Things I'd wished I'd known...

More of a practical post today:
Things I wish I'd known before a) coming to Germany in general and also a few British Council Language Assistantship specific things as well.

Number 1:
Crucial this. Y'know how back in Britain (and maybe other places) you're the new kid on the block and you're in a room with one or two people you know and plenty you don't? Then your friend introduces you to the unknowns. It took me a while to realise but in Germany this doesn't really happen. It's apparently far more common to step forward, hand extended and introduce yourself. Makes sense really, and it's only a little difference, but it caused me a decent amount of awkwardness during my first few weeks when I'd have failed to introduce myself to a room full of people.

Slowly I got more used to it though (once I figured out what I'd been doing wrong), and it's actually pretty good for the self confidence in a foreign country, to step forward confidently and introduce yourself, German style.

Number 2:
Getting ill on your year abroad.
So I got ill (downside of working with kids) and  had to head to the doctors. This proved a little different to Britain, so I decided to mention a few things:

1) There are GPs, but there are also dozen and dozens of specialist doctors which you can book appointments with, if you feel its more relevant. I just went to the GP (Allgemeinmedeziner Artz) though as I had fluey symptoms.
2) They took my blood before asking me what was wrong. Not sure how normal this is?
3) The Deutsche Ring insurance will get a few raised eyebrows as it is private insurance, but hey, you technically work for the government.
4) You pay for stuff like antibiotics upfront but claim it back later.  Haven't actually done the second part yet, waiting for my doctors bill to send off.

Number 3:
When saying "Prost!" (German equivalent of cheers) you must look your fellow drinker directly in the eye when clinking glasses, or suffer the terrible consequences***

Number 4:
Ditto for always having the right change in shops. Oh and try and have it ready, after 10 seconds or so of fumbling in your purse the shop assistants become physically impatient.

Number 5:
Oh and you will spend the first 3 months (and counting) having a mild panic attack every time you buy food at a supermarket; the cashiers go so fast they practically chuck your food at you, then ask for the money before you have had a chance to pack more than 2 items into the plastic bags you remembered to bring with you. I have heard of 2 ways to approach this dilemma.

* Option 1: Do everything deliberately slowly whilst staring into the cashier's eyes as if to say "so I'm going British speed whether you like it or not".

* Option 2: not having the bravery to follow Option 1's advice, I get a trolley, chuck everything in as quickly as they scan it, pay, then move aside and pack everything properly. Pretty sure this method is the only thing keeping me from having a small heart attack.

Number 6:
If you spend a lot of time in the rural areas of Germany like I do get used to being asked in detail about your life, your family, your job, your pets, your opinion on HRH Queen Elizabeth the second, your tea preferences, what side of the bed you sleep on and your  thoughts on that dog over there.


I may have made a few of those up.

This is a good thing though, people are so friendly in the country, just curious.

Number 7:
Following on from #6, if you are Welsh (and congratulations on being so, by the way) come to Germany with a prepared opinion on your nation which you must be ready to deliver, in German, at a moment's notice.

Last weekend there was an awkward moment when a teacher found out I was Welsh, the conversation followed thus:

Teacher: "Oh, you're Welsh! Interesting. Do you want to become independent from England, just like the Scottish?"
Me: "Um, no, not really, I don't really mind...I mean...yeah, I'm happy being Welsh and British...I think...?"
Teacher:  "Well, that's a disappointing answer."

Sadly that's not the first time I'd let down an inquisitive foreigner with my laissez-faire attitude towards my welshness.

Number 8:
If possible, bring rectangular pillows with you. Square is just an impractical shape for a pillow.

Number 9:

Engage wholeheartedly in all German festivals (and there are a lot). Muchos fun to be had. And good food.

Number 10:
Take the opportunity to TRAVEL. Unless you are very lucky this is your one and only opportunity in your life where you have the time and means to explore one country in such detail. Don't waste it :)



I'll probably think of more as time goes on, these have been occuring to me slowly over the past few weeks. Usually whilst being sat on a bus/train and pondering over life in Germany, cool bean that I am.




***Ok, I lie, the consequences aren't terrible. You just get a friendly german who corrects you by opening his/her eyes widely, pointing first at them and then into your eyes and saying "look into my eyes".

Tarantulas, Bob's Your Uncle and A Lovely Walk

Hello again!
Apologies for this being a bit late again, I've been working on a different blog post for 2 weeks now but am struggling, so decided to do an update on my life one instead.

So where were we? Just after Belgium, I believe.

I managed to get ill (the couple of hours standing in a field in the rain in Vimy didn't help) so unfortunately after just one day back at school after the holidays I had to take to my bed with the flu. The silver lining to this cloud was that, as ever without the capacity to entertain myself, I got my YARP abstract written by the end of the week. Hurrah!

That weekend, and feeling better, a group of us from the building cleaned out the huge cellars underneath the building at the "request" of our landlord to be picked up as Sperrmull on the Monday. This wasn't too bad, until we got to the darkest corner of the biggest, fullest cellar and came across a white styrofoam box. When my poor flatmate opened it up, she found it was full of huge, dead tarantulas.

Cue general disgust and debate about what to do about it. We found out we should ring the fire service, so they turned up and were equally disturbed by what they found. There were around 50 of them, ranging from roughly the size of a £2 coin to well, a lot bigger. Anyway, they called for the Ordnungsdienst (the police but without guns, as they were explained to me) and after 4 hours a vet turned up, who identified them as illegal etc and got us to take photos to send off for a report. I'll do you a favour readers and spare you the photos, which were unfortunately saved on my camera.

Anyway, after the Tarantula Incident things got a lot nicer. I went to a Divali party at Gunjan's and then finally headed back to school to do some breadwinning on the Tuesday. My week at school was really nice. We learnt about Guy Fawkes' Night and with my English AG I taught them some colloquial English, at their request. Some of it was practical stuff but I chucked a few more interesting things in, for example my little group of keen yr 9s and 10s now have "Bob's your uncle" in their active vocabularly, which they were surprisingly thrilled about.

Then on the Friday after work I headed to Wissembourg, Alsace to stay with a uni friend of mine, Meg, and also to see another uni friend, Helen. It was a bit of a trek on the train (see below) but hey, when you think of how big France and Germany are it could have been a lot further away!

Wissembourg really is on the border to Germany, as you can see.

The town was lovely, so beautiful, and it was really interesting for me to visit an area I'd written a huge linguistics essay on for Multilingualism last year: people really do code-switch a lot, so the linguistics geek inside me was happy as anything.

On Saturday we had a very French lunch of baguettes, cheese, ham and amazing chocolate thingies from the local patisserie, then headed to the house of one of the English teachers at Meg's school, where a few other English teachers arrived. Then followed a beautiful hike up the hills slightly to the west, right on the German border (we actually walked into Germany!) amongst some beautiful ruined castles. Sadly it was very foggy, so we missed out on the beautiful views, but that did lend a very mystical air to everything when standing on top of the castles.

 Castle Loewenstein :)

 Cue Meg and I "It's like being in Helms Deep! Or Minas Tirith!"

A tree told us we were in Germany. Fanfare much?

Later, after 3 and a half hours proper hiking we were taken to a very rustic Tarte flambée house by the teachers, where we got a very French experience, discussed the amazingness that is the languages department at Southampton University and tried (and failed) to politely decline more Pfannkuchen than we could manage. Our French got a workout too, which was well needed.

The next morning we headed upstairs for lunch with the teacher who owns the flat that Meg lives in, it was lovely, and the family was really cool as they were totally bilingual French and German, and would swap languages according to who was in the room/leading the conversation. Switching almost seamlessly from French, to German, and back to French again, myself, Meg and Helen exchanged a few thrilled glances: if someone told me, aged 15, that in 5 years or so I'd be able to do that, I would have told them they were being silly and got back to my Macbeth coursework. How things change, and how pleased am I that my year abroad has become such an amazing experience on so many levels.

After lunch we headed out with Bergère, the sweet dog that belongs to the teacher, for a walk around the town, before watching a couple of episodes of Friends and making our way back to our respective German cities.

P.S: My long journey home was brightened up considerably by spending an hour on what appeared to be the Hogwarts Express. Since the end of the Harry Potter series it now apparently runs between Mannheim and Saarbrücken, incase you were interested.
An old lady came past and even asked me "Fahrkarten bitte", which I'm pretty sure translates to "Anything off the trolley dears?". Not 100% though, so don't quote me on that.

So a Canadian, 3 Americans and a Brit went to Bruges...or was it Ghent?

No readers, that isn't a rather crappy joke that lost its way, I really did go to Bruges (or Brugge, which made me, the Brit, laugh a lot, if you can figure out why) with a group of lovely people for the weekend.

It started at 8.30am Friday, when Tylor picked me up in the hire car. Upon seeing it I burst out into slightly hysterical laughter as the car was a BMW. Sweet!

Photo below of a pretty chuffed group of people:


We hit the road, Tylor our trusty captain at the wheel, and drove through Luxembourg and then through Belgium to Bruges, which lies near the West Coast in the Flemish speaking part. We arrived at our hostel, which was very similar to a standard British YHA hostel you'd find in the middle of nowhere in the Lake District. (This isn't really a good thing). But it was warm, dry and vaguely comfortable and came complete with an über friendly cat so we were zufrieden.

We headed into the city centre, armed with a map Patty picked up at the Youth Hostel, but quickly got confused with our bearings. It was then we realised that she'd accidentally picked up a map of Ghent, which I'm sure is a very nice place but it did render the map a bit useless. Correct map found, we found the main marktplatz, which is stunning. See below:


Those of you who have seen the film In Bruges will recognise this place, it is the Belfry of Bruges, which has apparently been destroyed by fire and/or lightning strike 3 times to varying degrees:



From there we decided to do some of the more unusual tourist activities, including finding and kissing a hidden frog on a bronze statue and discovering the ruins preserved beneath the 4 star crowne plaza hotel.





Afterwards we wandered around enjoying the beautiful little streets and the canal for a while (with me going roughly every 5 minutes "ooooh I remember this bit from the film!" until I got a grip on that annoying habit) then hit a pub. We wanted to go to a pub selling a particular brand of beer one of the euro-tripping Americans was missing, but sadly it was closed so we headed to one over the road instead and took it upon ourselves to sample a large number of fine Belgian beers (all in the name of culture, of course) and played cards.

The next day we headed to Oostende, which is a town on the coast, and drove along the "coastal path". Unfortunately you couldn't actually see the sea much to the American's chagrin, so we decided to brave the driving rain and pulled over in a small town (De Haan I think it was called) and hit the beach. After getting soaked we had a hot drink then the sun came out (sort of) so we decided to head back to Bruges. 

Next we went to a beer museum, which was good, though I embarassed myself by making fun of and taking silly photos with a huge picture of some silly looking people on the wall, who turned out to be the owners and makers of the beer, awkward. By this point it was 3pm and we were pretty hungry, so we had some food then headed to a "Celtic" bar we'd heard was good; it was, though to my disappointment it was more just an Irish bar save for the dirty Welsh flag on the ceiling.

Finally our trusty, if slightly odd, guide recommended the bar at another hostel, so we headed there for happy hour and got talking to some people from Newcastle and New York (an interesting combination). 

The next morning was a different experience alltogether: we drove to Vimy, northern France, where there is a beautiful and majestic Canadian war memorial. Tylor (who is Canadian) had found out there was a Remembrance Day Service in front of it on the Sunday, so once more we braved the driving rain and stood to watch. Serious moment here, but it was pretty moving to attend the service of an entirely different country remembering their fallen soldiers, and hearing the speeches in French was a further reminder as to how many soldiers around the world have given their lives.

The monument: breathtaking, ne?

Afterwards, throughly wet through, we headed to the car and benefitted from Germany's overengineering and toasty car heaters til we'd stopped shivering. 

Then, after one of the most interesting and funniest weekends of my life, we headed home via Belgium & Luxembourg once more. 

I will leave you with a picture of me next to a Beth-sized door, and Tylor next to a normal sized door which is currently being appreciated on Facebook. Really puts my miniature-ness into perspective, doesn't it?

Bis bald!