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.

Returning to the Regular Schedule

So I had not realized it had been almost a month since I posted on my blog. Oops. Time can speed away from you. So I was sick for a bit there and then I spent a great deal of time helping my family plan their trip to Europe, and once they arrived, I did not have much time for anything. Anyway, here is a short summary (I hope) of what I have been up to the past few weeks.

My mother, brother, and aunt flew into Copenhagen Denmark because we have distant family in that area. It was wonderful to see them and everything was made much smoother by having a place to stay with our relatives. Unfortunately, due to the time it that was spent in Denmark, my family only got to be in Braunschweig for about three days. To top things off, the weather was cold and rainy for all of them. At that point, my brother and Aunt flew back to the US and my girlfriend arrived. Naturally the weather became a thousand times better and we had nothing but sunshine the whole time that she was here. While she was here, we all had a wonderful time exploring Braunschweig together and I was very sad to see them leave.

I am trying to keep this short until I can get back into the swing of blogging. What I really want to relay here is how wonderful it was to have family visit. It really did help me deal with some of the homesickness that I was experiencing and gave me part of my old life back. Also, it was a very helpful reminder of just how much I have learned and how far I have come. I may be far from fluent and even further from professional fluency (Chemistry and Engineering talk), but the extent of my skills really hit me while I was showing my family around, helping them order, and helping the understand random signs around the city and in the parks. They also arrived at the ideal time during my trip, right at the three month mark. I could already tell that I was worn out and that the three month dip was going to be a bad one. My last post was just as I was starting down into it and it would have been much more difficult alone.

If you can manage it. You should find a way to have friends of family visit, and if it comes at the three month mark, all the better. That is all for now. See you next week.