On Sunday, I had planned to meet up with Kalle to have brunch and then look over his English papers. He's an English major and wanted me to read over them for errors. The brunch was everything I expected for a German breakfast-ish time. They had three different types of bread, salted and unsalted butter, five kinds of jam, honey, tea, walnut butter (as opposed to peanut butter), three kinds of cheese, and some salami. Not only was there more food than I could ever imagine eating, we sat there for about two hours, dragging out the eating process for much longer than most Americans I know. After we ate with his roommate, Annika, we headed to a cafe to work on the papers. We were there for a few hours, as he had nearly thirty pages worth of stuff for me to read over. I didn't mind though, because the topic of his papers was linguistics, something in which I clearly am interested. After we finished working on his papers, we spent the rest of the day hanging out. I had my first Tatort experience with Kalle and Annika! Tatort is almost a form of religion in Germany. Tatort (which means 'crime scene') is a television crime series that has been on since 1970. It comes on every Sunday evening and each episode is 90 minutes long. Each episode takes place in a different German city than the last, so there aren't any characters that appear in every episode. Although I wasn't able to understand every single little detail, I was able to understand everything well enough to know what was taking place in each scene.
I've now had my most embarrassing experience in Germany. On Monday while in my Schiller course, my professor asked me a question about a specific detail in the text, as he normally does, and I was unable to answer. I hadn't had as much time to do my homework as usual and the section he was asking about was more difficult than most, so I was at a loss for words. To make it worse, none of my classmates helped me out and said anything. They all just sat there looking at their books, maybe because they didn't know the answer either. Regardless, my professor actually asked me if I had done my homework. That´s how bad it was. I was so embarrassed and angry at myself that it just ruined my whole day.
I completely forgot about my appointment with the foreigners office on Tuesday morning. It wasn't until I was sitting in class at 12:15pm that I remembered that my appointment was at 9:30am. I hope they aren't grumpy with me when I call to reschedule. Whoops! I was mostly bored in class on Tuesday. In Translation, we went over English grammar. We did talk about the German equivalents of the English grammar, but all of the English grammar was rather boring for me. We didn't actually end up translating anything for an entire hour and a half. My language class was also more boring than usual. We just went over our homework. Luckily, the professor is funny so the time doesn't drag on. After class, I met up with Marcella, Matt, and Niall and we went to get some cake. We ended up at schonschön (yes, it's a cafe and a club), and I had some delicious carrot cake and hot chocolate. Once we all departed, I decided to go on a walk on the Rhein and do some reading for my German Grammar class, as schonschön isn't far from the river. I ended up running into Kalle on the way, and he invited me to go play basketball with him and some of his friends, just steps away from where I had been sitting. I didn't actually play, I just ended up watching some of them play while I talked with the others: Ben, Daniel, and Marcel (all Germans, of course). They had all heard Kalle say something to me in English, so then they all tried speaking English with me too. I ended up asking them to speak German, and we mostly continued our conversation in German.
I am really enjoying this Grammar course. It's probably mostly due to the fact that the professor is awesome. He's really intense, but also funny. At one point today, he asked a girl a question and she told him that he was scaring her because of how frightening his body language was at that point. He was standing over the desk, leaning towards the students with a sour look on his face. The whole class laughed along with him. I'm learning some more vocabulary with this class, which is always what I need. It's also a good motivation to look over some old information that I used to know and no longer do. After class, Matt and I went to the ZDV to work on our Grammar homework together. We ended up sitting there for a couple of hours. He did some other homework while I worked on other miscellaneous things. Once Matt left for class, I headed to the bookstore and bought my very first German dictionary. Not German-English dictionary, just a German dictionary. For my Translation course, since I'm a native English speaker I'm only allowed to use a monolingual German dictionary. My inner nerd was very excited about this purchase. When I got back to my room, it was clear that the Hausmeister was here. He fixed my sink stopper and took the mirror on my wall. I'm also fairly certain that he vacuumed my room. If he didn't, then he decided to kick my trash around for no reason. I am a little upset about the mirror. Though it wasn't mine, it worries me that he took something out of my room without telling me that he had. He didn't even leave a slip of paper saying that he took anything. Weird.
I'm ready for classes to be done tomorrow so the weekend can begin! It feels like just yesterday was Sunday. I'm not sure how the time manages to go by so quickly.
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