Drei Jahreszeiten
>> 21.9.11
This post covers January through September and in Word, it's 18 pages long...So have fun reading and write me a comment if you find time. At least you know I'm not dead...
I know, I know: this blog is turning into a bi-yearly thing and I understand that makes it boring and forgettable. Sorry about that. I’ll admit my life isn’t all that exciting but I hope at the least, it’s not boring and forgettable…
I’ll try to fill you in on some things that I wrote in my last entry 7 months ago.
The pizzaria job, while not a trap, hasn’t turned out to be a life-saver for me by any means. After working just a few weeks there my hours got cut to basically just weekends. I think the boss was expecting me to also be able to drive the delivery car but had just forgotten to ask me about it in the interview. Since I don’t have a license, I’m not all that useful to him when there’s a slow day (which most week days are). The boss is a really nice guy though. He’s a short little fat guy named Franco from Sicily (where my Italian ancestors come from). I dunno what the policy here is about the first 90 days but I suspect it’s something similar to the US, so he probably could have just let me go after realizing that I wasn’t much help to him but he’s kept me around and I work evenings there (just 3 hours or so) on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. He tried to encourage me to get my drivers license here a few times but I told him there’s no way. First off, it’s expensive as hell. To get a license here, you have to take a course…it doesn’t matter how well you can drive, you still have to have a minimum number of hours. Then you have to take the test which you pay a lot for. I heard the minimum anyone would have to pay here is 800€ but 1000€ is also not uncommon. I’d also be worried that I would have to take the course (which you pay for by the hour) a lot longer or that I would even fail the test and have to pay to take it a second or a third time because I can’t drive a stick so I would have to be learning that part all over again essentially. You can get a license here that certifies you to drive an automatic but I never want to do that. It would mean I’d never be able to drive another person’s car in emergency situations later in life. Plus automatic cars here are way more expensive than in the US.
My Förderlehrer job went pretty well. The kids all slowly stopped coming to the after-school sessions so at the end, I only had about 4 regulars. But I felt much more comfortable in the small classroom setting anyway. I think our work is really starting to help them, at least to be more confident in speaking. The kids are on summer break since the beginning of July and start back in September or October, I think. I’ll be continuing it then if nothing goes wrong first (I’ve accepted Murphy’s law as the ruling law of my European life).
My indoor hockey job is also still going strong. The kids are likewise on holiday but near the end of the last school year, I noticed a positive change in their play. A lot of the kids started to lose their motivation to play and caused a lot of problems but they won’t be back in my group next year because I have to give them permission to be a part of my class before it actually starts. I bought them all new sticks and balls on the school’s account in about June and they work much better. Before, we were playing with field hockey type sticks that were made of rubber and were really cumbersome. I ordered standard floorball sticks from Amazon and they work really well. I started teaching them shooting tactics (which was impossible with the old sticks). They’re team-play still needs some work…they play hockey like it’s football and I gotta get that notion out of their heads which is pretty difficult because football is like a religion here. But near the very end of it they were finally getting adjusted to the speed of the play that the new ball and sticks brought and I saw some really good stuff. All of the AGs (the after-school classes) presented their stuff at some performance at the end of the year. It was really poorly-organized and I had no idea what we were supposed to do so I just had them play a quick game in front of the audience in the gym. They were used to playing in the main hall of the school which isn’t that big; or sometimes we’d go outside on nice days but the sticks aren’t really made to play on a surface that isn’t perfectly flat. So the huge space available in the gym was new to them but it was a huge positive change and they we able to open up passing routes like I’d never seen. It was pretty great. Afterwards, the principal came to me and said he was really impressed and asked if I had any intentions of forming an official club with the kids to compete in regional tournaments and stuff. I told him I hadn’t thought about it before but I would be up for it if there was backing and enough kids wanting to be a part of it. He said if I ever wanted to, he could help me set it up through the school so that I wouldn’t have to pay for it. I definitely think that would be cool but I’m gonna hold off on that idea for a while to see how the future goes.
I had a huge fiasco back in February/March with my student loan company trying to get them to defer my loan payments due to my student status. Basically, they don’t give a shit that I’m still studying and can’t finance my studies and pay back a loan simultaneously because the school I’m studying at isn’t an American university. So fuck them. I had to sign a forbearance which means I’m not paying them due to “financial reasons” and the interest is still accruing. Luckily the new government of my state got rid of tuition for universities just before the start of the summer semester so I only had to pay 200€ (to the Federal Government) to study.
Back in March, I just happened to see a newspaper laying in the hallway at the pizzeria while I was headed out back to take out the garbage and I noticed an article
about how the 501st (the Star Wars club that dresses up in full Stormtrooper regalia) was going to be in the Dortmund Zoo the very next day. So I called up a friend of mine that I knew is a fan and we went the next day and got our pictures taken with Darth Vader and Jango Fett and all sorts of Stormtroopers, Clonetroopers, TIE Pilots, etc. It was pretty cool. Over Easter break, I went with Anne and her family to Hamburg for a few days. We stayed at a really nice hotel right on the Elbe a little outside of the city. We had to take a ferry to the actual city each day but it was a short ride and the weather was really nice the whole time so it was great to sit up on the open deck of the ship and relax, especially on the way back home after a long day of walking around. Being a port city, we ate lots of fish—particular Portuguese-style fish and it was all delicious. We took a bus tour of the city and did some shopping and most of the time Anne and I just walked around on our own and just enjoyed the time off from school. We’d both already been to Hamburg a couple times so there was no rush to try to see everything. The one thing I hadn’t seen but had been wanting to we finally managed to all do as a group. There’s an old tunnel going underneath the Elbe to the other side of the river. There’s not really much on the other side apart from the view of the city but the tunnel itself was pretty cool. Anne and I went with her dad and her godmother’s husband; the women stayed behind…something about the tunnel collapsing and flooding… All in all it was a really great vacation and ended far too early.
The BVB continued to dominate the Bundesliga and on the evening of 30.4. they secured first place in the league for the season. This was incredible because winning the Bundesliga (finishing in first place) is the big thing here. There are no playoffs after the season. I know in the NHL, it’s a joke to win the President’s Trophy (best record in the regular season) because it’s been a jinx to for that team for the last half century and no team finishing first has won the Stanley Cup since then. Think about even that year in the NFL that the Patriots went 16-0…they lost the Super Bowl. It was also huge that they had secured the title on that night because it was a Saturday and the next day was May Day which is a pretty big holiday here. Basically, everyone has 1.5. off of work so the night before is traditionally a huge party night. Well the BVB game was late so people we already out celebrating and then the news started to come through that Dormtund were Deutscher Meister (German Champions) and the party in the city just went off the wire. I went out with a few friends into the city and got fittingly inebriated. The Altmarkt in the city had turned into a sea of broken glass and trash and it was so loud, I couldn’t hear the people next to me. We tried to get into two different clubs but the lines were ridiculous and we settled for a few more cocktails at our favourite bar. I made it a point that night to try all of the really interesting-sounding things on the menu that I’d always looked at but never had…this included a cocktail made with wasabi and one with chili peppers. I wouldn’t recommend either. I never did get to go to any of the games even though Anne’s parents gave me a voucher for one for Christmas because they continued to play so well at the end of the season and all of the games were sold out. Going into this season, Dortmund is just as popular (if not more). A couple of the players even made the German National Team, including my favorite player, Mats Hummels, and another really young guy named Marcel Götze who just scored a goal against Brazil a couple weeks ago in an exhibition match. Speaking of young players: the BVB finished the season as the youngest championship team in history and they still have the youngest starting 11 going into this season.
The new group of exchange students was pretty cool but quite different from the other two groups I got to know. I didn’t go on any trips or anything but I met up with them a lot for parties and stuff. Basically they were great drinking buddies over the summer. Our parties usually got a little out of hand and I would often pass that point where my memory starts to get a little blurry and then I get good laugh when I see the pictures on Facebook reminding me of the ridiculousness that went down…like me and two other guys finding a couch that someone had just set out by the dumpsters and carrying it half a kilometer into the middle of a field and all cramming onto it to look at the stars…I remember a toast to the last shuttle crew which we spotted.
In May, my buddy, Stu, came back for a visit. There was the official Meisterfeier (Championship Celebration) and the main highway in Dortmund was closed so that everyone could gather on it and the players rode down the street in an open bus and there were concert stages set up every kilometer or so and all of Dortmund was going crazy. I met the lady in charge of the camp in the city for breakfast and by the time I was headed home around 11, the fans were already coming out of the woodwork and there wasn’t a single person in Dortmund not wearing yellow with a beer in their hand. I got back to the main station to find it standing in a huge cloud of yellow smoke that someone had set off like in the stadium. It was a crazy day. It also poured down rain and hail starting that afternoon but no body cared, the party went on and it was ridiculous. I watched it safe and dry on television though the windows were open and the whole city was alive and filled with the sounds of car horns going non-stop, police sirens, people screaming and blowing whistles and voovoozelas. After the rain stopped, I met Stu in the Kreutzviertal where we walked around for a good while trying to find a bar that had seats open. We finally did and had a few beers and caught up on the last year. We planned a BBQ in Westpark for the next week and I got all of the Americans together and we spent the day playing (American) football and grilling delicious German meats. The next day on the way back to the uni from Anne’s I discovered new graffiti on the main wall running west out of the main station that all of the trains have to go past. There were probably 7 or 8 different works on that wall…my fellow exchange students from 2009 and 2010 will remember the anatomically-correct Hulk smashing through an indistinguishable word…well since May Day, the Hulk’s nakedness had been covered by a BVB jersey and sunglasses but on this morning, I was surprised to see that practically the entire wall was painted yellow with huge black letters spelling out “Deutscher Meister ist nur der BVB” (Only the BVB are the German Champions) the lyrics to one of the thousands of songs that were randomly being shouted by drunken people all over the city for the past month.
Over the course of the semester I played unihockey here on campus as an intramural sport. Unihockey is pretty much floorball. Another American studying here from Iowa who plays ice-hockey back home started it with me but then eventually stopped coming, leaving me with the Germans. Another guy I knew from Finland who usually plays goalie came along a few times, too, but we used small goals without permanent goalies and I guess he didn’t like playing forward that much because he stopped coming, too. But I still go and work on my skills, the other guys are all way better but I’m getting there; it’s a lot different from roller-hockey because you play on foot and the stick is really short so you have to play bent over the whole time. The sticks are also not really designed so that the shots come from the wrist but rather large arcing motions that start far away from the body which is really weird to me having always had a tendency to play close.
For a while, I was also giving English lessons to a group of guys from Morocco. We met at a classroom in their mosque just around the corner from Anne’s place. In the beginning it was really cool. We did two lessons a week and there were a lot of people. But then fewer and fewer started to come and eventually we just did one lesson a week and occasionally only two people would show up and we would cancel the lesson. The guy in charge of it was a young guy who had just had a baby. He is really nice and friendly. I did notice, however, that he always wanted to talk about religion. I found it really interesting at first because I had no first-hand experience with Islam and having discussions about religion with the class was pretty cool. I watched them prey one night upstairs and once, Samir, the guy in charge, invited me to his place afterwards to eat dinner. He basically just wanted to show off his baby girl to me. But the food was all traditional Moroccan and it was delicious. It did get to the point eventually though, that it was kinda just getting annoying. Aparently Muslims don’t try to convert you by telling you that you will suffer if you don’t convert like Christians do, instead they just try to make Islam sound like the coolest, most awesome thing in the world. That did get annoying like I said and I was kinda glad when we just stopped the lessons all together because they couldn’t afford it any more after buying a huge building in Dortmund to renovate as a sort of community center for the Islamic community from Morocco. It was a good experience though and I enjoyed it. I was impressed that Samir did not once ask me to donate any money to the renovation because after they bought that building, it was all he could talk about is how they needed the money and that a donation would be rewarded by god. I thought, there’s no way a Christian from the US who was on such friendly terms with me would be able to resist asking me for money. Though he did suggest to me that I read certain parts of the Quran (because they were so “cool”) or that if I had any questions about Islam, I could call him any time, he still respected the fact that I was not a Muslim and thus, not part of their family and should be treated instead as a friend until I make the decision on my own time to join their family. That, I think, is a much better attitude to take towards religion. Anyways, like I said, it was sometime uncomfortable but in general a good experience and I developed a lot of lesson plans for the class that I can use for other English tutoring jobs in the future.
In June, Anne and I finally got around to visiting my family here in Germany for a few days. It was the first time Anne had ever met them and we had a blast. We slept in my Onkel Norbet and Tante Isolde’s camper in the driveway which was pretty nostalgic of vacations as a kid. We also got to swim in their pool and we took a few trips which were really fun. First we went to a park where there were a bunch of lakes and swamps and tons of wildlife to observe. Another day we drove over to Xanten, one of the oldest cities in Germany. It was founded by the Romans and just next to the present-day downtown, there’s a huge open-air museum built on top of the Roman ruins.
There is a reconstructed amphitheatre, a temple, traditional houses, baths, city wall and other buildings, as well as the actual foundations of many Roman buildings and several excavation sights. For me, as a history geek, it was like I had found heaven. This place was huge, too: pretty much the exact same size as the original city…they claimed to be the largest open-air museum in Europe. We also went to my Onkel Freddie’s birthday party and got to see all the rest of my family, including my cousin, Yvonne’s new baby so it was a great mini-vacation.We also took a few trips with Anne’s dad around their neck of the woods. A history teacher himself, he loves to show me all sorts of old traditional German things. We went to another open-air museum where there are a bunch of reassembled old farm houses and other various buildings such as school houses and mills and stuff. The buildings were taken from all over the state (a few even from Dortmund or from Anne’s hometown, Neuenheerse) and reassembled on site there to make a traditional village from the 19th century. We also went to the Herrmann’s Denkmal (Arminius Memorial) which was really cool.
Arminius was a German in the Roman army that defected and united a few Germanic tribes and led them in battle against General Varus. The Germans used their knowledge of the forest where the battle took place and slaughtered two full Roman legions. The battle was so catastrophic for the Romans that the Emperor called off all of the campaigns attempting to push further east of the Rhine River into Germania. Arminius (Herrmann) is considered a kind of national hero to the Germans who kept them from being Romanized like the rest of Europe (with the exception of Scandinavia). I also went on a day trip with her and her parents to the city of Weimar which is a really old, historical city where the Weimar Republic was founded. It’s also the home to Goethe and Schiller. During the World War, it was sparred from the allied bombs so many of the old buildings are still in tact which was new for me in Germany. Up on the side of a mountain in the Thüringer Wald (Thüring Forest) is Buchenwald, the concentration camp liberated by the Americans in 1945. It was my first time at a concentration camp and quite an experience for me. Such an eerie, indescribable feeling that I think everyone should experience at least once. The museum set up there was really well-done too and provided tons of information about the tiniest little details from the camp which has a really intricate history as it was one of the first ones used and was almost exclusively for political prisoners. It eventually housed the Jews and other groups targeted by the Third Reich and just before the American troops arrived a group of prisoners revolted and took control of the camp, essentially liberating themselves. After the war was over, the camp was used by Soviet officials as a prison for the political opposition to the communist East German government. Today, many of the buildings have been torn down but the feeling is definitely still there on that bald overlooking the city. Like I said: it’s a very unique feeling that’s incomparable to anything else I’ve ever felt and it’s difficult to do it justice here in words so I would just suggest you visit a concentration camp whenever you get the chance.
The semester started out pretty difficult for me but it got easier because I stopped going to a couple courses…the story is kind of a long, aggravating one but I’m almost over it so I’ll try to just summarize really quick. To become a teacher here you must study two subjects (for me it’s English and History), plus you must take education classes (like I’d already done at Western but had to redo because the education system here it “too different”) as well as also doing a basic studium in either German or Math. I chose German, knowing full-well that I can’t do math. So I had a few German courses this past semester along with my English and education courses (history was still being a pain in the ass). Well I found out about half-way through the semester that Dortmund was going to be introducing a brand new studium for education starting in the winter semester and history would finally be offered again: Halle-fuckin-leula. But that wasn’t all: in the new studium, you don’t have to do the German or Math any more. So I dropped my German courses thinking I wouldn’t need them. My life got much easier and the future looked great. I sorted everything out with the history professors about getting my history stuff from Western recognized and applied for the new studium for the next semester. Two fucking days before the deadline to register for the new semester (which happened to be my birthday) the university just decides to drop history from the programme. I talked to my contact in the history department and he was legitimately pissed; the uni didn’t even inform them before hand and to this day, still haven’t given an explanation as to why they decided to do that. He said about 800 students had registered for history and the uni basically just fucked us all over, not to mention the department which had hired extra teachers in preparation for the next semester. He said I should sue the school because I could probably win the case but as much as he’d like to help me, they couldn’t finance the court fees. So I just said fuck it; I’m used to the uni pulling this bullshit with me by now anyway. So the next step was to see if I could somehow continue my studies in Dortmund and do the history courses at Essen and have them recognized here. I just found out a couple weeks ago that that won’t work so the end effect of all this run around bullshit that I’ve had to deal with at the TU Dortmund is that I’m transferring completely to the University of Essen-Duisburg staring in the summer semester next year (it was unfortunately too late to transfer for this semester…plus I would have to move out of my room—which I just moved into—since it’s a student dorm). So I learned my lesson the hard way and I’m here to offer this piece of advice to any former exchange students of the TU Dortmund who have aspirations of one day returning to Germany as I did: DO NOT STUDY AT THE TU DORTMUND! Seriously they are all sorts of fucked-up and no one has any idea how to do anything. Dealing with the people in Essen just a few times, I’m already sure that they are 100 times more competent and organized than the people in Dortmund and way more friendly and helpful and they couldn’t believe my story. If you want to stay around the general area, check out the Uni at Essen-Duisburg…Bochum is ok too but the campus is really boring (I heard they have the highest suicide percentage of students in Germany)…the plus side of Bochum is that it’s a really cool city though so don’t rule out the uni just because everything on campus is made of concrete and looks symmetrical. Soest is also not far from here. Sam studies there at the Fachshochschule and he’s really happy with it. His entire studium is in English, too.
Yeah so you might have caught that my hopes and dreams of finally having everything squared away basically imploded right before my eyes just before my birthday. That sucked. The night of my birthday was also (kind of) disastrous… Me a few girls decided to go to Düsseldorf to see Harry Potter in English. What should have been a short ride there and back turned out to be a long and stressful trip. Just past Krefeld, a stray lighting bolt (there was some wicked wind that evening but no rain really) hit something important and our train lost power. We waited in the train for a good while as the conductor kept explaining the situation to us and said he had no idea how long it would take. The incredible bad luck was that we had just passed the Krefeld main station where all the trains stop. We were now at some rinky-dink station where only our train stopped. Had we been in Krefeld, we could have just gotten on another train and still made it to Düsseldorf on time. But instead, after waiting for a good 45 minutes when the conductor finally told us it would definitely be another hour yet minimum before we were up and running again, we had to walk to some bus stop and then all cram onto a bus (all of the passengers from the powerless train). We took the bus to a subway station where we could have taken a line to Krefeld and then gotten on a train back to Dortmund, or we could have taken a line to Düsseldorf (because those two cities have the same subway net) and go to the later showing of the movie. We decided for the latter since we were all starving and figured we could get a bite to eat while waiting for the movie to start. What we didn’t know is that the subway line from Krefeld to Düsseldorf wasn’t really as close as we expected which leads me to question whey they are even connected in the first place…Basically we rode the subway for about 40 minutes and finally got to Düsseldorf. We went straight to the theatre and bought our tickets and then almost immediately after got a text that one of the American guys was wanting to meet up in Dortmund for drinks because he was leaving the very next day. So we could have just went home and had a fun night and got to see him one last time but we had already bought the tickets so we had to say a sad goodbye on the phone. At least the dinner was nice and the film was worth it. We almost were late to that one though, too because the subway from the restaurant to the movie was really late for whatever reason. The movie got out at about 10 and we should have been back in Dortmund by just past 11 but at the main station in Düsseldorf, I was on the phone and not paying attention, got into the wrong train. In my defense, I often go East to Neuenheerse with Anne and have to change trains once on that stretch. On the way home, when I switch to the second train, regardless of if it’s in Paderborn, Soest or Hamm, it’s always the train to Aachen. I hardly ever go west of Dortmund any more and didn’t stop to think that the Aachen train from Düsseldorf is already long-past Dortmund and so we headed towards Köln and none of us noticed it until the second stop which was something Leverkusen (a small city near Köln). We tried to get off there but weren’t fast enough. So we got off at the next one (Köln Mühlheim) which I assumed was going to be an alright station because we were already within the city limits of Köln. But instead it’s just this really small station with nothing but a ticket machine and a vending machine. And it was pretty damn cold with that wind still whipping (I’m not even gonna get into how shit our summer has been here but two words should give you the idea: jacket weather). We had to wait almost a full hour there with nothing to do but buy snacks from the machine and tell funny stories to distract ourselves from the cold. We got the train which was a regional train which means it doesn’t stop at the small stations and thus travels faster—good news. Then just before Düsseldorf, we realized that it still probably wasn’t going to get back to Dortmund before midnight and by then the S-Bahn (the small train that runs from the main station to the uni) wouldn’t be running any more. So in Düsseldorf we got off again and switched to the S-Bahn headed to Dortmund since it would stop at the uni on the way there. But it stopped, of course, at every other small station between Düsseldorf and Dortmund along the way. We didn’t get home until after 1 and it was about then that I remembered that I had promised to read over a friend of mine’s English essay for him and to send the corrections so that he would have it to turn in to class the next morning. So I spent the first couple hours of my birthday fighting sleep on the train and then correcting an essay and I didn’t get to bed until at least 2. I was pretty worn out the next day but Anne had a nice birthday surprise for me. She made dinner and we had drinks and watched a movie that she had got me that takes place in Cambodia (she knows how much I want to visit). It was pretty cool because it’s a German/English movie so it doesn’t matter what language you watch it in, they speak both languages through out…the only difference is whether the German is translated to English in the subtitles or vice-versa. The Cambodian isn’t translated, I guess so that you get the feeling of what it’s like to be in a foreign country. It was pretty good. She also got me the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die and marked special things and gave me vouchers for certain things like a gondola ride in Venice or breakfast in Paris or a trolley ride in San Francisco. I thought it was sweet and a really good idea…the perfect gift for me! She also bought me a computer game to play knowing that she would be really busy in July, August and September working on her master’s thesis and that it would give me something to do when I’m over at her place and she’s working. Her parents also gave me a 20€ gift card to a book store and a really nice world atlas which has all sorts of interesting information in it and really cool maps that aren’t just the typical physical or political. It’s really cool, there are maps for climate, religion, tourism, transportation, historical origins, school test scores, it’s crazy how much is in this one book, I really like it and will definitely get a lot of use out of it as a teacher.
Speaking of being a teacher, I had one of the hardest tests I’ve ever taken back in July. It was the introduction course to the education programme and I guess it’s designed to weed out the bad students because it’s notoriously hard. If you fail it (which 50% of the students do), you only have two other chances to take it. If you can’t pass it, you can never become a teacher in Germany. Oh yeah, and you only have 30 minutes to take it. It was about 20 questions and all in German. I studied my ass off for it with a buddy of mine, Johannes, a couple days before and we both passed it. That was a huge weight off my shoulders. I also studied a few days with another friend, Olaf (the guy whose essay I corrected) for an English class we had together. He had already failed it once and said it was pretty hard. We studied a lot for it as well and we both got A’s on it.
After the semester was over I relaxed for about a week then a professor got in contact with me about helping her out with her dissertation. If any of the former exchange students remember Veronika Timpe, she was the professor. She studies English and was basically analyzing how Germans interact with American slang. So I helped her out as a native-speaker. Basically what I did was sit in the computer lab downstairs in the main building on campus and have Skype conversations with dozens of German students. They were pretending to be exchange students in the US and I was one of their classmates. With each student I had two conversations, one in which I invited them to come to a party and challenged them to a game of beer pong (I talked to over 100 students and I think only 3 of them knew what beer pong was?!), and one in which I invited them back to my family for Thanksgiving break but tried to get them to skip class on the Thursday and Friday before so we could go to my high school’s homecoming festivities. It was pretty cool work and she paid me for doing it. Since the semester was over, the building was completely empty and it was kinda weird to experience it like that. There was also a lot of downtime in between the calls so I did a lot of stuff online that week including making a Google + account and uploading a lot of pictures to an album that I really went over board on the details with. If you wanna check it out, please do so, there are photos of all the cool stuff I’ve seen since I’ve been here with detailed descriptions for all of them and a link to the Wikipedia page about whatever it is in the picture.
I found some time to watch a few movies over the summer. I finally watched the Life Aquatic. I’m a huge Bill Murry fan (my sister will remember how I freaked out at the cameo in Zombieland…by far the best cameo ever) and I’ve always liked Wes Anderson films so I dunno why I’d just never watched it before. But I really liked it and I’m glad to have finally seen it. I watched Pulp Fiction in German with a friend because he wanted to show me Bruce Willis’ synchronized voice. Germany was the first country to start synchronizing films…actually under the Nazis. And today they are still by far the best country at it. They even have a really cool deal set up with most major actors so that the same voice actor does all the movies that his English-speaking counterpart does. Kinda sucks for the voice actor because they don’t get to choose their films, but sometimes they do real acting jobs, too…that kinda throws everyone off though when all of a sudden there’s some blonde chick in a German TV show and everyone recognizes her voice as Jennifer Garner’s. Well Bruce Willis’ voice in German was pretty good and made Butch seem so much cooler. Sam Jackson’s on the other hand left a lot to be desired. And something about a guy yelling “Sieht er aus wie eine Schlampe?!” just doesn’t strike you the same way. Similar disappointment came when I watched Hang Over 2. Having really liked the first one and knowing that the sequel takes place in Thailand, I was really hoping for the best from that movie. It delivered but after watching it (in German), I couldn’t help but feeling that I missed so much of the real comedy despite being fluent enough to understand movies here no problem. For instance: “Dämon” and “Samen” just don’t rhyme the way “Demon” and “Semen” do and I completely misunderstood the joke as an attempt at random interjection of humor. I saw the new Planet of the Apes film and was really impressed. The CGI was fantastic and the storyline was pretty good. I especially liked the nostalgic tribute to the old films through the character names and the dialogue. Once again, I would have rather heard those infamous lines spoken in English so that it would have the full effect of stirring up memories of Chuck Heston hanging from a net or being sprayed against a wall with a fire hose, but I have seen the original in German as well…plus, somehow, I just seriously doubt that that Draco Malfoy-wannabe zookeeper had what it takes to do those lines justice. Another movie that I really, really liked was Due Date. I watched it in English and then again with Anne in German.
I moved into a new apartment at the beginning of August. I’m in Emil-Figge 37 and it’s pretty cool. It’s quite a bit further away from the main campus (library, train station, Mensa, grocery store and all that) but it’s still only about a 15 minute (maximum) walk to all of that and it’s about a five minute walk to a spot where two bus routes merge for a small stretch meaning I have lots of options for buses. The building is a little nicer/newer and my room, though slightly smaller, is much cleaner and I like it a lot. I even have curtains finally! It’s in the corner of the building so I have a corner window which is really cool and I can see the stadium from it. The only bad thing is that it’s on the 4th (American 5th) floor and there’s no elevator so moving was fucking terrible. I essentially carried five suitcases upstairs because I had to unload them and reload them a couple times to get everything up. I’m really not looking forward to moving again next year but I’m gonna have to because I won’t be allowed to live in the student dorms after I switch from the uni here to the one in Essen. But I guess that won’t be so bad and Anne and I will probably find an apartment together in the city somewhere. From Dortmund, you can get to the uni in Essen in just over 20 minutes so the commute won’t be a problem, I don’t think.
During the last week of July, as I was doing those Skype conversations, I finally met with the organizer of the summer camp in Unna. I had met with the woman in charge of the project back in June when I got the job (I had had breakfast with her in Dortmund the morning of the Meisterfeier). She’s really nice and comes from München (Munich). The company, Saphairos, is based out of Bayern (Bavaria) but there are a few satellite camps elsewhere in Germany such as Frankfurt and Unna. The woman in charge of the Unna camp is called Sinead and is from Ireland. Sam and I met her at the Mensa and we talked about how the camp was going to be organized. Normally, it would be at this big estate owned by a guy called Zurbrüggen. But it was over-booked for this summer so we found another place…essentially Zurbrüggen found it for us. He’s a really great guy. Super rich but really nice. He sponsors the Unna camp basically so that his kids can go to it but he’s also really involved with it for that reason, too. Unna is a relatively small town just outside of Dortmund but there’s a pretty fancy horse riding facility there where his children take riding lessons and where he keeps his horses. So we rented out a couple of rooms upstairs for the three weeks to do the camp. Looking back, it probably was a bad decision and we definitely won’t be going back there next year. The facility was really nice but the staff was really snobby and unfriendly. The kids were loud the whole time despite our efforts to control them and everyone was getting pissed off because they claimed the kids were scaring the horses or they were too loud in the restaurant during lunch and they were losing customers. We were all of the opinion, however, that they should have seen that coming when they agreed to host a summer camp for 30 plus small children each week. And they definitely exaggerated and just liked to complain in general. One day there was a group of children there taking riding lessons and they were screaming their heads off the entire time and the staff all thought it was adorable (because they are friends with their rich parents and are getting paid butt-loads for the riding lessons instead of just renting out rooms). Anyways, that’s a long and stressful story that I might touch on again in a minute but I’d rather not. So Sam and I and another couple from London who were going to be working with us met Sinead to talk about the camp. The theme was “Around the World” and basically, we were told that we could do just about whatever we wanted. The info packet with materials from the camp headquarters in München was pretty pathetic: just some pictures for kids to color and mazes and stuff and a lot of texts that were probably too advanced for the majority of the kids. Plus there was only stuff on a few countries/continents, namely: Africa, China, Mexico, Australia and the United States. As a teacher with a passion for geography and world cultures, I wanted to teach these kids everything there is to know about the world. I just had to make sure to incorporate a lot of arts-and-crafts-type things and interesting/fun things for kids so that they wouldn’t feel like they were in school. Each week, there would be a new group of kids and Sinead, Sam and I would each have our own class. My kids were a little older (10-12-years-old) compared to the others (7-9) so I figured they would really be able to grasp the information I wanted to present to them about the world. So I broke up the week into continents…on Monday, we would talk about Europe, Tuesday was Asia, Wednesday was Africa, on Thursday we would learn about both Latin America (South America plus Mexico and Central America) and Oceania and Friday we would finish with North America and a review quiz game. What I basically did was find a bunch of pictures online and saved them all to a USB stick, knowing that there would be a laptop and a projector from Zurbrüggen there for me to use. But as a perfectionist, I spent a lot of time doing this and making sure to find the exactly-fitting pictures. By Sunday night, I had only collected pictures from Europe, Asia and Africa. So I went to the camp Monday morning pretty much with no plan. I also had no idea how to get there but I met Sam on the train and we managed to find it and get there pretty early actually. I spent most of the day just showing the kids pictures from the different countries in Europe and trying to get them to talk about them but they did get kinda bored. So we made some pinwheels to represent the windmills in the Netherlands that we talked about and that held them off until lunchtime. After lunch, it became clear to all three of us (especially Sinead and Sam, who had the smaller children) that we couldn’t just go back up to the room and continue because the kids all had way too much energy that they needed to get rid of. Zurbrüggen had told us the facility had a lot of places on the grounds where the kids could play outside so we went searching for a good spot but they were hard to come by. Plus we had to walk by the horse stables and all of the kids wanted to pet the horses and it took forever to convince them to keep walking. Eventually, we did find a spot that was sorta ok but it was really hot that day and there was no shade there. So we thought of some games to play with the kids for about 40 minutes or so and then we had to go back in because the sun was just pretty unbearable. When I got home that day, I immediately went to work using the pictures for Asia to make a PowerPoint. I knew that would flow a lot smoother than having to find pictures in individual folders (there were a lot of pictures…for Europe, I had individual folders for the following countries/regions: Germany, Austra & Switzerland, the Netherlands & Belgium, France, the UK & Ireland, Scandinavia, Russia, Eastern Europe, Hungary/Romania/Bulgaria, the Balkans, Italy, and Spain & Portugal). Plus, I’m pretty handy with PowerPoint and I knew I could make it interesting by doing little things like adding trivia questions to certain slides. That took way longer than expected…probably because my laptop is a dinosaur and as slow as shit. I couldn’t use Anne’s laptop though because she was writing her master’s thesis on it and the computers in the library don’t have PowerPoint. During the three weeks of the camp, I slept at Anne’s place since it was much easier for me to get to Unna in the mornings (still had to get up at 6:30 though). So each night, after she had called it a day for working on her stuff, I took the laptop and disappeared into the kitchen to work on the PowerPoint for the next day’s lesson. I think the earliest I went to bed that first week was 2:00AM and the on Thursday, after going to Anne’s neighbour’s birthday party for a little bit, I worked until past 3:00. It was definitely one of the most stressful weeks of my life but the camp was so much fun, it definitely made it worth it. My group that first week all bonded really quickly and by Wednesday we were all having a great time each day learning and having fun. For Africa, we molded animals out of clay and a lot of the kids used the left-over clay and made me things.
We played tag that day and they all beat the crap out of me. The last day was kinda stressful with the clean-up and having to deal with the people from the riding center coming in and out of the rooms to check them. But Jackie came over from Zurbrüggen’s once he was done there and helped us. Carl also came to pick up Amanda that day so we got to see him again. He’s a great guy and it was difficult to see him in the leg-cast because he’s so tall and powerful-looking. He’s in the musical Starlight Express in Bochum where the actors all skate around on roller skates. Jackie then drove us to the train station in his car so we didn’t have to wait on the taxi bus to pick us up that day.The weekend following and the next week, I spent in Neuenheerse with Anne just relaxing finally after all the chaos and stress from the first three weeks of August. But I learned that teaching little kids isn’t as bad as I had expected and at times was actually a lot of fun. I bought a new book and started reading it. I also found time to e-mail a lot of people that I had been ignoring during the whole camp just because I seriously had no time to think about anything else and was way too stressed to even try. Anne and I went to Paderborn for breakfast one day which was delicious and we went to see the movies another night.
Immediately after the camp was over Sam moved to Hamburg but during that last week he introduced me to his student, a nice woman from Poland whom he gave English lessons to. She works for the UN here in Dortmund and we set something up so that I can continue her lessons in business English which has gone really well so far and is also providing a little income for me. Right now though, I have my hopes up for a new job that begins in October. It’s in a small suburb of Dortmund where a few years ago, the kids started to cause a real mess in the neighborhood with drugs and violence and stuff. So the school there started a programme in which the kids are allowed to come into the basement of the school from 9 to 12 on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. It’s set up really cool; they’ve got pool tables, ping-pong tables, foosball tables, a kitchen, a wood shop and pottery wheel, a recording studio, internet and surround sound, a dance floor, hundreds of board games, a bar, television, a stage for concerts, you name it… Basically the kids are allowed to do whatever they want there as long as it’s not illegal. So it’s only for kids 16 and older since they are allowed to drink. The main reason it’s there is to get the kids off the streets and give them good role models. There’s usually two people working there and two that walk around the neighborhood to try and convince those hanging out on the street corners to come by instead of abusing whatever illegal substance they have. I went over there a couple times to meet the people working there and check out what it’s like and it’s really cool. The kids aren’t problematic at all and I think I would really enjoy working there. It also pays better than the pizzeria and I wouldn’t have to work every single weekend which is a really good deal so I’m gonna be starting there in October and I hope it works out. As I was there the last time, it had gotten really slow and there were only two kids. Me and another one of the guys working there were playing pool when all of a sudden the table started shaking enough to roll the balls around and one sitting on the edge of a pocket actually fell in. We checked the internet and apparently there was a small earthquake on the Dutch-German border that could be felt as far away as London. That was really odd since there’s not a fault line anywhere near here. There is a lot of mining in the area though so that might have had something to do with it. At any rate, it was the strongest earthquake I’ve ever experienced.
I mentioned Anne’s parents having given me a voucher for a BVB game for Christmas last year…we tried to get tickets for a few games last season but they were all sold out. We also tried to get tickets to see them play Hertha Berlin last weekend but that also didn’t work out (for the better since they lost 1:2). Well somehow, they amazingly managed to score tickets to the coolest game I could have imagined and I went with Anne’s sister, who is also a big BVB fan, on Tuesday. Because Dortmund won the Bundesliga last season, they automatically qualified for the Champions League. For the first round group stage they got sorted into a group with Arsenal, my second favourite football club on Earth. It’s been a while since Dortmund has played in the Champions League (though the won it in 1997) and the first game in it this season was a home game against Arsenal. And that’s exactly where I was on Tuesday. It was so unbelievable. The stadium was sold out and decorated with Champions League stuff since the game was being televised world-wide. All of the scoring and statistics were done in English because it was an official UEFA game and the iconic music was played in the stadium. I finally got to see a block of English football fans singing which was pretty cool and the game was really good, too. Dortmund played better the whole time but a mistake late in the first half gave Arsenal a go-ahead goal. I think that really sucked a lot a wind from their sails because they started the second half kinda weak…though Arsenal weren’t much better. It wasn’t until later in that game after we subbed in all of our reserves that Dortmund began to up the tempo and you could see the Londoners beginning to falter. BVB scored the equalizer off a rebound from a free kick really late in the game and the stadium erupted. The renewed energy of the crowd really lit a fire under the BVB players and for the last five minutes Arsenal played their hearts out just to keep from losing the match. Dortmund had three solid scoring chances in those last minutes, one of which looked like a goal for sure but Arsenal got lucky. After the 1:1, Dortmund kept the ball on Arsenal’s half of the pitch for the remainder of the match and showed that they really do mean business in the Champions League this year (something a lot of people were speculating about since they are such a young team). It would have been nice to see a win but a 1:1 draw between my two favourite teams is pretty perfect enough as is, if you ask me. I got to see some great football and had a really good time at the stadium.
Last week I was also lucky enough to land two extra jobs. One is at a school in Hombruch, a really nice suburb of Dortmund that’s near the university. Once a week I’ll be there to watch the kids during their break after school and then to help them with their homework. The school is a really nice Gymnasium and the kids are so much better behaved compared to the boys I teach hockey to at the Hauptschule. Last week, they didn’t have homework so I spent the whole time playing football with the boys and looking for bugs with the girls. At the end, they had worn me out with the football game (our team was playing with 3 guys against 5 because they thought that would be fair since I’m bigger) so we made paper airplanes and I answered questions about America. I also have been twice now to Wattenscheid, a small city just past Bochum to give private English lessons. The kid is in the 8th grade and her mom got my number from a friend whose kid was at the summer camp in Unna. She said her daughter needed help in English because they weren’t happy with her grades. She also has a thick Russian accent so I’m not expecting much…I got there though to find out that she’s really nice and her daughter speaks perfect German and her English is really good as well. I asked her what grade she has in English and she said B-. So I we just go over her text book together and speak in English the whole time…she understands everything and she’s even been to New York before (the current unit they are working on in school is about NYC) so I can’t understand why she’s not the best in her class but if her mom says she needs help then I guess I’ll help. It’s a bit of a ride out there from Dortmund but right now it’s worth it for the money. I’ll see how much time I have once the new semester starts in October though.
Yesterday, I managed to convince Anne to come with me to an exhibit at the U-Turm Museum in the city. The U-Turm (U-Tower) is the most iconic building in Dortmund. It’s a large brick building in downtown near the Haubtbahnhof (Main Train Station) and on top of it is a large, illuminated letter U that is trimmed in gold.
The U originally stood for the Union Brauerei (Union Brewery) which has since shut down. Last year, the Ruhrgebiet (the area around the Ruhr River) was the Kulturhauptstadt Europas 2011 (European Capital of Culture for 2011). The Ruhrgebiet is seen by many as the largest city in Europe. It’s a bunch of really closely-lying cities including Duisburg, Mülheim, Oberhausen, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Wattenscheid, Bochum, Witten, Hagen and Dortmund. If you look at a satellite image of Europe at night, the Ruhrgebiet is easily the biggest patch of solid light on the map. It is known for it’s industry culture…coal and steel works of the 60s and 70s. Like the Great Lakes Region of the US, the industry is pretty much dead and a couple of years ago, many of these cities looked were as a mess as Detroit or Pittsburgh. But in preparation for being the Kulturhauptstadt, all the cities started to fix up a lot of stuff and infused new technology into the old industrial culture in a way that most thought was going to be impossible but actually turned out to be a revolutionary success. There were a bunch of new museums created to provide attractions for the millions of tourists coming from all around the world to visit last year. The biggest project Dortmund worked on was renovating the U-Turm and turning it into a cultural museum. They added glass windows around the upper floors that function just like any other windows…when you look out of them, you don’t notice anything different…but from the outside they are TV screens. Images are displayed directly onto the glass and it makes the whole top of the tower look like a giant TV screen. 
I’d only been in it once on a “museums night” in which there were a lot of special events going on in the museums in the city and they were open all night long. But each couple of months a new exhibit comes to the U-Turm because two of the floors are for temporary exhibits. Currently, there is one on Japanese art which I was interested in. We went there not knowing that there were two: One about Anime and one about Japanese art in media. We decided to go to the media exhibit but then found out that students can get into the Anime exhibit for free…and we only needed to pay 3€ instead of 5€ for the other. It was really cool in both exhibits but especially the media one up on the top floor. There was a lot of stuff to see and also to try out…hands-on electronic gadget-type stuff…even video games. I had a really good time and must have been there a few hours. Anne eventually got bored and went home but I stayed behind and made sure I spent a few minutes at everything and tried everything out. It was also virtually empty there which made it a cool atmosphere to not feel like I’m being rushed or preventing anybody from trying something or standing in someone’s way. I just wish I would have picked up a programme earlier to find out that they’re also showing movies there periodically throughout the month. I already missed Ponyo and on Thursday they’re gonna be showing Ghost in the Shell but I’m not sure if I’m gonna spend the money again to go back just for the movie.That brings you all the way up to date with what’s been going on up until today. So I’m gonna end this really long entry with the wish that I hope you all are doing well. Thank you for reading this and write me a comment if you find the time. Peace.
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