So what has happened over the past two weeks? Not much really, this has been the least eventful two weeks thus far, yet I feel obligated to at least write something.
Winter is officially here and there was one day with a couple of hours of sleet, which easily distracted one of my year 7 classes. Two days a week I start class at 8am and I’ve had to get use to riding a bike in the early morning at quite low temperatures and the associated wind chill.
Speaking of bikes, last Thursday morning I was unable to get to school due to a flat tyre and, since I know almost absolutely nothing about bikes, I had to learn fast. So finding the correct tube was a bit of a hassle because the specifications on my tyre were from the English system (even though my bike is French) and eventually found out that I convert them to the German system. Two of the supermarkets I visited didn’t have the correct valve type, but on the third go I was lucky. Then the next problem was finding the right tools to remove the rear tyre. So I walked my bike to the free bike workshop in the city where they let you use all the tools for free and there are some volunteers who are meant to give you advice. The volunteers there weren’t particularly helpful (which I sort of expected anyway) but I managed to work out how do to all things necessary to fix my bike without any assistance.
Last weekend I went out with Annette and a few of her uni friends, which was nice. However, at the end of the night outside of a pretty trashy nightclub I saw possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen thus far in Germany: Germans trying to fight. At that point I had never before seen an act of violence in Germany, whereas, in Australia, violence, especially drunken violence, is rather ubiquitous and it would be weird to go out in the red light district in any decent-sized Australian city on a weekend and not see at least two-and-a-half brawls. It’s simply a part of our culture and it’s funny. Anyway, outside of this club were two absolutely plastered blokes, who could barely stand up, trying to punch each other and then people intervened to break up the “fight” after a misdirected swing which was about a metre off target. It simultaneously entertained and annoyed me how serious the bystanding Germans were in breaking up this “conflict”; I would’ve been perfectly happy to see these two sloshed losers fall over on each other for another 10 minutes.
School was a little bit frustrating this week as about half my classes were cancelled and I normally only find out a few minutes before the class. One of the previous teaching assistants did actually warn us about this during the seminar; classes do regularly get cancelled for a myriad of reasons. I also only recently found out that I had a pigeonhole because someone noticed it was overflowing as no-one had previously thought of mentioning to me. Additionally, a few of the English teachers have told me that their classes like my lessons and that their students get shitty when they discover I don’t have a lesson with them that week; this is nice to know.
I promise my next blog will be much more interesting as I’m spending the next weekend in the north of Germany and then we will be having a joint birthday on the weekend after. In other news, a friend from Belgium, who I haven’t seen in a good three years, will be visiting me during the March holidays, which is very exciting even if it’s quite a while away.
Green Bear 