Here goes...

After reading the blog of another language assistant here in Germany, I've decided to give it a go myself. Hopefully it will let me keep everyone at home (and in other parts of the world) up-to-date, and I'll just add to it whenever I've done anything interesting, or I have an observation to make, or when anything else occurs to me.
Maybe eventually I'll be able to put up photos and so on, but we'll see how the basic writing goes at first...

So, my third week in Germany.
I met Daniela, the Bulgarian, and she is absolutely lovely. I am very jealous that she is fluent in Bulgarian, English, and practically fluent in German, but it's good, we talk in both German and English, depending on where we are/what we are talking about, and whether we know certain words in either language. She goes to the local college, to do German lessons, and she invited me along, so now I have lessons 3 afternoons a week. It's good, as well as giving me the chance to learn and practice more German, it turns out I can do a fair amount of the technical grammar stuff, which reassures me that there is some German in my brain, and its not completely pointless being here. It's also good as it's a whole class of students, so I've already met some more people my age. I'm going to have a weird accent by the time I'm finished here- our class comes from all over Europe.

I spent Friday and Sunday with Daniela and Dinara, a Russian girl from the college. Daniela is a language assistant too, and this weekend we met her supervisor/teacher, Sonja and family. Her husband fixed my bike, for which I am very grateful- it was so annoying not having it, especially as that meant having to get up earlier to go to school, and needing to have the right change for the bus, and so on and so on. I think it's fixed now. (Fingers crossed, thumbs pressed, and so on*) Sonja also has a daughter our age, and on Sunday we all made muffins together- baking vocabulary increased! =) It was funny when we were all talking together, Daniela and I helped each other with translations into English, Dinara could sometimes follow the English but not always, Bulgarian and Russian have some similarities so sometimes Daniela and Dinara would try to help each other, but often they'd find out the exact same word has a completely different meaning, which was very confusing, Maria (the German- Sonja's daughter) obviously is a native german speaker, and kept speaking teenage slang German, very fast, and probably also found it hard to get past our accents/ roundabout way of saying things, and to top it all off Sonja speaks a little bit of Russian, what she remembers from school, so every so often she'd just spout a lot of Russian, and I'd severely worry that my German skills had suddenly completely disappeared. It was mental, but it was pretty fun. It's a similar atmosphere in classes, the teaching is all in German, but everyone uses German synonyms, English and their own language to try and work things out. It's great getting to listen to everyone, I hope I pick up a few phrases!

That's probably enough for now, though lists and stories are already forming in my head for next time, so no doubt you will hear from me soon.

Love to you all. =)


* In Germany (and also Bulgaria, according to Daniela) rather than crossing their fingers for luck, they press their thumbs... 'Ich druck dir die Daumen' is 'I'll press my thumbs [cross my fingers] for you' but I'm not sure if 'Daumens gedruckt' or 'gedruckte Daumens' has quite the same effect as 'fingers crossed!'.