A collection of thoughts, musings, reviews, tidbits on life, languages, travel, blah blah blah
New Year’s Eve in Germany is called Silvester which is named, for some positively boring religious reason, after Pope Sylvester I and, unfortunately, not after the lisping cat from the Looney Tunes. We had a Sause, a crude colloquial nominalisation denoting a “booze-up”, a word which I had learnt some years prior from a few German undesirables in Lithuania of all places.
Dresden has an absolutely beautiful old town, perhaps the most beautiful in all of Germany. The old town was heavily bombed during the war and has been immaculately restored; it has even earned the nickname “Disneyland” because everything is a copy of the original. Russian tourists flood the old town since there are direct flights from Moscow and St. Petersburg.
My housemate, Annette, invited a fellow English assistant, David, and I to her family home in Freudenberg in the Oberpfalz (Upper Palatinate) region, which is about one hour east of Erlangen.
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).
When Germans get really drunk, they almost start behaving like sober Australians. Yet, I didn't see any of the sort of mob violence that you would see on a typical night out in any Australian city, only a bit of vomiting and passing out.
So, I’ve decided to write a blog documenting my experience with the Fremdsprachenassistenz (“FSA”) Program run by the Pädagogischer Austauschdienst (“PAD”). The main reason for this is a lack of any online Aussie voices documenting the experience; the majority of the voices are from Yanks who participate in the program via Fulbright.
Green Bear 