A Few Points of Interest

So things are starting to move very rapidly here again as I approach the end of the semester, finals, and the end of my trip. It is very hard to believe that I halve already been here for nearly four months and that there are only five weeks and counting. I m also trying to get things settled enough to report. Anyway, as things go I will be providing information on the ex-matriculation process here at Braunschweig, but for today, I just wanted to point out some things that I have found interesting during my time here that I never would have considered before.

One thing that I have found truly amazing during my time in Germany is the wide number of languages that you encounter on a daily (or semi-daily) basis. It may just be the people that I have been around during my stay, but I am regularly hearing Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Italian being spoken around me. I do not claim to have learned anything about any of the languages, struggling enough with just German, but I have gotten to the point where I think that I can identify Russian when it is spoken. That may not sound like much, but when you combine those languages with the other people from Korea, Japan, Poland, Switzerland, Sweden, Iraq, and several others that I have forgotten (not to mention all of the different dialects of German that you can encounter at a University) it all just become a giant jumble of incomprehensible sounds. I feel that being able to identify any of that is cool.

Continuing on the topic of the languages, the variety of the German language has really surprised me. It was the biggest problem while I was down in Munich for my language course. I would be doing just fine in my classes and then the second that I stepped out the door, I couldn't understand what people were saying. In the end, it was good for me because it has made it easier to understand some of the different dialects I have encountered here. Oddly enough, the place where I have the hardest time understanding people is not in my Chemistry lectures (which is a discussion for another time), but it is actually in my German Language Classes.  It is hard to understand fluent German speakers when they really get going on a topic. For me, it is even harder to understand students with a heavy accent speaking in halting and incomplete sentences. We are all here to learn, but I just never foresaw such difficulty communicating in the classroom.

I am just going to discuss only one more thing on this post (for the sake of any poor suckers reading this). I am going to talk about weather. That's right, the weather. Well more specifically about some extreme weather. In the past few weeks there has been some serious flooding in middle and lower Germany. I thought this was worth mentioning, because while I was in the USA I never considered things like that happening. Yeah, it is a natural occurrence, but we don't hear about that kind of thing on the other side of the world unless it is REALLY extreme. We don't here about the occasional flooding. Th only reports that reach us are those about massive hurricanes. I knew this was happening, but it never really hit me until I had to cancel a weekend trip due to canceled trains. This was a strange experience.

 Every day I get a dozen small reminders that no matter where they are or what language is spoken, people (for the most part) are just people. The old generation complains about the younger, everyone is complaining about taxes, and everyone likes watching TV. Unfortunately for us, the rest of the world has no way of learning this. All that they get to see are the news reports about the Bad, the Violent, and the Crazy parts of the US. I hope that I have done my job and gotten you to think a little bit today. With such insights, I think I should be paid more.... or anything really. That's all for now. Guten Abend

This Post was supposed to be up earlier, but I have been struggling with Blogger this week.