What a great birthday party yesterday! At 5 the whole family met at Stroiers (sp?), a local restaurant/bar. Down in the cellar is the Kegelbahn (Kegel lane). It was soo much fun to play again. Kegeln is sort of like bowling (but quite different too). The lane starts out skinny and then gets wider at the end. Instead of 10 pins, there are only 9. The balls are smaller and there are no finger holes. There are a variety of different games you can play. We started off with kinda the norm... every player gets three chances to knock over as many pins as they can after each ball all 9 pins are set again. Next we played Tannenbaum (Christmas Tree). We divided ourselves into two teams. Each team had to then get rid of all ... read more

Hi everyone, Don't have much to write today. Just wanted to say hi. Class today was uneventful. We discussed how Germans deal with enviornmental issues. They are so much more concious about protecting the earth than we are. It's amazing the lengths they go to to protect nature. Things like building animal bridges across the Autobahn so that animals can get safely across the Autobahn. This afternoon I went over to my friend Simona's and studied grammar with her. YUCK!! I'm getting really tired of all this german grammar. I'm really quite nervous about the exam on Mon. though. It's coming up and I'm still having a lot of trouble with the advanced german stuff. Today Simona and I spent 2 hours trying to understands Nominalisierugn and Verbalisierung in German (Nominalisierung = making nouns out of ... read more

This morning in class we worked on grammar. Our professor wanted to go over some of the stuff that will probably be on the placement exam on the 31st. I couldn't do any of it!!!! It was all way over my head. It made it really noticeable that I've never learned grammar in a classroom setting. I didn't know any of the terms for certain sentence structures or times. What in the world is a 'Participal attribute', or 'participal 2'? I now have a week to go back and learn all the different grammar terms and what sentence structures belong with each term.... YIKES! It really stinks, cause I know what 'wurde gemacht werden' (would be done) means, I just don't know if it's Konjuktive 2, Konjuktive, Präteritum, Präsens, and so forth. I need to know ... read more

What an awesome class today. The theme was Multi-cultural society. We talked about what culture was, what made a society multi-cultural and whether we thought Germany was a multi-cultural society. We talked a lot about foriegn workers in Germany and how the Germans feel about foriegners. During the 60s, 70s there was more work than there were German workers, so Germany advertised in Turkey and Italy for 'Gastarbeiter' (guest workers). Of course a lot of them came, especially a lot from Turkey. In the early 1990s, when the wall fell, there was an anti-foriegner mentality that came from East-Germany. During that time, there was a lot of violence aimed at foriegners. In responce, there was a lot of advertising and so forth to promote tolerance. We looked at one such advertisement today and I absolutely loved ... read more

Yeah, so being sick away from home really really stinks. I was supposed to go to Bonn today with my group. Instead I've spent most of it in bed with a fever, trying to sleep it off. Being sick makes me just want to go home. I'm quite upset that I couldn't go to Bonn (was really looking forward to the trip) and tonight is a big party for all the international students (which I'll also be sleeping through). Oh well, not much I can do, so I guess I should stop feeling sorry for myself. The last few days were pretty good. Our bar tour Thur. night really wasn't much of a tour. We went to one bar and ended up staying there for quite a while. Then some of the group went to a ... read more