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.