Small Town Livin'

My internet went out as I wrote this, so it’s a bit late. I hope you don’t hate me. I still don’t have any, so I’m using my neighbors right now. Just pretend it’s Sunday, because that’s when I wrote it.

Well, I’ve had one week of my full on immersion here in Germany, and I’d have to say, I kinda like it. Speaking German all the time every day is a little bit stressful, but once you get past the fact that what’s coming out of your mouth is going to be a mess grammatically, it becomes easier and easier to just talk in order to get your point across. As far as understanding goes, I think I can feel myself actually getting better. Of course, it depends on who’s speaking to me. My host parents speak very clearly (or to me, it’s clear), as does my older host brother and his friends. The twins (my twin host brothers will from now on be referred to as “the twins”) not so much. Other people that go on my list of not being able to understand would be teenagers and people that are drunk. Both of those combined . . . yeah that’s just a mess.

Host Family

So, as I may or not mentioned before, I live primarily with a husband and wife who have kids, but they usually are living somewhere else. My host dad, Birger, is turning 50 in January and is a policeman. He works during the day most days because he has tenure and gets priority on what shifts he wants to work. His hours do vary greatly, however. Sometimes he works from early until the afternoon, other times from the afternoon until night, and occasionally he gets a day off. He loves to cook, so usually the food is good. Still never spicy enough for my tastes, but he always cooks something interesting, which I enjoy. He has a soccer team that consists of people from 16 to 18 years of age, I believe, so I’ll be ineligible once my birthday rolls around next month, but I could probably play despite that fact. They’re not exactly stringent. However, they are really good, and I. . . am awful, so I’m not sure if I want to play anyway. Germans are crazy about their soccer. He’s lived in Ebergötzen/Göttingen all his life, but loves America and wants to emigrate there some day. My host mom, Sabine, is also 48 or 49 . . . I don’t really know what she does. She does do things almost everyday, but I have yet to understand exactly what they are or if she gets paid for them. I’ll get back to you on that one. She likes to bake though. And read.

I have four host siblings in total if I’m not mistaken. I have a host brother, Marcel, who is twenty and lives in Dortmund. He’s really cool and I enjoy hanging out with him and his friends the most. He came here for the weekend to pick the twins up and drive them home (in Essen, I believe). On Friday night he came into town while I was hanging out with a small group of people (groups of people in Ebergötzen are always small), so I didn’t see him, but he apparently went immediately to a club nearby until one in the morning. Nevertheless, he slept in this loft/storage area above the kitchen and he was forced to wake up with us in the morning and ate breakfast with us, so I got to meet him then. My host dad, being German, decided to plan the whole day for us, but Marcel already had plans to grill with his friends in Ebergötzen that evening, so things didn’t really work out, which was okay with me. We went and visited his friends for a while, then headed to Göttingen, and he showed me a couple places to get good ice cream, and where one can get guys clothes the cheapest, and then we headed back to watch the soccer game that Birger was coaching. We lost, unfortunately, and it started pouring immediately after. So, although the plan was for me to go to Göttingen to visit a little festival that was going on that day, it was raining and I decided that I’d rather grill in the rain than go to a festival in the rain. Marcel and I headed over to his friend’s house (actually two of them live there in the same house) where I met three other Germans that live in Ebergötzen. One of them speaks almost perfect English, which was cool, but I still spoke German the whole time. We baked some frozen Pizza instead of grilling because of the weather and then watched some movie on TV. Afterwards it was about 11 o’clock and I was tired from watching the movie (it’s hard not to be tired after watching a movie for some reason), but Marcel still wanted to go to this club somewhere in East Germany (Dunkeldeutschland is not really that far away). I . . . was really tired so I just asked him to take me home and he went with these two other guys from town anyway. I’d have to say, I’m glad I didn’t go, because he got home at about 5 in the morning. . .

So anyway, I enjoyed meeting him and his friends this past weekend, but now he has driven home with the twins. My twin host brothers were here for the whole week, but I didn’t really do anything with them. One of them is usually on the computer and the other is watching TV. And then they switch. Not really that engaging. All of my brothers are the sons of my host dad and live (or lived) with their mother in Nordrhein-Westfalen. I have a host sister too, the daughter of my host mom, but I haven’t met her yet. I think she lives in Köln.

Cookies Apparently soft cookies are really something special here in Germany. I baked some regular chocolate chip cookies on Friday and they were all gone by Saturday night. That’s the second time I’ve baked them here, and both times I got the compliment “They taste just like the ones at Subway!” I think that’s a compliment at least. . .

Other people!

As a result, the only other Germans my age that I hung out with were the local teenagers. Some I met from coming to their soccer game and practice, and others from playing in this cheesy German band that I joined, so I suppose I’ll talk about that for a bit. On Tuesdays I play in this small ensemble that consists of a ragtag bunch of saxophones, valved trombones, a euphonium, a tuba, a trumpet, and a drum set. The director is old and can’t hear very well, and so I don’t think he can actually hear that the guy next to me is about fifty cents sharp or more all the time. But anyway, we basically just play through music from these binders, and all of it is pretty watered down. None of the parts are in F, so I’m usually playing the Bari sax part in E flat and transposing, so at least that makes it a bit more challenging. Let’s see. . . we played Pennsylvania 6-5000 (there’s nothing better than listening as all of them shout that in the middle of the piece), Puttin’ on the Ritz (something they also can’t seem to pronounce), a Johann Strauss medley, and random polka music/music that I hadn’t heard of. One piece was written by one of the valved trombone players and dedicated to the lovely town of Ebergötzen.

Anyway, it’s a small town. People my age just kind of drink on weekends, which is what I did on Friday night. I don’t really mind so much, because they never drink past their limit. One of them was visibly drunk, but he didn’t drink any more after that and he was still coherent (he just spoke so fast all the time that I couldn’t understand him). It was fun. I got to meet more people and speak more German, and it certainly beat just hanging around the house during the weekdays, because school has started and there’s nothing really for me to do yet.

Man-eating Plants and Plant-eating Cows

My internship starts next week on September the 6th. I’ll be working in a lab with a Prof. Isselstein. He works in the Graslandwissenschaft sector of the Nutzpflanzwissenschaft. So basically he works mostly with domestic animals and their diets and such. I guess I’ll be doing research under him for a while, until classes at the Uni start at the end of October. Maybe I’ll be able to work with cows. My other options were to work at the Experimental Botanical Garden or the Old Botanical Garden. In both of those internships I would simply be working as a gardner, and there wouldn’t really be much work since it’s the end of summer (coldest August I’ve ever experienced, honestly) and the plants are just kinda dying off early for the winter. So, I might still work in one of those places come spring, but I don’t really know. The Experimental Botanical Garden is really cool, they have a whole greenhouse full of carnivorous plants, which in German is fleischfressende Pflanzen and roughly translates into flesh eating plants. I think that sounds way cooler than carnivorous plants. “So, what did you do while you were in Germany?” “Oh, I worked in an experimental garden with flesh eating plants. You know, the ones that eat meat?” That would be reason enough to do the internship next spring.

Ende

Yeah, so it was a pretty slow week. Lot’s of rain, every day it rained I think, so not a lot of opportunities to go explore the Harz mountains or anything. I am going to Hungary with the soccer team in October though! I’m super excited! Later this month I’ll be able to go to the North Sea with my family for a weekend, too. Visit some friends of my host dad’s in a town near Hamburg and take a little visit of Hamburg as well. It’ll be fun, I’ll show them where my family used to live, if I can remember where it is. Which I can’t, so I’m going to look it up.

Oh, by the way, the chickens are actually our neighbors chickens. But I can still go visit them anytime I like, and talk to them or something. Y’know, to practice my German. Not that I would actually talk to chickens. . .