Week 1.5

It's already half way through week two and it feels like we are speeding through this program. However, unlike the normal semester back home, you want this one to slow down. The ability to truly absorb things has become significantly harder, possibly due to the fact that we've started to integrate ourselves into normal life. I find that every night it gets easier and easier to get home using any means of transport. My constant schedule looking and time constraints have become relaxed, I'm able to use intuition and experience to know when things will arrive and how long it'll take to get places. If I miss the train I know that the subway will be by sooner than another train would arrive and get me to my destination in some cases. 

Hilde has given her fourth German lecture class and I can see a noticeable difference in my ability to understand simple things. I know that I might not be able to learn the whole language in such a short period of time, but I can at least try to learn as much as I can. Between Hilde and my three host brothers and one host sister I've managed to learn some useful and some not so useful things. Some formal sentences and some that are definitely not. A few will get a laugh here and there and a few that I'm too afraid to say for fear of a slap. However, I'm still very excited to learn more via formal teaching and from hearing conversations. At the beginning of this program I knew nothing and now I'm able to introduce myself, ask basic questions, and order food. To me I'd call that a major improvement. 

Today is my host brother’s birthday, he turned nuenzhen (nineteen). It was strange the way I found out, and a little scary. I came home to look what was going on for dinner, only to open the door to a group of old people at the table. I seriously thought I was in the wrong house or something at first until my host brother came out. I was completely prepared to travel back into Bonn had it not been for him. I'm glad I stayed though because we had bonding time over making dinner. Somewhere along the way he decided to make pizza from scratch, so all six of us helped to make some part of it. I was tasked with cutting the fresh mozzarella, which is different from the US kind. Back home I've only ever seen it shredded, here it comes in a little water filled bag with the cheese "floating" inside. 

Class with Dr.Wasser is also very interesting, however I feel like I'm focusing too much on the Nazi information and not enough on the big picture. For example, the exploration and final use of a euthanasia program by the Nazi party. Originally it was planned for use on terminally ill and elderly who wanted a means to painlessly end their life. However, the ideas behind it were twisted into directing it at the handicap and other "inferior" people. The class is great though, Dr.Wasser is like a black hole full of knowledge, it's amazing how much information he can present. Even on the tour he guided he knew everything, or at least all the interesting things. Speaking of which, the tours have all generally been very insightful and interesting. The only exception to that would be the Beethoven house, I found it a little bit weak and boring. The instruments, of which there were relatively few, were the most notable things. Going into the tour I thought it was going to be one of the best ones because of my love of music, but sadly it might be one of the worst. I might be able to attribute it to the heat inside the building or inability to take photos, but all I know is that it was uninteresting.

Getting back to the present again, tomorrow is our first travel day out of Bonn. I'm excited to start visiting other cities. Next blog post will be probably be from Vienna on Monday, after our weekend in Munich. So in German, bis dann (until then).