They keep telling me it is spring. The calender says so, but is was still cold here until  yesterday. The sun was out all day long and it FINALLY warmed up in the afternoon. Today it will be a whopping 20 degrees Celsius, which is around 70 degrees. I am tempted to dig out my shorts and wear them to my class this afternoon.  I know this won’t last and it will be cold again. YUCK, I really miss Florida weather. It is a lovely 80 degrees there, My integrations course began (again) last Thursday. I like it, the people in my class are friendly and the instructior has a bit of a sense of humor, which is good, she has a hard job teaching adults German. Most of the people are from Turkey, 1 from Morocco, my friend Joel from Portugal and some from Russia, Croatia and Bosnia.  Susanne is back to being my husband because I don’t dare come out to most of the people. In Turkey, I think  they still put people to death for being gay. I don’t want to alienate the people in my class, foreigners here have to stick together and help each other out. I will pick my time tell them. So I am starting at the A2 level of the language, it is a little boring at times, I have learned enough myself and from the teacher I had for a week to be at the B1 level, but I need to speak better. Oh well, I learn something new with every class and I finally get to be with other people learning the language. On break, we have to talk German because everyone speaks a different language, no one else speaks English and I  (at least not yet) don’t speak any Turkish or Arabic or Russian. Communicating is a learning experience, I have to think of how to say something that people can understand because I can’t fall back to English, it sound like gibberish to them.

Easter was okay, lots of chocolate again, like Christmas, we are both over chocolate for a while. 3 days of easter, Friday is a holiday, Sunday and then again on Monday. Lots of holidays here,  it is still amazing to me that anything gets done between all the holidays and all the vacation time people get. I went with Susanne and her nephew to pick up her neice coming in from France. We drove to Holland (an hours drive) to Eindhofen, There is a tiny airport there, only small jets can land and Ryan Air seems to be the airline of choice. It is cheap and serves most of Europe. It was nice to get out of town for a while.

It’s time to stop, I have a quiche in the oven and I gotta get ready for learning German for 3 1/2 hours. The first few hours are okay, but the 45 mins gets to be a bit long, I am ready to run for the door at 5. We get a small amount of homework per night, I do more because I want to learn fast. So off I go!

Auf Weidersehen!

The first class of my Integrations Course started today. It was pretty cool sitting in the classroom at the Volkshochschule with 29 people from various counties. We had to introduce ourselves (of course in German), and there are people from Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Russia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Kenya, Turkey, Iran, Morroco and another from the USA. We didn’t do too much, they collected money, 100 euro for the first 100 hours, and then everyone took a test to see what section they will be in for language. I have been watching/ listening to tv constantly for the last 2 weeks to get really used to hearing German and it has paid off, I could understand the instructor for the entire time  I was there. It is becoming easier to understand people when they are talking fast. I may not understand every word, but I hear every word now instead of a bunch of sounds. Finally something to write about again, it has been pretty quiet here, I have just been working at home on websites and my ecards and not doing anything new except teaching myself CSS.  Every day from 1:30 – 5pm I get to go learn more German and for 45 minutes out of that time I am learning about the German culture.

We got a new lamp ( actually just a lamp) from Susanne’s parents for the kitchen. Since we moved in, the kitchen has had nothing but a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, I actually forgot about it, I don’t look up much when I go in there, I just cook or wash dishes.  The 70″s lamp ( it looks like it was made then, really), made the room a tad bit darker but it does look better now. The weather has turned around, I never thought I would be happy to see a gray rainy day, but I am now! It is not snowing and the temp’s are up in the 40’s and lower 50’s at the moment, I feel a bit closer to getting the shorts out!

Susanne has been adjusting to the German office life. In her last post , Susanne’s page, she wrote about her co-workers being really sensitive to food smells. It turns out that it may not be a German thing, perhaps something more local to the  Krefeld area and more specifically to the guy that doesn’t like her that she has to work across from. She was talking to another woman who works in the building and this woman said she considers it rude when someone eats something with garlic in it the night before and comes to work the next day. Like she can really detect that someone has eaten a minute amount of garlic the night before! Give me a break!  No wonder the food here is so bland ( my opinion only).  Even the cayenne pepper doesn’t seem hot, I have to pour a lot on something to actually make it hotter. Oh well, I keep a bottle of hot sauce in the fridge, maybe one day I’ll have my brother send me some Dave’s Insanity Sauce. You only need a couple of drops of that at any given time, so it should last a while.  While I am on the subject of food, what is with the Gerber Greens? We were given something that tasted like greens spiced up with bacon recently. I couldn’t tell it was greens though, they had been put through a blender and looked like baby food. Food weirdness. I tasted it, it was okay, a bit on the greasy side with the bacon taste but if I had to eat it again, I probably could. Susanne didn’t like it at all.

Well that is it for now, there is something wrong with the T-Mobile internet connection, since the weekend everything is taking forever to load. I have a hard time looking at my ecard site because it takes minutes to load and I am having a hard time saving this post,  what should take a second or two to save is taking a few minutes, so I’ll wrap it up for now, I’ll be writing more about my new class and (hopefully) the progress I am making in it.

The other day I sat, looking at a Peruvian man who was speaking Spanish, listening to a voice translate the Spanish into French and reading the subtitles in German. It is no wonder my brain sometimes goes to a place I call Language Limbo.
I was watching TV5MONDE the French channel. I forget just what the program was, it had something to do with the mountains and people of Peru. Looking at the subtitles, which were in German, I took it for granted that the voice I was hearing was a German translating what was being said by the Spanish speaking person on the show. About 5 minutes later, Susanne came and sat down and said something about what the translator said and it dawned on me then that the translating voice was French. My ears had heard German, I wasn’t actually paying attention to it, I was reading the subtitles! The great part about it is I am actually uderstanding the German subtitles more and more. I know a little Spanish, I had a few years of it in high school, in fact I was a member of the Spanish Honor Society in high school. I have forgotten a lot of it though, unfortunalely. I love the language.

So now I am learning German and at times when I trying to say something and serching for the right words, the Spanish comes popping up and I come out with a half German and half Spanish sentance, Granish. Or half English, half German, Genglish. When I write in English now, I often forget how to spell a simple English word, or I jusy say it weirdly. It is funny to hear me talk English sometimes!

Language Limbo, not quite one language, not quite another but somewhere in the middle.

In time my brain will sort it all out and I will be able to go from one language to the next comfortably.
Susannes German father can speak some French and a little Engish easily, her nephew who is French is now fluent in German and can speak some English. Susanne too is bi-lingual German and English and she knows French from having 5 years of it in school. I think it is cool to be able to know and speak multiple languages, that is one the things I wanted to  be able to do after being here a while. I think that as the world goes more and more global, it is a good thing to be able to communicate in other languages. Some people don’t want to speak another language though, they are content with the one they know and they expect others to speak it also, regardless of where they are. I was reading something about that recently where someones family came to visit and since they had heard that Germans know some English because they get it in school, they expected that all Germans would speak English with them and got an attitude when they didn’t. I believe they were Americans, it certainly sounds like something some American tourist would do. That and assume that every other country will gladly accept American money.
I have seen this happen and I have to wonder why in the hell would someone be so friggin arrogant? Why is is that some Americans (not all mind you), have come to think that the world revolves around them?
I am getting off the subject here, I know the answer but this blog is about Germany not America.

So anyway, I am glad that German is becoming easier for me, I can go longer periods of time understanding what is being said now before my brain goes into overload and checks out. It used to be 5 or 10 minutes when I first got here, thats about all I could take trying to figrue out what was being said. Now it is an hour and a half to 2 hours of undestanding most of the converstion. I slowly but surly getting there. Kinda like the little train that could or in my case, the little brain that could!