now. I know where all my classes are and I have real friends and I get kissed hello and goodbye. Sometimes I can even understand what's going on in German class. But history is still a fail.

But now on to more exciting things... the weekend! On Friday I was actually invited to not one, but TWO parties. One was a Halloween party at Chrissy's house, and one was a birthday party for a girl in my class. I ended up going to the Halloween party because I was invited to that first. Maria gave me clothing advice (my complete lack of fashion sense hasn't changed despite being in Europe) and did my makeup so that I looked like some dead vampire/zombie combination. Although I've never had a sister before so I'm not really sure what that bond is supposed to feel like, I think we were starting to get there. It felt nice.

Ramona drove me to Chrissy's house, and after an encounter with her grandmother (who may or may not have realized that I'm not German) who lives in the other half of the duplex, I managed to find the party. Daniela, Ewa, Simon, Vanni, Karina, Erik, and Chrissy were there, along with three new boys... Philipp, Philipp, and Tom, who is from Sachsen. I know this because he speaks the horrendously difficult to understand sächsische dialect. More on that later. A couple of the other girls and Simon and Erik also had halloween makeup on, thankfully. Once Chrissy had told me that we were dressing up for the halloween party, I had the sinking feeling that it would be like straight out of Mean Girls where Lindsey Lohan shows up to the halloween party looking like a horrible dead zombie and all the other girls are dressed up as like... playboy bunnies and sexy devils. Thankfully, that did not happen to me!

But anyway, we hung out in the kitchen for a while and Chrissy made 'fingers' out of wurst (not hotdogs, wurst) and almonds (so German...). Then we went downstairs into her basement and ate and talked and were social. I discovered that 'vegetarian' noodle salad actually contained ham. Which makes the third time that I've accidentally consumed a small amount of meat here. I also discovered that I still do not like Pils beer and that despite readily available alcohol very few people were drinking it and they were definitely not getting drunk. Alcohol culture is very, very different here. Speaking from limited experience... In America, at least among teenagers/college students, it doesn't matter that the beer tastes awful because the purpose of drinking it is only to get drunk. Here beer is just like soda, so people that don't like the taste (read: almost all the girls I've met) just don't drink it. It's that simple.

After a while we put in a horror film called Thirteen Ghosts. With German subtitles (it's so much easier to understand movies when I can read as well as hear the German), I understood the whole movie and was definitely scared. I'm not much of a horror film person and I only had a pillow to cling to... aber trotzdem war der Film ok. We also started to watch Paranormal Activity (all the Germans call it Paranormal Activities, so cute), but we fell asleep on that one pretty quickly. I also dreamt in German again!!! For anyone not familiar with the language learning process... this is a huge step towards fluency and is really, really exciting. It's so funny for me because I wake up the next morning and I can't remember what the dream was about but I know that it was in German.

Naja. On to Saturday. We (me, Ramona, Jörg, Maria, and Thomas) went to Aunt Beate and Uncle Heinrich's house for dinner. Aunt Barbara and Uncle Roger (who coincidentally live nextdoor to Aunt Beate and Uncle Roger) also came over. We made a fire in the garden and sat around talking and drinking Grog (the men) and Glühwein (the women). Grog is rum and hot water. Glühwein is mulled red wine with spices and sometimes fruit/citrus. It's normally drunken in the wintertime and is a feature of the Christmas Markets. It was actually really, really good! Way better than regular wine.

After an hour or so I walked to a nearby parking lot with Maria where Pati, a guy from my class, picked me up to go to the movies. We went to see the Social Network! I had been wanting to see it for a while and it didn't disappoint. And despite the lack of subtitles and the fact that Jesse Eisenberg (and therefore his German voiceover actor) always speak impossibly fast, I understood the film! I only had a few questions for Pati afterwards, but he also had a few for me (about American university culture... the film takes place at Harvard). After the movie he drove me home and we ended up talking for almost two hours, all in German and without a dictionary! I was pretty pleased. It was also lovely conversation, about politics and music and Germany and the US and culture and travel and just fun stuff. He also gave me a bottle of his favorite beer ('zu kösten!') and a book about the dirty laundry of various corporations. And on top of all that, I dreamt in German again that night! I've definitely discovered the key to dreaming in German... whenever I spent the hours before bed conversing intensely in German, I dream in German. Normally I spend about a half an hour to an hour before bed writing in my journal (in English) and sending an email or two (in English), so the dreaming tends to occur when I sleep over at a friend's house.

And finally to today. I met my other host Oma (Ramona's mother), as she came over for lunch. Afterwards, we all (minus Oma) went for a really nice and long walk with Bruno in the Wald.

A note on the language:
German varies incredibly among the regions of Germany, Austria, and Switerland. Now with English we're used to regional accents and we can usually tell whether we're talking to someone from Texas or Massachusetts or Ireland or London. In German, the regional differences are on a whole different level, to the point that Germans from the north sometimes need subtitles to understand Germans from Bavaria. And it's not just the accent, either. Sometimes there are whole different words for things in different regions. Zum Beispiel... a pancake in Spremberg is called a Plins, but in Berlin it's called a Pfannkuchen. A potato in Germany is a Kartoffel. In Austria it is an Erdapfel. Blueberries have three or four different names in various regions... Blaubeeren, Heidelbeeren... and more that I don't even know. This does not make life easy for an exchange student. For example, Spremberg, while located in the state of Brandenburg, borders the state of Sachsen. Sachsen's dialect is almost as extreme as that in Bavaria, and therefore I have an extremely hard time understanding my host uncle Heinrich and Tom from the Halloween party. It's hard to describe, but at least the men speaking the dialect sound like they're saying 'glub glub glub' half the time and speaking from the depths of their throat. If you fastfoward to 0:40 on this youtube video, you can hear some Sächisch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmGmdeaujww

Fortunately, however, the Spremberg dialect is not so extreme. A few examples. The high German word 'nichts' is pronounced like 'nischt' in Spremberg. And instead of saying 'ich weiß,' pronounced 'ich v-eye-ss', Sprembergers pronounce it like 'ich v-ayyy-ss.' Instead of saying 'klein' like 'kl-eye-n' they sometimes say 'kl-ayy-n.' I enjoy the Spremberger dialect. It's not too difficult, thankfully.

And now for a note on Halloween:
I'm not sure about Halloween in the west of Germany, but here in the former East, Halloween is quite new. It's been slowly gaining popularity over the last 5-10 years, but my host siblings (aged 22 and 24) never once went trick or treating as kids. Now, some young children do, but for the adults the day has no meaning. Despite this, I carved a jack-o-lantern and I'm preparing the answer the door for the kids that do come. I find German children impossibly adorable, so I hope that we at least get a few.

Until next time,
Dani