GERMANY
This week has gone stupendously fast. I mean it feels like a second since It was last saturday. I never really realised before that when you only work 12 hours a week and do shit-all except food shopping otherwise, the week goes very very fast.
I had another lesson with the 11th grade yesterday, the guys I was with last Friday, except today I wasn't doing the teaching solo. Apparently earlier this week they did a vocab test, the vocab that I'd gone over with them last Friday and helped talk them through the meanings and stuff.
They all did crap, apparently.
I don't know if its right that I feel partly responsible. I mean, some of them were so poor (even by learner standards) that they can't have revised anything like they were told to, in no uncertain terms. One kid got 2 out of 30. I'm not that shit a vocab teacher. And anyway, they're doing it again next monday to improve. I regret nothing.
And man, the weather got balls here! Yesterday Neuerburg had that kind of 'long summer day' kind of feeling. There were literally no clouds in the sky; I thought that was just a kind of gay sentimental phrase that never really happened. Turns out it does, but last night we had the mother of all thunderstorms and its only just stopped belting it down 24 hours later. The whole sky is cloud now.
What with the weather being so crap, I didn't hit the town and have the wild friday night that I usually do, so I stayed in and watched Terminator 3 in German. I dunno why, but there was something terrible about it. You'd think with Arnie being Austrian, he might have dubbed his own voice, or at least found someone of the same calibre of German accent to voice him. But they didn't. It was like Arnie doing a bad impression of himself, if thats even possible. Pinnacles of robot engineering shouldn't sound like the mentally impaired.
This also meant that this was the latest I've gone to bed since I arrived here, at the grand hour of 5 past midnight. I had in mind visions of having a really fat day and not waking up early for a change. But at about half 8 this morning, the German builders invaded the proverbial Poland to build something in our building. I have no idea what it was; I can't see anything new. It certainly sounded like they were just smacking the same bit of wall with a hammer for no real reason. Hammer practise. Either way, it was a balls start to the day.
This example makes me realise once again that I seem to reach for material for this blog. When I was in Leeds, I got woken up in the morning for a plethora of other better, weirder reasons, but I never blogged about it then. This was because, in Leeds, you only had to step out of your front door and other things would practically scream "write about this, motherfucker!"
Here, when I leave the apartment for my food shopping trips and I gaze nonchalantly for inspiration, the vast expanse of forest just sort of sighs at me, and the castle looks over at me resentfully and says "What? What were you expecting?"
So the next time I'm in Germany, I will go somewhere just as quaint, just as picturesque, but one hell of a lot more vibrant. Dangerous even. I can start all my posts with "I won another knife fight yesterday."
This week has gone stupendously fast. I mean it feels like a second since It was last saturday. I never really realised before that when you only work 12 hours a week and do shit-all except food shopping otherwise, the week goes very very fast.
I had another lesson with the 11th grade yesterday, the guys I was with last Friday, except today I wasn't doing the teaching solo. Apparently earlier this week they did a vocab test, the vocab that I'd gone over with them last Friday and helped talk them through the meanings and stuff.
They all did crap, apparently.
I don't know if its right that I feel partly responsible. I mean, some of them were so poor (even by learner standards) that they can't have revised anything like they were told to, in no uncertain terms. One kid got 2 out of 30. I'm not that shit a vocab teacher. And anyway, they're doing it again next monday to improve. I regret nothing.
And man, the weather got balls here! Yesterday Neuerburg had that kind of 'long summer day' kind of feeling. There were literally no clouds in the sky; I thought that was just a kind of gay sentimental phrase that never really happened. Turns out it does, but last night we had the mother of all thunderstorms and its only just stopped belting it down 24 hours later. The whole sky is cloud now.
What with the weather being so crap, I didn't hit the town and have the wild friday night that I usually do, so I stayed in and watched Terminator 3 in German. I dunno why, but there was something terrible about it. You'd think with Arnie being Austrian, he might have dubbed his own voice, or at least found someone of the same calibre of German accent to voice him. But they didn't. It was like Arnie doing a bad impression of himself, if thats even possible. Pinnacles of robot engineering shouldn't sound like the mentally impaired.
This also meant that this was the latest I've gone to bed since I arrived here, at the grand hour of 5 past midnight. I had in mind visions of having a really fat day and not waking up early for a change. But at about half 8 this morning, the German builders invaded the proverbial Poland to build something in our building. I have no idea what it was; I can't see anything new. It certainly sounded like they were just smacking the same bit of wall with a hammer for no real reason. Hammer practise. Either way, it was a balls start to the day.
This example makes me realise once again that I seem to reach for material for this blog. When I was in Leeds, I got woken up in the morning for a plethora of other better, weirder reasons, but I never blogged about it then. This was because, in Leeds, you only had to step out of your front door and other things would practically scream "write about this, motherfucker!"
Here, when I leave the apartment for my food shopping trips and I gaze nonchalantly for inspiration, the vast expanse of forest just sort of sighs at me, and the castle looks over at me resentfully and says "What? What were you expecting?"
So the next time I'm in Germany, I will go somewhere just as quaint, just as picturesque, but one hell of a lot more vibrant. Dangerous even. I can start all my posts with "I won another knife fight yesterday."
