[Written 4 Juli]

Sorry for the post haitus… my trip was very interesting, as was my first day in München. München is a very interesting city, from the little I’ve been able to see of it. I’ve only seen about 5 square blocks and it’s my second day here, but I hope to see more as my time here progresses. So far it’s not Paris, very clearly! There are more bikers (not motorcycles!) here than Paris, where it was all mopeds, and it’s a bit more urban and a lot cleaner. But let me back track a little bit. (My battery life is what’s keeping me from taking my time here, because internet is very… awkward, it seems.)

So Sunday I spent hanging in my hotel room until noonish, when I checked out, dropped my bags, and went to discover Monmartre, the Moulin Rouge, and Sacré Coeur. I took the Metro to the Place de Clichy and walked the two blocks to the Moulin Rouge. It was sort of hidden between the larger buildings (a surprise) and the little square in front was jammed with traffic and trees. Not exactly the picturesque view the movie seemed to hint there was. Then, of course, was the fact that the area in which it’s situated is quite the… erm… place. In Amélie, the “love interest” character works at a “Sex Shop” in Monmartre, and I always thought that was the strangest thing for a normal-seeming guy to do… until I saw Monmartre. The entire street adjacent to the Moulin Rouge was filled with “Sex Shop” signs, in English, with huuuuge advertisements in English and French, with pictures. It was impossible to ignore! Crazy place. This was all a few blocks from Sacré Coeur, too.

As I walked down the block, the area turned more into a Canal Street/Chinatown sort of look, with shops all selling touristy things and cheap merchandise, each shop with the same stuff. Lots of tourist things and cheap scarves, jewelry and the like. Instead of people speaking Chinese, everyone was speaking French, even people who looked as if they would speak any number of foreign languages. Then all of a sudden there was a sharp hill and Sacre Coeur appeared amidst the buildings. (Another Parisian magic trick, I swear.) It was steep and tremendously sunny and warm, but it was beautiful.

After I was officially exhausted of being über-tourist, I took the train to the hotel, grabbed my stuff, and went immediately to the Gare d’Est, where I waited until 22:45 to board my train to München. The train was filled with English, and lots of backpackers. It was amusing… I wondered how many Americans and Europeans spend summers backpacking and train-riding their way across the continent. I shared a 2nd class cabin with two middle aged men who chatted in rapid French, while I sat there finishing a book I’d started sometime that afternoon. (I waited at the Gare for… a while.) Then we started moving and the ticket guy came in, saying, “Guten Abend!” and then asked (I presumed) for our tickets. I handed it over, and he said, “Ein noch München,” and then spoke to one of the French guys in rapid German. The French guy bobbed his head, saying, “Danke schön,” and he left.

Wow, I thought. I am going to Germany.

Then I slept for 9 hours on the 10.5 train ride. Arriving in München was interesting, especially because I’d had my European primer in France. That was officially the best idea ever, by the way. Because I know more French than I do German (as of now) it was much easier for me to learn how to do the Métro, how to work with Euro, and the like, than arriving in Germany. If I got lost in München, it would have been much harder to understand how things work.

Here is a small map of the relatively important places in the center of München, and highlighted is the Institut:

I went immediately to the Institut, which is on Sonnestraße, a major roadway on the fringe of the inner city, where all the oldest buildings are (and, apparently, the best shopping). In a worldwind of organized orientation, I registered, got my housing assignment, took my placement exam, and was interviewed in German. Wow was that embarrassing. I hadn’t spoken in so long it was so hard for me to answer her questions, but I strugged through, saying I’d studied for “ein Semester” (yes, I’d forgotten that) and that “Ich studiere Anglistik als Haupfach” (I study English as my major). It was so hard! Wow. The exam was agonizing too. Most of it, including the small essay, were pretty much me embarrassing myself. And I’d said I was good at reading and writing! Bah.

Then I made my way to my dorm, where I spoke with an old woman about my housing, in a converted convent where they currently house troubled young women, ages 15-21. I was put in the out building where there are about 3 rooms (6 women) per floor, who share 2 bathrooms and a washer (no dryers, only devices shaped like a grated ironing board where you hang your clothes to dry). I packed in and chose the nicer of the two beds/dressers, and was attempting to figure our the internet when my roommate and her father entered. They spoke halting English and she introduced herself (I still haven’t gotten her name right) and said she’s 18, going into her second year at University outside of Istanbul, Turkey. She said she was taking introductory German (so I can’t converse with her in German, because she knows none), so I was sort of annoyed. I wanted to be housed with someone from my level of the program, but oh well. She’s nice enough, and her luggage was even larger than mine. She brought 7 pairs of shoes, I brought 4. How did she fit all of her stuff in her luggage, I wondered, looking at her unpacking her dozens of makeup products, towels, clothes, hair dryer, jewelry…

We went out exploring to the center of the city by the Marienplatz, near the big churches. Over there, it’s shopping central. We bought some sandwiches and made our way back to the dorm for the night. We were told, to my utter dismay, that the internet was 2 Euro for an hour, and we couldn’t use our own computers. The Institut had said internet varied by dorm location or accomodation (some people are housed with families) so we’d have to see when we checked intoo our rooms. Well. I was annoyed… to say the least.

The rules for the dorm are pretty amazingly strict, especially for someone like me who’s rather used to having the relative freedom of college, and isn’t used to an odd, liberally European roommate (as to that, don’t ask. Believe me). In broken English (for which she apologized multiple times) one of the “teachers” explained that this place is a converted convent, now used to house troubled girls ages 15-21 who, for whatever reason, cannot live with their parents. The building I’m in is for the 18-21 year olds, luckily, so there’s a different atmosphere in the halls than in the tall 15-18 building, which is the main part of the complex. Their rules are strict: no alcohol in the rooms, no boys, no loud noises, and the outer door locks at 21 Uhr (9pm) and so we have to use our key on the outer gate (luckily we have a key!) after that. There are TV rooms (smoking and non, surprisingly, in a house for teenagers), a gym, an “internet café,” and a huge laundry room in the main building. Our building (which she didn’t show the others, leading me to think my roommate and I are the only two of the 10 living there) has its own washer and washroom on the same floor. (Now if only I could read it…)

In a vain attempt to connect to the internet, I spent the greater part of yesterday after 19 Uhr (by the way, I’m changing dates/times to German style, to help me remember) walking around the immediate area, searching vainly for a free internet connection. I found it, for five minutes, at the Institut itself, before a woman yelled at me in rapid German in the universal, “Hey you, you’re not supposed to be here because we’re closed!” sort of way. All other internet (wireless, at least) is impossible or expensive (2 Euro for an hour). So I’m stuck using the internet for the meager allotment my battery can allow (no [working] outlets) during the afternoons, after my classes. Perhaps Google can provide me with some free cafes in the area.

So to catch everyone up to the present, I woke up at 7 (the sun rises at 5:30, so it’s muuuch easier to get up early because it’s so crazy bright at that hour) and got ready, nudging my roommate and getting a croissant on the way to class. We got to the Institut and found our class assignment, then I walked into the room to see people of various ethnicities seated patiently, without an instructor. I sat down and after a few moments, a girl took out a German-Spanish dictionary and another girl grinned and started speaking to her in Spanish. I sat there sort of staring at the walls until a few more girls came in and sat near me, and one asked another a question in perfect German, and the other responded with a heavy accent. The girl immediately reverted to English and introduced herself, as Nicole from California, then the girl next to me said, “Oh, great! I’m from North Carolina!” and then I said, “I’m from New York!” and we all started chatting merrily. Until then, no one was sure who spoke which language, and it continued to get stranger.

A teacher walked in after a while, and in German that was almost a biiit too fast for my comprehension, she explained (my understanding grew as she kept repeating the story in a few different ways, using a variety of vocabulary, and saying, “Sie verstehen mich?” (“You understand me?”) every few sentences. I did, surprisingly, and I was delighted to realize that at least my comprehension and listening skills hadn’t drained out of me like the rest of my German apparently had in May. Her story essentially said our actual teacher was stuck in traffic on the Autobahn on her commute north because of a traffic “Unfall” (accident) and she would be in momentarily. The substitute said we were going to start asking questions of each other, and asked which questions one would usually ask to get to know someone? I immediately recalled my lessons in January—this was one of the first things we covered in my class. “Wie heißt du?” “Woher kommst du?” and so forth (Roughly: What is your name? Where are you from?) and we created a list on the board as a group.

Then our teacher popped her head in. Introducing herself as Heike (with much better enunciation than the first woman!) she immediately put vocabulary words on the board and explained exactly what the other lady had, about the traffic. The way she put the vocabulary on the board was exciting! I obviously got placed in the section of my level that emphasizes Wortschatz, or vocabulary, because that’s pretty much what she did all morning—she spoke, explained things about this and that, asked questions, and anytime she got to a word and saw a face that looked quizzical, she put it on the board, in this fashion:

r Strand, -¨e
e Sängerin, -nen

That’s exactly the way it appears in a German dictionary! Or close, anyway. Strand means beach (like ocean beach) and the “r” means it’s a “der” word, a masculine word. (“e” means “die” for feminine, and “s” means “das” for neuter.) The dash, umlaut, and “e” mean to pluralize the word, you add an “e” at the end, and put an umlaut on the last vowel, so Strand plural is “Strände.” Cool, eh? So Sängerin, or female singer, is Sängerinnen in plural. All in one quick notated form. She did that for the rest of the fifty or so words she put on the board through our haphazard discussions of getting to vaguely know each other, and I was amazed. So many words! So many! But it’s good.

And being able to take notes is exactly what I’ve been itching to do for ages. My professor last semester in Elementary German I was determined to never let us take notes and instead listen and speak as much as possible, thinking the repetition would be as good as notes. It was, in a way, because now I have all the elementary tools of the language memorized and I can understand spoken German much better than I could have imagined. But now that we’re getting to different grammar stuff, it’s more important I learn as many words as possible to enhance what I can already manage to put together on the paper or in my head.

The level of the course is absolutely perfect. I can understand just enough to feel like I fit in, but not too much so I know I still need to get along. There are various levels of knowledge in the room, from what I could tell, and it seems to go along with how their classes were taught, because we all are essentially at the same level. I got a big emphasis with the elementary principles, so I know numbers and letters and pronunciation better than I did after 3 years of French, but other kids know the different forms for grammar (the accusative, the dative) that I haven’t been really exposed to. I know enough to describe rooms and people and colors, and can recognize elements in other words to puzzle out meaning. And because I’m a natural grammar nazi (that’s a technical term among English majors, believe it or not) it’s relatively easy for me to immediately memorize grammar rules once I see their purpose. Like, tell me that in German, the verb is always in the second position, I’ll get it. Tell me how to conjugate, I’ll do my best to spell it right. Stuff like that. I was correcting the spelling and little things for the kid from Madrid to my left who served as my exercise partner, which was funny. (He put “Seine Großeltern kommt aus Deutschland,” which means “His grandparents comes from Germany” instead of “Ihre Großeltern kommen aus Deutschland”—“Her grandparents come from Germany.”) Tee hee. The Spanish kids pronounce German with such a strange accent, as does the Australian kid, who can’t help but sound like an Aussie no matter what language he’s speaking. It’s so amusing!

Speaking of that, the kids in my class are amazingly diverse. There are three Americans (I mentioned the other two before), two from Spain, two from Russia, and then one each from Mexico, Venesuela, England, Australia, Taiwan, Korea, Iran, and Egypt. Two are older than 21—the Australian is 25, and one of the Russians is 41—but all others are 18-21, mostly all 18 or 19, a rather universal college age. The common-ish language is English, but as only five of us are fluent-fluent (the English and Australian guys and the three American girls) the professor isn’t comfortable with translating any words to English unless desperation sets in, so she simply asks “Sie verstehen?” and then explains it in roundabout German until she gets head-nods. For example, to explain the meaning of “Herkunftsland” she explained that “Herkunft” is derived from “kommen,” a verb I learned my first week of German class in January. “Land” was obvious, and so she explained that putting the two together got the combined meaning. So those sort of explanations help most of the time, but for some of the words I looked them up very quickly in my dictionary and was satisfied. The kid from Madrid kept stealing it politely to look up words—his English, he said, is about as good as his French, which isn’t to say fluent, but good enough to look up a German word in English and understand it, most of the time.

So far I’ve learned the answers to vague questions I’ve always had, like about combined words (Germans love words like Betriebtswirtschaftlehre, or BWL—Business/Econ as a University major) and how they make sense in pieces.

We’re also starting discussing the differences between the nominative, accusative, and dative (sort of like the differences of when to use he/him/his sort of thing) which is terrifically difficult, but more so for people who have never really analyzed the grammar of sentences beyond “That’s a noun, that’s a verb.” So like, if you want to say “The man picked the woman the flower” in English, it’s technically using the same words to say “The man picked the flower for the woman”—the “his” is the same word. You know? So in German, the problem is you have to know aspects of grammar we usually forget exist, such as what role in the sentence each phrase is playing. Especially because the German equivalents for “who” vs. “whom” and things like that are super important, because they can change the aspect of adjectives and pronouns as well. Thank goodness for Auf Geht’s!, the software I used last semester with incredible detailed explanations of how to use grammatical stuff. Unless you know what they mean by saying “accusative” or “indirect object” you’re hopeless, unfortunately, but at least it’s mostly all in English, with colorful examples.

So enough for my boring grammatical meanderings! I love that stuff, though, sadly.

So with that, I am off to explore a German Biergarten in München with the program at 18 Uhr, which should be positively exciting. Bis bald, und will ich morgen mehr sprechen! (I hope that means, “Later, and will I tomorrow more speak!” which is actually how you order the words in German, or so I have been led to believe. Liz, correct me if you’re reading this!)

I leave you with a typisches Deutches Sprichwort, or proverb: “Ordnung is das Halbe Leben!” Organization is half of life! Amusingly, only Americans seem to have an equivalent saying: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” All the other kids looked at the professor and said, “Nope, we don’t have an equivalent in my country.”

And pictures are coming. Soooooon. Yes. I promise!