14 April 2008...4:47 pm
ich studiere an universität. geil.
After months of bumming around Europe and listening to my friends back home complain about their homework, my semester has officially begun. On Mondays from 10-12, I have class on Campus II, which is about a half mile away from the main buildings of Campus I. That half mile, however, is traversed on top of a mini-mountain that’s covered in mud and has crazy freezing winds.
A view from the pathways looking onto Campus I (main campus). It was really dreary and raining this morning (big surprise). If you look really really close at where the skyline meets the mountains in the background you can make out the windmills that power the entire city.
A blurry photo looking out onto the Tarforst area. I’ll try to get back up there on a nicer day to get some clearer shots of the vineyards and windmills.
The first class I had this morning was “Einführung in die Didaktik und Methodik,” which is actually an education course on how to teach German as a foreign language. I only knew one other girl in it, whose German happens to be pretty bad, so we ended up helping each other out a lot. After we were done she invited me over to her dorm so that she could cook me some authentic Korean food. I don’t know if it was just her, or if it’s their culture in general, but she was incredibly courteous and friendly to me, far beyond what I’m used to. Not only did she cook me lunch, which I’m proud to say is the first real spicy food I’ve had my entire life, but she also gave me these bangin’ socks from Korea as a gift for letting her borrow a bunch of my DVDs (for her to practice her English with).
Everything from Korea is cute.
After that I blew a few hours reading in the cafeteria and then headed off to my first Phonetics course. It was like Hooked on Phonics for college students. We basically learned how to pronounce words for two hours. Maybe after four months of mind-numbing word repetition my accent will be less “American”. As it is now, I’ll go into a store and try to talk with the shopkeepers in German and they’ll just respond to me in English because it’s obvious what my “Muttersprache” is.
Another cool thing today happened during my bus ride back down to the city. I was minding my business like usual (reading a book) when I heard someone speaking English with an American accent (I can’t get over how something so familiar can become foreign to my ears in such a short time). It turns out that this kid from Lancaster, Pennsylvania had been in Europe for eight years playing basketball on semi-pro teams, and had been living in Trier since September. I talked to him for a while about Europe, how different it is, what we missed, and then for the second time in the past month (the first being in Amsterdam, where I met this awesome kid from Oregon…which I’ll go into more detail about (hopefully) in my next post), I said goodbye to him, knowing we’d never talk/see each other again. It really made me miss the permanency and comfort of home.
To all Clarkies: Have fun at Spree Day (drink one for me). You can’t tell through the Internet, but that sentence is laced with bitterness and jealousy.
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