What I've been up to

I feel like a failure because I haven’t updated my blog in so long but I’ve finally found the time to do so, so prepare for a long entry.

The semester is over finally.  All I have left is an essay on the Black Death’s influence on art –ten pages in German due at the beginning of September.  Not exactly excited about that, so at the moment I’m procrastinating in my new room.  I moved out of Ostenberg last Friday and am subleasing a room in the Studentendorf for a year while the guy is abroad in Iceland studying.  I really like my new room.  It’s in a two-person flat which is a lot nicer than sharing the kitchen and bathroom with three other people.  It’s also quite a bit bigger and I’m now only 5 minutes walking distance max to the Mensa, library and my classes.  About my classes… I don’t know which classes I’ll be taking next semester because I’m still uncertain about my studies next semester.  Now, I suppose, I have to back up and fill you in on some things.  I gave up trying to learn Latin in German.  It was way too hard for me.  Each week I would fall further and further behind and I knew I wouldn’t be able to pass the exam.  Even if I had the money to buy Rosetta Stone and teach it to myself in English, that wouldn’t really help because the Latin test I need to pass to do my masters of education for the Gymnasium is entirely in German and it’s strictly translation.  So if I didn’t learn how to translate Latin to German, it wouldn’t really work.  Translating English doesn’t even work that well for me still.  What I mean by that is, I can speak German because I can think in German.  When you give me an English text and ask me to translate it to German it’s a lot harder than it sounds.  I had a class this semester taught by a professor form England in which we translated German texts to English and I think I possibly learned more about my own language than I did about German in that class.  My other three classes weren’t all that exciting and I don’t particularly want to discuss them.  So without Latin, I cannot teach at the Gymnasium level but I can still teach at the Haupt- and Realschule.  So that’s my goal at the moment.  Sadly, I’ve been so far out of the loop since my last education classes at Western, I’m beginning to doubt my abilities, and actually my desire as well, to become a teacher.  I know this is probably only a phase –my mind’s way of coping with the fact that I will eventually at some point within the next few years no longer be a student and must hold an actual career.  I’m sticking with it though because I definitely do not want to give up after all the effort that I have put in thus far.  I had originally planned to not study next semester because I didn’t have the 700€ to throw down for tuition.  Since I am no longer an “exchange student”, I now have to pay for my rent and no longer receive my meal stipend.  I also am having to send money back to the US every month to take care of my payments for my loans taken out for my undergraduate studies at Western.  I did finally find a job though.  I am a waiter at a small cafe in the Kreuzviertel, a nice neighborhood between the university and downtown.  I doubt I’m ever going to get enough hours there though because it really is quite small; a shift consists of two people.  Since I do not know how to prepare any of the food, I can’t work a fixed shift which would be 6 hours at least.  Instead, I am on call.  When the first person gets too busy, they call me up and I come over and work for about 3 or 4 hours or so and then go home when the kitchen closes and they can handle the rest.  There’s another job at a Hauptschule in Aplerbeck that I may take instead.  I think it begins in October and would consist of me watching the kids during their breaks and then tutoring English after school.  I also have a job lined up as a private English tutor for a Bulgarian girl who wants to better her English for her upcoming job in December.  It will pay pretty well and she even told me that after our sessions are done in December, she knows other people that would probably also like help with their English.  I’m also keeping my fingers crossed for a job as a discussion leader in English classrooms here on the university.  A couple Americans from this semester did it and said it was a good experience and pays really well.  I haven’t heard anything back from the woman in charge of these jobs yet but as a native speaker, hopefully I can land the job.  So that’s my monetary situation at the moment.  It’s looking up but still not enough to go to school so I was still planning on taking the winter semester off.  But then I was told about an opportunity to join one of the student unions on campus.  As a member, my tuition could be waived.  I tried to register for next semester but the process here is so complicated and the woman I talked to was really unfriendly and not helpful at all.  Apparently you first have to apply; this is your “intent” to register.  The deadline for that was my birthday, July 15^th.  Then in September you have to actually register.  And even after you’ve registered, you can still back out and not have to pay for the tuition for the semester which begins in October.  So I thought this was a pretty good opportunity and decided to go for it.  If things fell through with the student union, it would be no skin off my nose, I’d just be back to my original plan of taking a semester off.  But this woman confused the hell out of me.  She gave me a form to get signed saying that I can speak English.  She also told me that I filled out the application form incorrectly where I put down my field of study, which I had a German do for me.  And she told me that I need to take the German test before I can register whereas I was told that I just needed to take it within the first year of my studies.  Since this all came on so late and I was talking to her two days before the deadline to apply and the German test isn’t offered again until September, I figured oh well this isn’t gonna work.  So I just didn’t bother fixing the form and resubmitting it.  The woman didn’t explain to me, however, that the test only has to be completed before I register and not before I apply to register.  Everything here is so dumb.  It’s like they don’t want people to study.  So I could have still turned in the form and applied to register, then taken the test and then registered but I feel it was really this woman’s fault because she didn’t explain any of this to me.  She was quite impatient, didn’t let me finish my sentences and even went so far as to tell me that the person that advised me about next semester and taking the German test and such didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.  Eventually I met with my academic adviser and explained all of this to her and she got the woman on the phone and figured out some stuff.  It was then, of course, too late for me because I had not applied to register and would not be allowed to register in September.  But essentially, I can register for another field of study, namely: philosophy, which doesn’t have a cap as to the number of students that are allowed to study that subject (yeah they have those because, like I said, it’s like they’re trying to keep people from studying).  So at the moment I’m trying to register for that field of study and if it works I’ll just take pedagogical classes that will count towards my actual major that I will have to switch to next year.  I really hope this works though because another setback in this system is that for my major, I cannot register in the summer semester.  Which means I would have to take an entire year off and try again next September.  This is very annoying.  I tried going back to this devil woman yesterday to turn in my form and see how rude she could be this time but apparently she’s only in her office one day a week.  Yeah, the lady that’s in charge of all admissions to the university only works one day a week.  So I have to go back next Tuesday.  Thank god it’s not Monday because I will be late-arriving in Dortmund from Berlin where I am spending the weekend with Anne and her family as vacation.  I’ll write about that and what happens with my studies in my next post which will hopefully be a lot sooner.

Apart from my studies and finances, I’m doing really really well.  I’m so happy at the moment.  I have the best girlfriend in the entire world!  And I had an awesome semester getting to know and hang out with all of the exchange students.  Sadly, you are all gone from me now but if you are ever back in DO or are traveling through Germany and just need a place to stay in the Ruhrgebiet, just hit me up!  I posted a lot of pictures to facebook this past weekend, almost every picture I have taken since I got here.  Anne was out of town and I was staying at her place because the guy whose room I’m living in was still here and I had to move out of my old room on Friday.  So I took advantage of having my computer at Anne’s which is a rare occasion.  In the dorms, we have a restricted amount of bandwidth and doing things such as watching videos or uploading pictures uses up a lot –especially with my laptop because it is so old and slow that it takes forever to upload pictures…that literally took the entire weekend to get those posted to facebook.  But I figured I owed it to you all.  I’ll eventually try to get them, or a select few of them up on my Flikr so you can see them in the slide show at the bottom of my blog but for now, feel free to browse through them on my facebook and leave comments or if you wanna ask where something was or whatever just do it and I’ll let you know.  Among those photos is an entire album from our trip to Croatia in June.  I went with three other Americans and we stayed in Zadar on the coast.  It was a great trip and it definitely warrants its own post so I’ll try to write that sometime soon as well.

This past Sunday I said goodbye to my good friend, Stu, from Iowa.  He was staying in a hostel in Düsseldorf for a few days after we moved out and I took the train down to go meet up with him and we saw Inception in English.  I was so impressed by that movie!  I loved it; there were a few things about the plot that weren’t too much to my liking…I feel like they tried too hard to write DiCaprio’s history into the story to give it more value…add a romantic theme for the ladies or what have you.  It could have done without that because the storyline alone was phenomenal, but it didn’t taint it too much so I have no real qualms.  The imagery was amazing, the acting was really well-done and I found the idea to be the best since the Matrix.  I even convinced Anne to go see it so we are going sometime next week to watch it in German.  She usually hates anything that’s sci-fi or fantastical or anything that’s just not straight-up realistic and depicts everyday life but she saw how excited I was as I was telling her about it so she said she’d see it with me again when I told her I was going again just for the hell of it.  Anyways, this is not a blog about movies but you should all go see it if you haven’t.

As for what else I’ve been up to this semester, it’s not really that exciting but I’ll fill you in on some of the highlights.  I’ve gone with Anne to her hometown, Neuenheerse, for quite a few weekends and I love hanging out with her family.  They are so nice and supportive and her parents are going to loan me the money to study next semester.  There have been a few things going on on the weekends when I was there such as Schützenfest in Paderborn or Libori which is a lot like the state fair but with a lot more beer.  Next weekend is Schützenfest in Neuenheerse and I’m excited about it.  I missed it last year by like two days when I flew home and Anne has been wanting me to experience it for so long.  Schützenfest is a folk festival that every small village in Germany has once a year and the people of the village are usually so very proud of their Schützenfest and it has so much tradition and culture going back hundreds of years; it is the big event of the year.  It means “shooting festival” because the men attempt to shoot a wooden bird from the top of a high post and the winner becomes the Schützenkönig –king of the festival.  I’ll write more about that after it happens too.  I was told that the Schützenfest in Paderborn was not very traditional at all, due to the fact that Paderborn is actually a very large city.

For our one year anniversary, Anne and I took a trip to Köln and went to the zoo which was a lot of fun.  We also went back to Köln a few weeks ago to go shopping and just walk along the Rhine.  This past Tuesday, her and I and another friend of ours, Sara, went to Köln to watch our friend Stephan and his boyfriend compete in the decathlon of the Gay Games.  It was a lot of fun –except for the terrible, terrible song they played on repeat like a thousand times as they presented the medalists for each event in every age group.  It’s called “Facing America” and I want to punch that woman in the face now.

A couple months ago, I also took a random trip to Düsseldorf with a one, Karen Barrett, as we searched for Dunkin’ Donuts.  We found the donuts but I had way too much wine on the train and when we got back in Dormtund –just in time to go to a party– I was already pretty drunk and then I just lost track of how much I had and I got black-out drunk.  But it lead to an evening of great stories the next night from the others who were there recalling the evening to me.  I celebrated my Buffalonian heritage by chowing down on some all you can eat wings at Hooters in Bochum with the Buffalo gals.  There was a trip to Aachen, a large city situated near the German, Dutch and Belgian borders.  Aachen was Charles the Great’s capital of the Holy Roman Empire so the city was really interesting for me as a history nerd.  We also discovered a hole-in-the-wall toy store in which we were encouraged to play with the toys. 
We were even served gratis alcohol and candy.  I felt sorta like I had stumbled into Willy Wonka’s or something.  Half of our group returned home after we ran into some snags trying to get to the Dreilanderpunkt, where the three borders meet, but eventually we found a bus that would accept our student tickets because it didn’t cross the border to the Netherlands.  We got out on the Dutch-German border and hiked up a small mountain for about a mile or two and at the top, we found the Dreilanderpunkt just a few meters away from the highest point in the Netherlands.  We had some fun laying in all three countries at once and I managed to balance myself on top of the pillar in the center.  After the photos we strolled over to the playground nearby and because it was a Sunday evening we were virtually the only ones in the whole park and the playground was empty.  We took turns climbing on and spinning in circles on crazy-awesome things that all American playgrounds lack for “safety reason” (read: because American kids are too dumb and will hurt themselves).  There is also a big mound of sand in theplayground that is obviously taller than “the highest point in the Netherlands” and there’s a sign in it making fun of this fact.  I also went to a Hallenbad in Hamm with Anne.  That was so cool.  I’ve never been to like a big public pool or water park.  The closest thing I’m familiar with is the YMCA pool or like the pools at hotels or camp grounds on the beach with might, yeah have a big slide and lots of palm trees and stuff but this Hallenbad was way more awesome.  The was a large outdoor pool with really warm and really clean water, it was so comfortable.  All along the edges of two sides of the pool there were like beds so that you could lay flat on your back but still be submerged in the water.  There we’re also two large mushroom-shaped things that pour water down on you like a waterfall, and there was a circular area that was connected to the pool that was like a giant whirlpool.  That large outdoor pool also led inside where there was a wave pool which is like being at the beach without sand.  There is also the sport pool which is like a regular YMCA pool except Olympic-sized.  And there was also a Jacuzzi and a cold-water-whirlpool.  A kiddy pool too that had lots of toys and fun stuff to play on, which American kiddy pools also lack for the same reasons.  There were also two slides, one in which two people sit on an inflatable raft and slide down a pipe which was awesome and one in which people just tumble down a large shoot which is open to the outside.  There are segments where you are sliding faster than you can think and then you suddenly drop into a deeper pool and have to dog-paddle a little to get to the next segment of the slide, and everyone is crashing into each other the whole time, it’s a lot of fun.  I got to take a tour of the Westfalen Stadion which was like a trip to Disney Land for me. I walked on the grass that BVB plays on!  I was in their locker room, press conference room, detainment cells for hooligans that go too far, and I even sat in Jürgen Klopp’s seat. 

This year I was only able to go to one football game: Bochum-Stuttgart.  I went with a buddy that goes to the Ruhr Uni in Bochum, who is actually a BVB fan.  We had tried to go to a game in Dortmund the week before but it didn’t work out so we decided to go to Bochum then next week.  We needed Stuttgart to lose so the game was still of value to us.  Sadly, Bochum didn’t win; they were having a terrible season anyways and were relegated at the end to the second Bundesliga.  BVB finished 5^th and earned a contention spot for the UEFA Cup this season.  After the Bundesliga season was over, however, the World Cup began and that was a blast.  We watched the first Germany game, which was against Australia, at a public viewing event in one of the big squares in the city center.

There were 17,000 people packed into one city block and the atmosphere was crazy.  The rest of the Germany games I watched at the Westfalenhallen on the big screen.  They were always a blast.  I can’t even begin to describe to Americans what football fever is like in Germany but it’s definitely something that you should experience at least once in your life.  For one, the Germans were finally “allowed” to show their pride in Germany.  Doing so at any other time is kinda taboo because they are the last nation on earth to be able to say that they are proud of their history because of the two world wars which were blamed entirely on them as well as the Nazi period and the holocaust.  You just don’t see German flags here except in front of government buildings.  But for that month of the World Cup, they were everywhere.  Everything in Germany was Schwarz-Rot-Gold, even the bus drivers had the flag painted on their faces on game days.  It was a phenomenal experience.  I had actually predicted the Dutch-Spanish final before the World Cup began but I wanted the Netherlands to win so it didn’t work out in the end but it was still a lot of fun.  We watched the US-England game at an Irish pub downtown with a bunch of the Americans and the two Brits and one

of their sisters.  Stu and I even made shirts that said “Yes we can” on them for the guys, it was a hilarious evening.  There were a few birthday parties strewn across the semester, one of which our friend Sabrina celebrated in the style of a children’s birthday party with games and such.  I learned what type of games kids play here and got to take part in Topfschlag and the like.  Neuenheerse has a really close relationship with their sister city in France and earlier this year, a bunch of the French people involved in that partnership came over for a visit.  We all took a bus to Paderborn and were led in two groups on a city tour conducted in French.  One of the guys, a history teacher who spoke no German and terrible English took it upon himself to translate everything to Anne and I.  He was so loud and rude, it was like a kindergartener on a field trip, but eventually the guide gave up trying to control him and the three of us just kinda hung at the back of the group.  He was hilarious.  At the beginning of the tour, all he did was talk shit about the tour guide, I would have sworn this dude was drunk but apparently he always acts like that.  We were laughing the entire trip.  That night as we celebrated in the big hall in Neuenheerse (actually Anne and I and a few of her friends were waiting tables for the dinner celebration but there was a group of kids there from the Gymnasium too so we took turns doing shifts) the guy really did get drunk and he was so ridiculous.  He even stole the wireless microphone while no one was looking and as the chorus was singing, he turned it on and started singing along even though it was in German and he didn’t know a single word.  Everyone was so pissed at him but us at the “kids table” where he was sitting found the whole thing hysterical.  On Wednesday, I was over at a friends house and we watched BVB’s first test game which was against Manchester City.  We won 3-1 which was really cool.  We also saw the last few minutes of the Women’s World Cup which was being held in Germany this year.  The German girls beat Nigeria to win the championship, which was also pretty cool.  Afterwards, I played Steffen at FIFA on his 360.  It was the first time I’d played FIFA since February and here it’s like a religion so I thoroughly expected an ass-whipping.  I’m also used to the PS3 but the controls are similar enough.  I chose Arsenal, letting him have BVB since he’s actually from Dortmund.  We tied the first game 1-1 and he won 5-4 on penalties.  The second game ended scoreless and I won 4-2 on penalties.  We played a third game to determine the winner and I won 3-1 in regular time.  I felt pretty damn proud of myself:-D.

I’ve had a really good time here since coming back.  It’s been really annoying trying to deal with the university and get everything sorted out with my studies but that’s only part of the reason I came here.  I also came here to live and I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job at that so far…maybe that’s even why I haven’t found the time to blog until now…