schönen grünen Wald von Deutschland

Hello again! I'm sorry I haven't kept up with my blog quite as much as I should be, although I've been very busy with settling in and becoming used to my surroundings. Yesterday I think everything kicked in a little bit and I started to feel a tiny bit homesick.

My CR (Community Representative) came to visit yesterday in order to check up on how everything was going with school, my host family, etc. , and when I was driving with my host dad to go pick her up from the train station, we stopped at a local bank. For some reason, I started to realize that I don't know where anything is here. I can't even find my way around school, much less the villages! I've been so used to being familiar with everything around me because I've lived in the same town all of my life, and now all of a sudden changing gears to being unfamiliar with everything is a little unsettling. I told my CR this when I went to show her my new room, which is beautiful by the way, as everything is here, and she reassured me that in a couple months I should feel like I've lived here all of my life too. I'm definitely looking forward to that.

As I predicted, the hardest part about being in a foreign country is of course, the language. With the culture, you can easily pick up on what's going on, what to do, what not to do, and so on, because you see the same thing happening over and over again. However, with a completely new language, there are always new words that you haven't heard or haven't learned yet, and it's a lot harder to pick up what everybody's saying than what they're doing. Of course, I do learn at least twenty new words every day (whether or not I remember them is a different story), but there are still thousands of words I haven't heard yet. I do feel like I'm making progress though.

A little bit about the culture, you ask? Well, to start off, the German students like to push you out of their way in the hallways of school. Does anybody care? Nope! I always do a quick anger-check whenever one of my friends gets pushed out of the way, but whenever it happens to one of them, they always have a bright smile on their face as if nothing happened. The best example of this is on the "school bus" (it's really just a public transportation bus, which is a lot different than back home). Most of the students get off after the 6th hour (there are a total of 12 in a day that you can take, although it's rare to have all 12 filled up), and so when the bus comes, everybody screams (literally) and rushes into the bus as if there are free ipods inside. This is only because there aren't enough seats for everybody to have, but I've found it unnecessary. I've decided it best to wait outside of the screaming mass and have accepted the fact that I, indeed, will not get a seat on the bus. Alles gut.

Another thing that I find a little bit funny is that I can always tell when somebody is trying to speak to me, especially in English, because they always start their sentences out with "erhm...", or if they're speaking German to me, they'll say "erhm... Alex" with a cute German accent on my name. I love it! However, I can never, for the life of me, tell when they're speaking about me. I always try my hardest to listen in on the conversations around me and see if I can understand, but when I can't understand, I usually just stop listening and think about something else. However, if I knew that they were speaking about me, I would listen harder and try and join in. I have been very unsuccessful, if only because when they're speaking about me, they don't say my name, and they don't look at me at all, but then somebody will randomly say something like "ehrm... so today, did you want to go to so-and-so with us?". What? Where did that come from? So it turns out to be that they were speaking about me the whole time and I had no idea!

I'm debating with my host parents whether I should take a night-German class, and hopefully that might help. It seems a little expensive though. I'll let you know.

Last but not least, I wanted to share my thoughts on dreaming. I've always thought it to be really cool to dream in a different language. I hear about it all of the time, although it hasn't happened to me yet. You'd think that a little over a month of being surround by a different language, I'd be dreaming in it! But no, I dream in English, and I definitely think it sets me back in the morning. I'll go upstairs after waking up to eat breakfast, and my host mom will say something to me, and I'll just stare (tiredly, of course) and try my hardest to understand what she's saying, especially something simple like "Willst du Kaffee?" (Do you want coffee?). However, I'm still in English mode in the mornings because of my dreams! I need to get on this whole thinking and dreaming in German thing. I think it will help immensely.

I hope you've been able to learn a little more about Germany today. I will of course update you again very soon, and post some pictures of Germany and show you how beautiful it is here!

Guten Nacht!!
-Alexandra