Woche 1 (Week 1)

So my goal is to try to post once a week about my adventures in Germany. This might prove to significant a commitment, but it also might be easier than saying the same things to everyone 1000 times. It will also function so that everyone hears the same stories, and no one misses out on anything (since I know everyone is dying to know what's going on). SOOO...hear it goes:

I arrived in Deutschland after 17 hours of travel on Sunday afternoon. My coordinator, Kirsten, was there to pick up Sarah and me at the airport. Sarah is the other student from Brown who is studying in Tuebingen this semester. One other person is hear from Brown, Ellen, but she was here last semester, so she's off in Munich doing an internship, since she doesn't need to go through the language course again (deutsch-Kompakt).

For the first two days, we concentrated solely on taking care of all the administrative details of living in Germany for an extended period of time. Fortunately, because we have Kirsten, a lot of things have been taken care of for us. This includes our bank accounts, so we just had to go into the bank, sign the appropriate documents, and we should be receiving our German credit cards on Monday. These are very important since very few places outside of the tourist areas accept American credit cards, and it's difficult to keep remembering to get cash. She also gave us our cell phones on Monday, which have also been a huge help. We met the other students in our program on Tuesday, and speaking with them, it's a good thing we have Kirsten, because they don't have any coordinators, so they had to do all these things by themselves. I'm sure we could have figured everything out, but it was just much less stressful to have someone to help guide us through.

On Tuesday morning, we took the test to be placed into the appropriate level German class. As I was walking out of the oral testing room, I saw the most wonderful person. Herr Alfred Stumm!!!!! For those who don't know, Alfred Stumm (Alfred, oder Herr Stumm, beide sind egal) was my German teacher spring semester last year. He was an exchange student from Tuebingen, and was only at Brown for that one semester. I knew that he would be in Tuebingen, but I hadn't had time to try and contact him yet. It was completely coincidental that he happened to walk through right when I was walking out. Like a good German, he held out his hand politely to greet me (he also knew I would be in Tuebingen from the professors back at Brown), and I jumped into his arms. Among the students in our class, Alfred became somewhat of a favorite person. He is delightfully awkward but very nice, his English is as bad as my German, and he's always trying to help you with whatever you need. I think he was surprised at how excited I was to see him, but I hope it was a good surprise. Anyway, we have plans to meet up for dinner and I'm sure we'll be seeing each other a lot.

On Wednesday morning class started. I have 3 hours of German every morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon. Zu viel Deutsch! We tend to spend a lot of time with the other people in our class and with the tutors (students here our age who are also teaching us in the afternoon), so even though we can all speak English, we're really trying to speak German most of the time. Unfortunately, this means that every night, I have a splitting headache, but I'm hoping that soon I'm going to have that breakthrough moment. So far I really like everyone in the program. Most of the students are from the US from a bunch of different schools, but a few are from Sweden, Hungaria, Colombia, Russia, Italy, and Israel. This gives us even more incentive to speak German, since usually there's no common language between people.

Now my living situation: I'm in a suite (oder, auf Deutsch, ein WG. Das ist eine Abkreuzung von Wohnheim-Gemeinsam, oder, auf English, a common apartment). We have a common kitchen, bathroom, and central lounge. German dorms work differently from American dorms. They can live in one as long as they would like, all four years, if they want. The guy who lives across the hall from me has been living here for two years. I think he's the longest. It's coed, so there are four women, and two men (including myself). Last semester, a guy from Boston lived in my room, and for a brief period, they thought a girl might fill my room, so the guy across the hall was very happy when he saw that I was moving in. They're all very clean, which is, even for Germans, somewhat unusual. Everyone who comes by always says that I'm leaving in the cleanest dorm on campus. This is good for me, because even though I'm not the neatest person, I don't have enough stuff to be messy right now, and I do appreciate a clean bathroom and kitchen. I can certainly do my part to make sure that both places stay that way. For food, we generally cook together, which provides lots of time for me to speak real German with my Mitbewohnern. One of the girls just stared studying Latin, so we have a good quid pro quo relationship going. Another girl is a really good cook, so she's helping me make sure that I don't burn the water. Overall, I'm very happy with my dorm.

The area of Tuebingen that I'm leaving is called the French Quarter, because it's where the French army stayed back in the war. It's (comparatively) not very old, and the architecture doesn't look like anything else in the city. It's about a 25 minute walk from the University, but there's a whole bus system, which makes everything easier. It's still taking a little while to figure out, but my Mitbewohnern are helping me.

I think that's all I can really think of that's going on right now. Mainly, I think I'm just tired of typing. It took a while to get Internet (as in yesterday), so sorry it took a while to get word out. Feel free to pass this along to whomever might be interested, and please post questions. I'm very happy to answer them.