Kulturelle Erfahrungen

There were English students on the bus today. They have the greatest accent in all the world.

Runners-up: the Swiss. French and Italian accents are over-rated.

Today is Dienstag, the day some of us (but, in actuality, only I) have devoted to exclusive use of the German language.

Which gives you an idea of how often we usually speak German. We're lazy, and today we have our penance.

(Dornerstag is, of course, the most enjoyable theme-day. Hurrah for Turkish immigants!)

I probably shouldn't be blogging, certainly not in English, but I'm going to Oktoberfest this weekend and Berlin next week so I felt I should post something. Plus I wanted to gush about seeing the English students.

I think school has just started at Lawrence- at the very least, I've started getting emails from the Center For Teaching and Learning again, which means that some one should be there by now.

I can see it now… the parade of station wagons, the cock-sure freshmen, the frisbee games on the green, Jonas and Jubb hauling that huge couch up the stairs to our quad…

Well, class is starting again. Later.

The Freiburg Bubble
and
The Wonders of Socialism

Ah, Freiburg.

This is a city built on ideas; there are no major factories, and the biggest employer is the University. This is, I suppose, not "really" Germany in a sense, in the same way that my college back home is not "really" part of the real world.

That being said, it almost goes without saying that I love it here. I've never really lived in a college town (Appleton is not a college town, it's a paper-mill town with a college somewhere nearby. Here, more than 10% of the town's 200,000 inhabitants are college students) and it's really a totally different experience.

There's something cool going on every night and dozens of great places to go to. For someone used to Brainerd's nightly Perkins-or-the-theater dilemma, it's a wonderful sort of culture shock. I still know almost no Germans, but I keep telling myself that all that will change in Oktober when their semenster officially begins.

The last hour and half of each class is focused on Freiburg; we read texts about the town and get recommendations from our teacher, who hails from one of the suburbs. I'm slowing starting to convince myself that I'm not a tourist.

Every so few days our prof lets us out of class early and takes us on a tour of the town. Friday we went to the Green quarter (Freiburg is one of the greenest, most liberal cities in all of Germany) and saw the alternative cafe and the alternative bookstore and the commune.

I'm going back to the bookstore/cafe sometime this week to see if it's the kind of place I should study. It's a Cafe Kafka sort of joint, where everyone wears dark colors and talks about the 70s. I'm (to borrow a word Graham so aptly used) a pseudointellectual at best, but the idea of reading in a nice cafe is tempting enough to forget my predudices against such places and people.

Talking to the guy who owns the bookstore co-op made me a little more socialist. In Germany, every bookstore has to charge the same price for books, which means that there are still little bookstores on every corner and no mammoth Barnes and Noble selling Harry Potter for 40% below list. I like Barnes and Noble, but this quaint, inefficient system seems so much better.

Hmm… everyone has verschwuden. I think I'm late for class. Later.

�– and Z

German keyboards are strange. For one thíng, they are Qwertz keyboards, not Qwerty keyboards. I've said that before. The really odd thing is that I can type "�–" and "�„" and "�œ", even if your web-browser can't understand umlauts.

I hope it can, but then again I can't always say the "�–" sound, and that's a bigger problem. At the moment, I'm struggling with "z" (pronounced "tset"), a phoneme that never occurs at the beginning of English words (though in words like "ratsalad" it's easy to say)

No word yet from Best Buy; my computer has now been in for repairs for almost three weeks.

I moved in to my WohnGemeinschaft (basically a really nice co-ed apartment for students) on Thursday. I share a kitchen and a bathroom with two GermansSwede swede, and a guy from Pakistan, but I haven't seen them around much. In fact, I've fallen disgracefully into one of foreign study's inveterate traditions: drinking with other Americans.

Every day for the next three weeks I've got a four-hour intensive-language course, which I think is pretty cool. Some intimidating polyglots in that class speak four or five languages; one American has a German girlfriend.

At least I'm not the worst person there, accent wise. The Iowan who sat next to me (an eternally-behatted Grinellian who supposedly knows our Meghan Rahn "quite well") has an accent you could harvest corn with. Ouch.

We're supposed to try and speak German outside of class as often as possible, but most of the Americans aren't hardcore enough to abandon English. I'll try, but…

I think I'll sign up symbioticboitic "tandem" program with one of the Germans from the University. Otherwise, I don't know how I'm going to become fluent in "only" four months. My WG-mates have their own lives, and little time to spend fixipronunciationiation.

In the meantime (since I have only one English book left) I've started to read Die Unendliche Geschichte (or, in English, "The Neverending Story"), a book Arno was kind enough to lend me. It's meant for people much younger than myself, which makes it easy enough to read without reaching for the dictionary every page or so.

I glossed over the fact that I would be going to school here; I need to furnish my room, buy a dictionary, get an answering-machine and all that. I already bought a rug from IKEA (that's an interesting place!); apparently as a WG-wohner I'm entitled to an extra set of sheets and a free t.v.

But I'm hungry. It's d…rner-time.

Freiburg

Arrived in Freiburg safe and sound on Thursday, fell in with some Americans seemingly at random. Just finished first half of first class. Hate old computers, will update a while later from a better one.