Sommer wird Herbst

The most chaotic/stressful summer of my life is over.  It sucked every penny out of me that I had but I guess I'm still doing alright and can now look forward to other things.  Hit the jump to read more...

 

Ok so I’ve been waiting to write this post for a reason. My life up until this moment was utter chaos but now the chaos has been greatly reduced to at least something I can think about without getting dizzy. I have been trying to register for the winter semester as a regular student since the summer semester ended in July and there have been close to a hundred set-backs, all of which I eventually overcame because I am now officially registered just as any other German student. The biggest thing I had to do was take the German language proficiency exam. That set me back 120€ and wasn’t all that easy. I had to take a training course for it that cost me another 100€ and took away any free time I may have had during the break. Without that class, though, I definitely would have failed the exam because it was a lot more complicated than a simple multiple choice or fill in the blank test like I had imagined. It consisted for five parts: grammar, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, text production and verbal communication. During the class I regularly made top marks and impressed the teachers and on the practice test, I scored almost 90% (pretty good for a test whose fail rate is over 50%). On the actual test though, I felt a bit stressed and I really didn’t like the topics chosen for the reading comprehension and the text production. I think I got 77% on the written portions of the test and 100% on the verbal. So I didn’t do my best but I’m totally satisfied with my results and given the perfect verbal score, I don’t really feel that test reflects my actual German proficiency but rather how I perform under pressure. I got a certificate for passing the exam; that makes me officially bilingual. Yes, I took four semesters of German in high school but I really forgot almost everything. I suppose the most important thing I held onto was verb conjugations (which are really easy in German anyway). Other than that, I’ve gone from completely nothing last March to fluent in a little over a year. I feel good about that. And I owe most of it to Anne, despite her claims that she was no help. After passing the test it came time to transfer the 480€ tuition and register. But there was a problem when I wired the money and it didn’t go through like the 212€ I transferred in August for the government’s part of the 700€ tuition. I’m not even gonna get into right now how poor I am and how utterly disappointing this is that I can’t even afford the 700€ tuition that I was so happy about before coming here when I compared it to Western’s 8,000$ undergrad tuition –or the out-of-state tuition for my would-have-been prospective grad-schools in the US (Oregon and Arizona) which were around 35,000$. The truth is I simply could not afford the tuition…I borrowed the 700€ from Anne’s parents, who I am greatly thankful for. They are very supportive of Anne and all of her life decisions including me and I genuinely feel accepted as part of their family. Back to the bank problems though: the 480 wouldn’t go through and when I went to register, I found out I couldn’t because the university never got my money. So I retried the transaction, this time carefully double-checking the account numbers that were printed up for me when they realized this problem. I waited and still nothing showed up on my account statement, not even that the money had come back to my account like it showed me the first time. So I assumed the transfer was still pending and I gave it the weekend but Monday morning, there was still nothing. Somewhere in there was also the first of the month and my student ticket for the trains expired. No big deal for the other students who have been registered since August but because that stupid test is only issued three times a year and if I wanted to study this semester, I had to take it in September, I had to wait until the end of September –just before the deadline to register– until I got my results proving my fluency. This whole system is really messed up. So the last week of registration possibilities, I went to the bank and explained my situation to one of the associates. She seemed pretty unsure about the situation and told me what I had thought: that the transfer was still probably pending and I should wait at least one more day (this was on Monday) before attempting the transfer again (in case it did finally go through and then I end up overdrawing my account because I by no means have enough to make that payment twice). So I waited until Tuesday…nothing happened. I went back to the bank and asked them to do the transfer using the same account information that I had used for the successful transfer of the first part of the tuition (the 212€) in August. The guy did that for me and it went through that afternoon –after the registrar’s office was already closed. I went back first thing Wednesday morning and found out they’re only open on Thursday (the last possible day to register). So I prayed that I had everything I needed (it’s a ridiculous amount of documents…my parents even had to send me the original copies of the bachelor’s degree and even my high school diploma) and I went back Thursday morning, waited in line for an hour and finally got registered.

So the worst part is over. But it takes a few days to get my new semester ticket and I’ve been riding black for over a week now. Which isn’t all that dangerous if you just stick to the sub-way in the city but that meant I couldn’t go to a birthday party in Münster that I was planning on, nor could I go to Neuenheerse with Anne this weekend, or even visit my own family, who I haven’t seen in quite a while. So I’m kinda stuck on campus this weekend…of all weekends, finally the one in which I haven’t really anything to worry about and the last weekend before the beginning of the winter semester. So I’ve just been sitting in my room playing gameboy games on an emulator that I got online. Last night I watched the Germany-Turkey game which was really important here. If I hadn’t informed some of you already, Turkey is the largest source of Germany’s immigrant work force, sorta like the Mexicans in the US but more like that Pakistanis in England if you’re more familiar with that situation. I’d be willing to bet the percentage of Turkish immigrants is higher than the percentage of Mexicans in the US but I don’t know the numbers for sure. Plus the fact that they’re Muslims has a lot of Germans pissed off about the whole situation (they were brought here during the 80s as part of a work program and the government expected them to go home afterwards but they just didn’t…in fact the government began paying them to go back in the 90s…I think they’ve stopped doing that though). It’s not a big problem by any means and I certainly don’t have any qualms with them. But it’s still understandable that a German-Turkish Euro Cup qualifications match would be a big deal. Germany won 3:0 with two goals from Miro Klose, my favorite player and one goal from Mesut Özil. To people completely unfamiliar with the German or Turkish languages, it probably looks like Özil is a German because of the “ö” character but Turkish is another language that uses the umlaut and Özil is indeed Turkish (at least in heritage, he was born in Germany). He came into the spotlight during the World Cup this summer, where he did pretty well and was nominated MVP. He also attracted the attention of Real Madrid who bought him from Werder Bremen afterwards. The fact that he chooses to play for Germany instead of Turkey may be chalked up to the fact that the German national team regularly qualifies for the Euro Cup and the World Cup whereas Turkey does not, but it still means a great deal –hopefully a signal of acceptance and a step away from racism. Everybody in my dorm partied the whole night after the victory and I took that to my advantage and got up early this morning to wash clothes because those machines are always occupied (except for apparently Saturday mornings).

I also discovered the Sabres beat the Sens in their last pre-season game and found out they got rid of the retarded “slug” jerseys, moved the retro logo to the main jerseys and created a new third jersey for their 40th anniversary season, which is pretty cool. If I had the money, I’d take a trip over to the beautiful city of Prague for the season openers tonight. But I am poor and it looks like my days of traveling Europe have come to an indefinite halt. I still have to pay back Anne’s parents, and I wanna do that real soon but hopefully my money situation will turn around in not too long. My private English lessons aren’t really happening because the Bulgarian woman I’m tutoring is working on finishing up her doctorate studies and she hardly has any time to meet for lessons. My job at the bar got changed around a little: instead of being on call like 15 times a month and randomly getting called in for 3-4 hours (or not at all, as has often been the case since the weather has been getting colder and no one wants to sit outside anymore), I am now only doing about 5 fixed shifts a month. But that means I’m closing up shop and getting 8 hours or more each of those days so I should be getting about 200€ a month from that. I was also really lucky last month to land a job teaching indoor hockey on Friday afternoons at a hauptschule in Aplerbeck, a suburb of Dortmund that I have ridden black to and back from (a 90-minute round-trip) for the past two weeks, lol. It’s a lot of fun but the boys are pretty rowdy and my language competency isn’t quite up to par to deal with them so it’s pretty difficult but I make it work. I also took an 80 minute round trip riding black out to Scharnhosrt, another suburb of Dortmund for an interview and I got a job as förderlehrer for English. That’s pretty much just like what I did at the gymnasium this past semester. I will tutor about 7 kids in English after school on Tuesdays staring in November (after their fall break which began today). So with those three jobs I should be pulling close to the 400€ a month that I’m limited to. My rent is only half of that. I still have to pay health insurance and groceries and stuff but I should, theoretically, have a little bit to put aside each month and eventually my situation will turn around…hopefully.

The past couple days, I’ve managed to watch a few movies online because I was at Anne’s while she was out doing stuff with her girlfriends or at a seminar on the uni (I can’t do it at my place because of my limited bandwidth each month). I watched Get Him to the Greek, which I really liked, The Other Guys, which didn’t do much for me, and Robin Hood, which I thought was a hell of a lot better than the reviews I read. I think it didn’t try too hard to be great, so I could still accept it for what it was: a pretty good film. They were the first movies (apart from Inception) which I watched in English since I moved here so that was pretty cool.

I’ve been trying to stream the Bills games online but so far, I’ve only been successful at catching the first half of the opener against the Dolphins. I’m really missing the American fall. The leaves are changing colors here too but it’s just not the same as in the mountains. And if the lack of hockey and football doesn’t kill me, I’ll probably die when Thanksgiving rolls around and there’s no turkey and gravy with sweet potato casserole:-(. But of course I’m exaggerating. The hockey and football void is pretty well-filled by the BVB. In August, I went to their home game in a two-game series against a team from Azerbaijan called FK Qarabag. The BVB won both of the games and thus qualified for the UEFA Cup. They won their first game in the group stage on the road in the Ukraine but recently lost their first home game against FC Sevilla because Schmelzer got red-carded at the beginning of the second half. The 1:0 loss was still pretty impressive considering Dortmund had the better chances in the second half playing with only 10 men. In the Bundesliga, the BVB are on a roll. They lost their first game but have won the last 6 straight including a 5:0 blowout against Kaiserslautern and a 2:0 victory over Bayern München in their last game. They’re second in the table and have the best goal differential in the league so I’m amped (as is the rest of the city) as to what will come when the season resumes from fall break next weekend.

Some updates on things I touched on last time:

Schützenfest in Neuenheerse was really cool. It rained so we didn’t watch much of the traditional ceremonial stuff…it was just too tempting to go inside since it took place in the church yard which is literally right next to Anne’s house. But we went to the big party in the social hall that night and had a great time. We drank beer and ate currywurst and rode bumper-cars and danced and talked the whole night. It was a lot of fun. I was also recently at a stiftsmarkt in Neuenheerse that reminded me a lot of the Apple Festival: lots of hand-made crafts and food stands and such. The school was also open because the art classes were displaying their work to the town so Anne took me inside and showed me where she went to gymnasium and the supply cabinet in the art room that she had painted. I particularly enjoyed that; I even got to eat wild boar!

At the beginning of August I also went with her and her family on a small vacation in Berlin. We drove there and that was really boring. I’m telling you, everything that Americans imagine when they think of the autobahn is completely false. Ok yeah: you can go fast if you want but it’s still difficult because for the most of the way it’s only two lanes just like in the US. Only around the big cities did it increase to three or four lanes. And there were so many traffic jams –it’s like a phenomenon, I can’t explain it…traffic jams just happen regularly in Germany. Like bad traffic jams that stretch up to 30 miles and last hours. It’s ridiculous. Luckily I had discovered the artist Radical Face a few days before and uploaded him to my IPod. Berlin was really cool though. It was the third time I was there and still just as awesome as the first. The weather stayed nice even though it was predicted to rain the whole time. We stayed in a nice hotel not anywhere near the city center so we actually had a while to ride into the city each morning but it was alright. It was on a lake and it was really beautiful. We had delicious dinner out on the veranda the first evening and delicious breakfast in the dining hall in the mornings. Anne and I went for a walk along the river flowing into the lake one of those nights and it was really nice.  

 

I also tried ice cream for the first time ever because they had fruit ice cream at the hauptbahnhof that wasn’t made from milk. So I had a lemon ice cream cone; that was a really weird feeling but it tasted awesome. The next day we went back and I had cantaloupe and lemon together:-).

 

After we left Berlin we went to Potsdam. We went shopping on the main street there but what was really cool was the palace. It’s called Sans Souci, French for “Without Worries”. It was beautiful there and the Palace was painted yellow which I loved. The view from the front reminded me out of something from Super Mario Bros. sorta, kinda weird but I liked it. The walls are covered with grape vines and the green doors have glass panes that are closed over the vines in the winter to protect them from the cold.

My Black Death paper was finally finished. With all the necessary stuff like table of contents and works cited and stuff it came to 18 pages –all in German. I’m not really proud of the achievement –more so just happy to have it behind me. It was so much work. I wrote it first in English and translated the whole thing (no simple task –even for someone fluent, which I barley am). Then Anne corrected the whole thing for me because, to a native speaker reading it, it probably sounded like Fez from That 70s Show. Her dad (who is also a history teacher) also read it over and made a few corrections. I still haven’t got a grade on it yet but will hopefully within the next couple of weeks…

Apart from that, I haven’t been up to much. Stephan’s birthday was pretty fun back in August. We had a picnic in the park and played a really old game whose name I forgot but it’s also called the “Viking game” because it was supposedly invented by the Vikings. It’s simple to learn and play and involves throwing wooden pegs to knock down the opposition’s wooden blocks and at their end, the king in the center has to be knocked down at the end to win the game. It gets difficult though because whenever one of your own blocks is knocked down, the opponents throw it into the field between the king and your line and it is stood up where it landed and you have to knock it over before you’re allowed to hit theirs again. They try to throw it near the king because he’s like an 8-ball and if he falls before the end, it’s game over. It was pretty fun. Back at his apartment that night I played the werewolf game for the first time. It’s a really awesome game that I’m pretty fascinated with. I suppose it’s also known in the US but I’d never heard of it until I came here. It’s based on the game “Mafia” if you’re familiar with it but the werewolf version makes so much more sense. It’s a party game and best played with larger groups of people from like 6 to 20 but 10 or 11 is a good number to have. It’s played in the dark with candles and it would make a really awesome Halloween party game. It’s easy to learn but really difficult to play because it’s always changing and the whole thing is based on a system of accusations, excuses, defending and so on. If you want to play it or learn about it, I have a word document that explains it in full detail that I’d be glad to send to any of you. Just send me your e-mail address (mapude1@catamount.wcu.edu) and I’ll attach it and send it to you. It’s also really simple to make because all you need are note cards and tea light candles.

This entry is getting really long so I’m gonna cut it off here. I haven’t forgotten: a blog about my trip to Croatia this summer is still in the works. And I promise to upload some more pictures whenever I find the opportunity, you know by now my excuse for not being able to do this as often as I’d like.

Take care and hope everything is going ok stateside. Lemme hear from you; tell my what you’re all up to and stuff.

Peace.