A collection of thoughts, musings, reviews, tidbits on life, languages, travel, blah blah blah
It's been a benign three weeks since my last post, and at some point in the last three weeks I realised that I finally felt "settled" in my school as a staff member. The other staff members seem to be "used" to me now, and some have even expressed appreciation for what I do, which means a lot because the culture here is seldom complimentary for the sake of it.
Lager beer is, for better or worst, the most popular type of beer in the world. Most of the nastiest, cheapest, watery beers produced gigalitre by gigalitre by the enormous multinational breweries around the world are ignominious attempts at brewing lager.
Since it was my first Xmas outside of Australia and I have no family here to celebrate with, my friend, Mirj, who lives in Nuremberg, invited me to her family’s Xmas celebrations, which was super nice of her. So I was not only having my first German Xmas but my first Franconian one, and it should be very obvious already that Franconia is my favourite region in Germany.
This is going to be a short one because not a lot has transpired over the last two weeks. One particularly notable event, which was actually the only interesting thing to happen during the week before last, was the Laufgelage (“walking feast”). It is evidently the second biggest social event in Erlangen after the Bergkirchweih and is held once a semester, organised by the uni here and consists of a three course dinner shared with complete strangers.
My third week of teaching English in Germany is over and I’ve almost completely settled into my school; I now know the locations of all of my 12 classes and have spoken to all 11 teachers I’ll be assisting, and all of them are more or less approachable and amicable (though I can’t say the same about most of the teachers in the other departments).
My first week of school has been incredibly interesting and perhaps a little overwhelming, but in a good way. Life here is much faster and purposeful than that of slow, old Adelaide.
After a long transit from Australia, I’ve finally arrived in Germany and in this blog post I will reflect on my last few days in Australia, my trip and my first couple of days in Germany.
