A New Record!

In the past five days, I have spent more time at parties than I did during my entire five years at Miami.

Granted, this wasn't a difficult record to break; I only went to three legitimate parties at Miami, and I was an extremely reluctant guest at two of them. (For the record, party #1 was my freshman year after a gymnastics meet. I got pretty tired of dealing with drunk guys, so within a half hour of arriving, I was standing by the door with my arms crossed. Party #2 was a friend's 21st birthday party during my 1st senior year. (I spent my 21st birthday with my parents, which was actually perfectly fine: no pressure to get ridonkulously drunk!) Party #3 was also during my senior year, part 1, and it was also after a gymnastics meet. I agreed to accompany a teammate who had never been to an American party (she was a graduate student from France). She decided that the American house party scene was pretty sketchy and asked to leave after about 15 minutes.)

I'd argue that one of the best things about being in Berlin is that I live near quite a few other Fulbrighters. I probably depend on the other Americans a little too much for social outings, but it's really wonderful to have a group of friends in a new city, especially when the holidays roll around.

Two of the parties this week weren't *real* parties, but come on, I had to have a good title and lede. :)

Anyway, party #1 was the Fulbright Thanksgiving, which was hosted at the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy on Tuesday. I was less than thrilled with its organization, but it was nice to run into some people whom I hadn't seen since orientation. We showed up at 6 with food in hand, and the panel discussion began around 6:30. It lasted until somewhere around 7:15-7:30. Needless to say, I had a very lukewarm (and very small!) Thanksgiving dinner. I tried not to complain about Fulbright's tendency toward excessive speechmaking because I'm sure that Fulbright probably made a deal with the ICD in order to host it in their building and because as far as I'm concerned, I can trade a few hours of my time for 9 months in Germany, but come on: serving dinner an hour and a half after people get there was a horrible idea to begin with, and the panel discussion itself was a very shallow examination of intercultural issues in Germany. All in all, the people were very nice (I really like the researchers), but the meal was not so great.

Party #2 was on Thursday at another ETA's house, and about 20 Americans and Brits showed up. There were a few minor issues, such as the host putting the oven on the wrong setting and the turkey needing to roast for an extra two hours, but the food and people were great, and snarks about the Fulbright Thanksgiving abounded. :) I ate green bean casserole, two types of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, a meringue, and a little apple cobbler. (As a side note, several of the ETAs got Thanksgiving off because it's a national holiday in the US. I went to school like always, and the only person who wished me a happy Thanksgiving was an 8th grader! And this was after I paraded my little handprint turkey around the staff room for the two days leading up to Thanksgiving! (In the event that anyone from My Gymnasium ever finds my blog, Thanksgiving is very widely celebrated in the US. In fact, some of the ETAs argued that Thanksgiving is more important to Americans than Christmas! I'm from the edge of the Bible Belt, so that doesn't quite align with my experience, but I fully support calling a non-religious holiday the main national holiday!)

I just got back from party #3-- the first Christmas party of the year! My Gymnasium celebrates early, I guess (and no, they did not call it a winter party-- it was very explicitly a Christmas party!). It was also an incredibly LONG party-- I got there at 6:30 and didn't get home until midnight! I admit that the first hour or so was a little meh because it was so hard to hear conversations over the music, but things picked up from there. The food was very good (I had egg noodles, three types of salads, and chocolate pudding with berries for dessert), and I had a pretty long conversation with a German/French teacher. (The best part of the conversation? She spoke in English, I spoke in German, and neither of us made any attempt to switch languages.) Around 9, they broke out the karaoke, and I thought it was fascinating to hear what songs the Germans pick when they sing karaoke. Most of the songs they selected were in English, but they definitely weren't the typical things that you'd hear in the US... For example, the second song they chose was "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash. I also distinctly remember them requesting "Dancing Queen" by ABBA and "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd. On the other hand, I tried to get other people to sing "Don't Stop Believing" with me, and no one knew it! They didn't even know Journey! What the heck, Germans? You sing "Ring of Fire" but not "Don't Stop Believing?" You can't even use age as an excuse; Journey is from the same era as Pink Floyd!

Okay, end of karaoke rant, and I'm almost to the end of today's blog. I only have one more mini-party left this week; my WG is celebrating the first Sunday of Advent by finishing the decorations in the living room and eating lots of sugary food!

Funny story of the day: the hotel that hosted My Gymnasium's Christmas party is located one U-Bahn stop away from school. It should not have been difficult to get there. However, yours truly was spacing out to an extreme degree when getting on and off trains (I nearly wrote "einsteiging and umsteiging"-- thanks, Denglish) and caught the wrong train not once, but twice! Instead of switching lines after one stop, I plopped myself down and daydreamed... until I looked up and discovered that I was heading in the direction of Korean class. Oops. I ran off the train and went back two stations, where I got on a train that was going south. The hotel was 12 stations north. I got there... eventually.

Hope all of the American readers had a lovely Thanksgiving! :)

Teaching Post-Miami: Part Two

I've hinted a few times that I returned to the US over fall break and had had a few interviews... and I'm happy to write that I just committed to Teach For America as a member of the 2011 corps!

I probably will not continue this blog once I start TFA because I'm totally identifiable (although there is at least one other Berlin Fulbrighter who is doing TFA next year!), but I do plan to write a few posts about the application process and other TFA-related thoughts between now and then. :)

The latest My Gymnasium story: I had another run-in with German bluntness today. I was sitting in the teacher's room, and a teacher whom I had never met or seen walked up to me. She said, "Oh, I recognize you from the website! But you're much prettier in person than I had expected from your picture." Um, thanks, I guess? It's better than being much uglier than my picture, right?

Edited to add another My Gymnasium story: on a test, a student declared that he is a "terist" and needs information about the most popular tourist attractions in New York. I might have to do a quick spelling and pronunciation lesson so that none of my students get detained if they ever visit the US...

Trip #2: Bremen

I think I mentioned Trip #1: Indianapolis at one point, but my weekend trip to Bremen was my first trip in or close to Europe.

I have a list of places that I want to visit this year, and Bremen was pretty high on my list. I knew that Bremen was one of the three city-states and had heard of the Stadtmusikanten (town musicians), but that was about the extent of my knowledge of the town. It turns out that J, one of my Berlin Fulbright friends, has a German friend in Bremen, and I tagged along with her.

Really, the only bad thing was that I had to wake up around 5:30 to get to the train, and I was up until 1:00 talking to my parents on Skype. I tried to sleep on the train, but there was a little girl with a piercing, obnoxious voice that narrated every event that was happening on the train. If you've ever seen the Youtube video "Kittens Inspired by Kittens," it was that voice but in German. I made it to Bremen on time and very, very sleep deprived.

F (J's German friend) gave us a walking tour of Bremen, and we hit the main sites: Die Sogestrasse, die Gedaechtniskapelle, die Stadtmusikanten (of course), Roland, and a Glockenspiel. By then, we were hungry and ready for food, so we stopped at a cafe and ate. It was so comfy and warm, and I was totally falling asleep over dinner. Oops!

We walked around a little more after getting food, and I convinced F to take us to the windmill, even though our legs were about to fall off. It turns out that a few of F's friends had driven to Bremen, so we packed into their car (breaking several laws, I'm pretty sure), where I promptly fell asleep on F's shoulder. (My only quote that made it onto a gymnastics t-shirt was, "I could drive, but I'm slightly narcoleptic," which pretty much sums up my sleeping habits in moving vehicles.)

F attends a private German college, where the main language is actually English. When we got back, we had a few minutes to relax (the guys took showers; I slept) before heading to Deepawali (Diwali). I enjoyed learning a little more about Diwali, but I have to admit that the Miami production was a lot more impressive. Afterwards, they had Indian food (I need to figure out what I'm allergic to; it must be a spice because there weren't any nuts in the dishes), and we went back to F's room to hang out before the fireworks!

German safety standards are not quite the same as the standards in the US, so some students launched fireworks from one side of the field while we stood at the other side. There was also a fire juggler (there has to be a technical name for that, right?), who appeared to toss his burning sticks or ropes on the ground every so often (they did a few fireworks, then the juggler did a few things, and they kept switching back and forth).

Let's see, what else? F, J, and F's cousin, also a J, wanted to go clubbing downtown, but I was exhausted and had already fallen asleep spontaneously three times that day, so I decided to stay in F's room. Since I was going to be asleep when they got in, they decided to give me the bed (still don't quite understand the logic of that), have J sleep on the couch, and have the guys share the air mattress. Anyway, I was sleeping very peacefully when something hit me on the head: a poster! I don't know what it is with me, sleeping, and things falling on my head, but I'm not liking this trend! :)

All of us woke up late on Sunday, so we just wandered down to breakfast, annoyed the lunch ladies because we took so long to choose food, ate, packed, and set off for the train.

Miscellaneous impressions of Bremen: it felt like a very stereotypical German city with old, beautiful architecture, a thriving cafe scene, and a pretty gemuetlich atmosphere. There are bizarre quirky statues scattered throughout the city; some are spinoffs of the Stadtmusikanten, and some are completely random. This mini-trip to Bremen definitely highlighted the things that I like and dislike about Berlin: Bremen felt very peaceful and relaxed-- and also very ethnically German!

Thanks for a great weekend, F and Js! :)

Mauerfall and Miscellaneous Musings

Today is November 9th (oh. you probably see the date at the top of the post.), which is a day with a lot of baggage for Germany.

Germany celebrates the reunification of Germany on Tag der Deutschen Einheit (the day that East Germany was incorporated into West Germany), which was last month. Despite the fact that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a much bigger celebration than the official unification day, Germany does not recognize November 9th as a national holiday; it is the same day as Kristallnacht. I haven't heard a thing the whole day about the Mauerfall or Kristallnacht.

We discussed this briefly in my German class today, where I proved my dumb Ami-ness by saying that pretty much everything I know about the DDR, I learned from Goodbye Lenin and Sonnenallee. I mean, she asked. It's a little scary how little I know about European history and especially German history. I've taken plenty of 17th-19th century literature classes and even a class on post-Wende (after 1990) literature, but I have never actually discussed the 1930-1990 period in a German class. This means that I look... well... like a dumb American. And it's kind of true.

To be fair, I don't think the other students had very insightful things to share, either, although it was interesting to hear how their perspectives were shaped by their native countries. For example, the students from Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia thought of the DDR as a place with a lot more freedom, where socialism was functioning pretty darn well. (Also, most of the other students are older than I am, so they at least had something to say. It's easier to talk about memories of the DDR when you actually remember it existing. I was barely a year old when the wall fell; the other American wasn't even born.)

A Collection of Anecdotes

I am super tired and don't have the brainpower to put together a coherent post, so here are a few stories from the past week or two:

After three hours of Korean, I am very happy to say that I can read pretty much everything in Korean. Of course, I can't understand anything that I read except for hello, my name, and sushi, but that's a start!

The Korean instructor loves pointing out my American accent. When I was identifying letters of the alphabet, she said, "Ha, you can already hear K's American accent at this stage!" This would be amusing if she pointed out the other students' German accents, but she doesn't... and even *I* can hear where their German accents sneak in. On the other hand, the instructor was impressed with my ability to pronounce the R/L sound; she says the American R is closer to the Korean R/L than the German R.

My German class highlights the fact that my speaking ability lags behind my writing ability. I took 18 months off German while I was focusing on English, which exacerbated the gap. To be fair, it might also just be a K-issue, because I have similar problems in English! On top of this, the professor only calls on me when I'm spacing out... and I'm pretty attentive in classes. Crap. I don't know how she does it.

A few weeks ago, Dumpling knocked on my door, handed me a bowl of grapes, and said, "Danke, dass du so gut auf mich aufpasst." (Rough translation: Thank you for babysitting me so well.) Awwww. When he's not a monster, he's oh-so-cute.

Some of my friends and I decided to check out a Halloween party that someone mentioned through the Fulbright listserv. Let's just say that you know a party is a dud when *I* walk out after two minutes because it's too boring.

It is very interesting to see how different people from different countries react to me being an Asian-American. My students (predominantly from the Middle East) asked, "Where are you really from?" A Russian teaching assistant did a double take when she heard me blabbing away in English and said, "You're speaking American English!" A Chinese teaching assistant said, "Excuse me for asking, but do you have Asian heritage?" (Heh. It's nice to hear an attempt at PCness, but come on.) Another American Fulbrighter asked, "Did you always know you were adopted?" (When I'm standing near my parents, I like to say that I got all of the recessive genes. My parents have brown hair and blue eyes.)

I'm getting annoyed with German bluntness. In some ways, it's great-- I don't expect one of my WG-mates to blow up over something trivial just because she has been waiting to tell me off for the past few months. No, most Germans wouldn't do that. Instead, they provide you with a running commentary of everything that you are doing wrong.

For example, one of my WG-mates told me that she couldn't tell that I cleaned and that since my mother probably did all of the cleaning at home (hello, sexism), I should watch and help her clean this weekend so I can learn how to do it the "right" way. This was after she stuck her head in the bathroom and told me that I was cleaning things in the wrong order. See, you can't mop the floor before you clean the sink and the tub. Clearly. I pulled a passive-aggressive move of my own: I showed up in her room with a piece of notebook paper and a pen and told her to give me explicit directions on what things to clean, which cleaning solutions to use, and in what order I should do everything. It still didn't get me out of "How to Clean the WG 101."

I also got a note that said, 'Please don't leave dishes in the sink.' I did not leave dishes in the sink. Don't blame the dumb American for all of your woes...

Yet another story: I wanted to make soup for dinner. I was poking through the kitchen and making a list of what I needed to buy, and the same WG-mate said, "I don't know if we've discussed this earlier, but you really shouldn't use things that other people have bought. For example, I bought this lettuce, and I am going to eat it for dinner, and if you use it, then I won't have my dinner." I agree to an extent, but my WG-mates ate almost everything that I bought during my last trip to the grocery store: both of my cucumbers, an apple, some of my broccoli, all of *my* lettuce, the last of my cheese, all but three of my organic potatoes, and even my frozen spinach. Hypocrite.

In other news, according to an informal survey of the Fulbrighters in Germany, 85% of us identify as moderate to very liberal, and 65.9% strongly disapprove of the Tea Party. Only 10% believe that the Republican party best represents their political leanings. Who's surprised? Not me!

*grumpy noises*

I have not exactly had the best week.

On Monday, I had babysitting duty like usual, and one of Dumpling's friends came over. Since Dumpling's mom decided it wasn't fair to make me watch two kids, the other mother (also an American) came over, and we played with the guinea pigs while the kids hung out. Because the other kid made kind of a fuss when it was time to go, the mom decided to let them play a little longer; she thought it would be a good idea to run across the street and buy some samosas from the Indian restaurant across the street. No. Bad idea. It turns out that the samosas had ground walnuts in them, which made me have my standard allergic reaction with an itchy mouth, itchy throat, shaking, and eventually getting symptoms that present as food poisoning (you can fill in the details; I actually thought it was food poisoning at first because my mouth and throat were feeling better by then). Let's just say that babysitting isn't fun under those circumstances...

I went to school on Tuesday only because it was the first day of my AG (after school class). I planned a game that required about 15 kids. 5 showed up. Yeah. I had to do some major revising on the fly, and it was not very good.

Today, I woke up at 6 AM, not because I had to be at school early, but because my lamp fell on my head. Yes, you read that right-- my lamp fell on my head. I get the feeling that I was wrestling myself and clipped the lamp while shadowboxing.

Then, I looked at the election results.

When I got to school, my first teacher said, "Oh, K, do you mind if I leave you in charge for this class? I need to make copies for another class, and the copy machines were broken when I got in this morning." I said, "I don't mind, but I'm not allowed to teach a class by myself," and she said, "Oh, I might be back during class," and left. Of course, I didn't see her for the rest of the day. I really am fine with teaching by myself (I've led enough classes by now to know how to handle students, and 12th graders in a Leistungskurs usually behave pretty well), but it's prohibited by my contract, and I'm under strict orders by the head of the languages department never to substitute again. So, can't say I was too pleased.

4th period-- My Gymnasium has come up with a way to get around the can't-teach-solo rule in the contract. I am not allowed to take a full class by myself. However, it does not say that I can't take *half* of a class by myself (generally about 15 students). Today, I took half of a class to a different room, discovered that some of them were supposed to be with the other teacher, and sent them back in exchange for the rest of the students. They never came. Instead of having 16 students, I had 6... and they were having a behavioral issue day. Also, in my contract, it says that I am not allowed to teach grammar. What was I doing today? I was teaching grammar that I had never learned myself-- and yes, I told the teacher that. (She blew me off.) It didn't matter; I ended up asking a German English teacher to explain the worksheet because I didn't know the difference between X, Y, and Z. (Obviously, I understood the concept when I saw the examples... but we never learned what it was called. The teachers were all shocked that I had never learned it by name, but let's be fair-- I betcha I know more technical German grammar terms than my students do.)

After school, J and I decided to register at McFit so we can run during the winter. The problem is that she forgot to print directions, so we decided to walk around and see if we could find it. We failed. And then it started pouring.

However, I don't want to be a total Debbie Downer (probably too late), so I'll end by listing a few good things: I made a pretty good stir fry. J and I went to Soluna and bought amazing, chewy bread. I taught two lessons by myself, and they were pretty successful! The other teachers trust me enough to give me a lot of autonomy-- I'm teaching at least five full lessons/week! I also get to talk about SB 1070 tomorrow, which I am totally excited about! (I bet my lesson would be illegal in Arizona.)

Another story to make this post a little more cheery: I might need to have a talk with the 9th graders about American vs. British English. Why? I am used to 5th graders talking about school supplies in dialogues. I am not used to 9th graders coming up and asking me for a rubber (eraser). They might be a little confused as to why I do a double take, snort, and try not to laugh every time they do that.