Blogs from Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, Europe - page 53

Yeah, so what went wrong yesterday with the train ride back to Trier? Better question, what didn't go wrong. From the very get go things went wrong. Katrin and I were gonna take the Train from Arnsberg to Hagen, Hagen to Koblenz and Koblenz to Trier. We left at 2 and were supposed to be back here at 7. We even figured that we could take turns sleeping (as neither of us had gotten much sleep the night before). Well, it was a nice idea anyway. We rushed to the train station in Arnsberg thinking we were either gonna be late, or just be in time to catch the trian. Of course, the train came 8 min. late. (Not good when you only have 10 min. to switch trains in Hagen). As soon as our train ... read more

Yep, another good weekend in Trier. Fri. afternoon I went shopping in town with Katrin. We both had to find b-day gifts for our sisters. Later Matt, Jaime and I met at the train station to pick up Graham. We then hung out in the city for a while and ate dinner at Astrix... they have very good pizza and it's pretty cheap (really student friendly). I tried an apple wine for the first time (Veize)... never again... yuck. At least I can say I tried it though. In the restaurant there was a poster that I really really wanted to take a picture of, but there were too many people sitting in front of it. In large captions it said 'US World Domination Tour' then under it is a picture of the world colored in ... 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

Got to play the piano today. =) Loved it. It's nice to have those small comforts from home. I'm quite glad there's a piano for us in the apartment complex. Unfortunately the hours that it's available to be played stink, but at least it's there. Not much else to say. Got some new pics up. Took a few from around campus just to give you some idea of what it looks like. Been spending a lot of time studying my german grammar and vocab. Got two weeks before the 3 hour placement exam... not looking forward to it. I've also been trying to figure out what classes to take (It's a very confusing system here). I also found out that most students take 3 classes (that's only 6 hours of class a week!!) That's nothing. I ... read more