Almost Christmas

Since I already wrote a really long entry, and then the internet decided to stop working sometime while writing it, I will now write about the last week with bullet points.

last Saturday-

• ice skating got canceled, sad
• but the St. Lucia celebration started earlier than I thought, so good for that
• girls with candles on their heads, singing in languages I can't read, and eating good food

Sunday-

• church and lunch with KSG, spaghetti for lunch, then baked apples with chocolate and marzipan for dessert, yum
• baking cookies with my flatmates, more yum
• meeting a german Fulbrighter who is studying in Greifswald, fun! We were at a cafe for two hours and I had had the biggest cup of milk coffee I have ever seen for 2€

Monday-

• Practicing with the KSG choir
• helping bake more cookies with KSG (reminder, KSG is the catholic student group), but more talking than helping
• met up with my new tandem partner. Tandem partners has nothing to do with riding bikes, but helping each other learn languages. She is German and wants to better her English, and I speak English and want to better my German.
  

Tuesday-

• Abi concert
• Abi is a term for the 13th graders, and now for the 12th graders in Meck-Pom. At the end of the year they take big tests that will pretty much determine their entire future, similar to the British A-levels. The concert was to raise money for the Abi Ball, kinda like prom, sorta.
  

Wednesday-

• KSG Christmas party, mass, food, then singing and silly presents

Thursday-

• Annual teacher dinner before Christmas. Good food, and it was nice to meet with my mentor teacher since we don't get a lot of time to talk during the school day because we are always running from class to class
• it was actually pretty boring since the teachers all know each other, but still nice

Friday-

• left Greifswald at 9am
• got into Berlin, looked for the cute boots I had seen five weeks ago, they were sadly no longer there
• left Berlin and came to Dresden
• Met up with Nadine, went to Frisbee training, the shoulder was fine, and we actually did some running drills, yay!
• went for dinner afterwards, it took about 30 minutes to get some noodles with garlic sauce, really, lots of garlic!
• Karaoke! But I only sang one song, and it was a duet, because apparently my piece of paper with my original song got lost somewhere, and the DJ apparently never got it

This Saturday-

• slept in, hmm, nice
• did some shopping with Nadine, still didn't find cute boots
• Nadine went back home, I checked out the Christmas market, really pretty. I saw Santa sing a song, with back up singers from A Christmas Carol, and also maybe a pirate?
• Made a delicious dinner, curry chicken with cous cous, leeks, and red peppers

Sunday-

• went to mass at the main church in town, beautiful, celebrated the fourth week of Advent (being reminded that tomorrow is Christmas eve!)
• had some yummy bagel sandwiches (yes, real bagels)
• took a walk down the Elbe River

We will be heading to Görlitz in about an hour to start the Christmas celebration with Nadine's family!

Merry Christmas!

Being Busy Rocks!

Hooray for being busy, I love being busy, it makes me feel like a normal person again. Fun story: on Wednesday I made dinner for the Catholic student group, made sloppy Joe's. Everyone loved it, of course everyone loved it, sloppy Joe's tastes great. After dinner and the discussion, I was talking to a few of the guys, and one said they were going to the student bar, which is right across the street from my apartment. I also said so, and Christoph invited me to the bar with his and his friends. And since I had already done my preparations for school, I decided to go. It was really great to meet a couple of people, have a drink and then dance for a couple hours. I didn't really feel out of place at all, which was great! Then I was invited to go ice skating with them on Saturday!

Yesterday was Frisbee and first physical therapy session, and today was celebrating Claudi's birthday and then meeting up with some Frisbee friends for a drink. And now I am going to bed so I can get up nice and early.

I can do that

Last night was the improv show. The group is called Improsant, I think it is a pun on the word
"Interesant" which means interesting. Anyway, I was expecting to be able to understand about 25% of it, instead it was the other way around, I understood about 75% of the show, which was really exciting! I even called out some suggestions, and they were taken. During the show, you could yell, "That sounds like a song," and then the people on stage would have to start a song. Great. It was generally pretty funny, but I also found myself critiquing the players. Here are a few things that would have made the show better: moving around, a lot of times, they would get caught in one position and make themselves comfortable, either sitting on the ground, or just talking to one another. Another thing was, the host didn't let scenes play out all the way, or they never really established a problem, so they were just people on stage trying to be funny.

And then today I was telling one of the other teachers about this, and then she told me that I should join the group. I said, yeah, if they wanted to do a show in English. Then she said, no I should just join the group, my German is good enough. Eek, but it does sound enticing.

Tonight I am helping make dinner for after mass, we are making sloppy Joe's! Woo! And right now I am eating Flammkuchen, what a great day.

The best moment of my day

Right, I only work 12 hours a week, but I also prepare for these classes, and each class is at least 30 minutes, most are an hour of prep. Ok, also I can use some lessons more than once, which is also really nice, because the lessons then get better and better. But looking at my work again, when was the last time I really worked all 12 hours? I can't actually remember, because either there was Math Olympics, where I didn't need to work because the school was being used for that, or I was gone at something else, or the teachers are sick. Here in Germany, especially in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, they don't have enough money to hire substitute teachers. When a teacher gets sick, then they either try to find a teacher who teaches the same subject and has that period free, change the hours around, so if the Math teacher has the period where the class would normally have English free, then they will switch is around like that, or they will just cancel the class. So one of my classes was canceled today, and one is canceled tomorrow.

Now, this was the not the best part of my day. The best part of my day was when I was grocery shopping. After hearing the words grilled cheese, that is what I decided to have for lunch. While I was in the super market, I was looking through the refrigerated section, sometimes they have single servings for some food, and I found Maultaschen! It was the cheap 1euro price is always is, and it will be delicious tomorrow for lunch. This is something that I ate all the time in Tübingen, and was sad to not find it, because it is really easy to prepare and also very tasty. Maultaschen is pasta squares filled with beef and spinach. Apparently it was made my monks during Lent, so they could hide the meat in the pasta, that way, God couldn't find it.

Advent time

This evening I went to the Advent concert my church put on. Unfortunately, I got there right at the start, and all the seats were taken, so I had to stand. The concert was really cute, there were three choirs plus a few pieces played by a small band/quartet, really, a lot of recorders in different sizes and a few other instruments. Me and some other students agreed our favorite thing about the concert was a little eight year old boy who help his music folder over his face almost the entire time he was singing but still looked like he was having a great time.

After the concert, one of the girls invited me to come to a thing she was going to, on the way we were stopped by some Spanish guys who were looking for their hotel, one of them spoke German, but the other asked if we spoke English. Claudi then said, of course, she does! He asked for our numbers so that we could go dancing next weekend. Oh Spanish men, so much more forward than any German guy I have ever met.

I spent the next hour learning how to swing balls on rope around and make it look cool. We went into a room that smelled like "people had been working there" as Claudi said (yucky sweat smell) and inside there were people juggling, playing with Devil sticks, and also with Chinese Yoyos, yes, I was wondering if they were practicing for a small circus. It was really fun though, and I learned a few tricks, and the girl who was teaching me was really sweet. As we were walking out, I was told about an improv group that practices in the same room, and they are going to give a performance on Tuesday, and am planning now to go. It won't be as funny as normal improv shows, because most jokes are puns or a reference to current events or culture, but it will still be fun.

Weird? Maybe

Is it weird if I had a dream that I was in the UK, and no one had a British accent? It was a really strange dream anyway, and I realized that circumstances around it were strange when I was actually in the dream, but the accent thing occurred to me once I was awake.

Oh yeah, I have also decided that I always want to have a token British friend.

Maybe it is a little too cliche to make this comparison, but you know how the Lion in the Wizard of Oz was in need of some courage? I feel like that is me. In the end, he had it all along, and again, I feel that is me. So if I know that I need courage, but that I also have it, what is the problem? The problem is getting the courage that is in me to come out. Life has been all right, been coasting along all right, and I am finally at a weekend where I literally have nothing to do, and it sucks, big time. Whenever I talk to friends and family, I always have fun little stories to tell them, but it is because things just kind of happen to me. I love being busy, I was busy all throughout college, between my classes, my jobs, and the clubs I was in, there was barely any time for anything else. So if you are reading this, and you do the prayer thing, please pray that I can find my nerve again.