Lauschaer Kugelmarkt

On Saturday, Ingrid and Matthias Weiß (a teacher at our school and her husband)took us to a small town called Lauscha for the Lauschaer Kugelmarkt. Lauscha is famous because they make those amazing handblown Christmas balls - the kind you can buy cheap knock-offs of in Wal-mart for fifty cents but really cost 20 Euro each. It was amazing. Every household in the entire village makes their own decorations. They spend all year making them, and then they have only the month of December to sell them at their own market or at one of the many markets around Germany. Obviously, they also ship them around the world.

There was also a glass-blowing factory where you could watch them making the glass balls - and if you felt like spending the money, make your own Christmas balls. We weren't into that - also we had to leave quite quickly because Dave was going to be late getting back to Ilmenau to do his private tutoring with the students for the TU.

Dave also bought this disgusting giant slab of bacon. It comes on a string so you can just hang it up on the wall. It's nasty - although it smells quite good when it is cooking. He says its ridiculously salty so he has to soak it in water for at least fifteen minutes before he cooks it. He has this little jar he's been keeping the bacon grease in (since we can't throw it down the sink) and it is nasty. I am fairly certain our roommates are quite disgusted by this unidentifiable jar of nastiness that is now sitting on our countertop by the stove.

Winter Concert

Last Friday was my school's Christmas concert, in which all of the choirs at our school perform. The concert was really good. At the end, during all the bowing, the conductor was having all of the instrumentalists come out of the choir and bow separately - and then he pointed at me and Dave and had us come out and bow. Apparently, the school wants to show off their two Americans - although it is fairly true that without us the Lehrerchor (teacher's choir) would have not been nearly as good. Our friend Rich took some pictures - but most of them came out terribly since he was all the way in the back of the church and the lighting was quite terrible. He did make a nice recording of one of the songs though - although the video quality is terrible. The recording can be found at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjpsjj_Ro_M
Here is a link to the newspaper article and picture in the Freies Wort, the local independent newspaper: http://www.freies-wort.de/nachrichten/regional/ilmenau/ilmenaulokal/art2447,745367

We have another concert this weekend with just the Kammerchor (chamber choir) in Manebach. Hopefully we will get some better pictures this time.

Sweetness!

A good week in Ilmenau:

Monday: no school! apparently there are "variable" holidays in Thuringia. The schools can just randomly decide to have a holiday, so my school took Monday off. I had a fight with my roommate, went swimming, went to Russian and then got a cut and color at the local place. I almost thought it was going to be a disaster at first, but it turned out really well.

Tuesday: I taught five FULL lessons in a row. Usually I only teach fifteen to twenty minutes of a lesson - but I taught all five lessons all the way through. It was exhausting. In three of the classes, I was teaching about Thanksgiving. The funniest part is the copious amounts of notes being taken by the teachers in the back of the classroom so that they have something to teach their students the next year. After that, we had teacher choir (where the choir teacher FREAKED out as usual since Dave was not there - especially since we had only one guy at rehearsal (who really has difficulty staying on pitch unfortunately).

After choir, I went to Ingrid's house to have tea before going off to the university to enroll. Ingrid, her husband and I went in on all together in order to make sure everything got filled out properly. Since the university here is a technical university (and because it's already two months into the semester) it was a bit complicated to become matriculated. I have to have an official invitation from a professor to enroll. Good thing Ingrid's husband is head of the Maschinenbau department, because otherwise I would not have been able to enroll as a mechanical engineering major. And we even got Dave enrolled as well - which is amazing.
The reason to enroll in a German university is not necessarily because you have any desire to take classes, but because of the Semesterticket you get for the train. We can now travel to Erfurt, Meiningen, and Saalfeld for free on the train. In the case of Saalfeld, that's a two hour train ride. One way to Erfurt costs 4.80. The semesterticket, which is good until the end of August, only cost 61,50.

Wednesday: Off to Erfurt for a working day with ThILLM, the educational wing of the state of Thuringia. I am now the voice of the directions for the listening exam for graduating seniors. I also got to correct and edit the written exams for German high schools in the rest of the world. But mostly I sat around and talked to people and ate free lunch. Oh, and I got paid 15,00 an hour for this. It was quite funny because one of the guys doing the listening was from New Zealand and his accent is obviously quite strong and quite different from any of the other accents. They made him record over and over and over because his pronunciation was too difficult.

And Dave came back from the United States on Wednesday! Poor Dave had the longest flight ever from the US, and then he had to take the train back to Ilmenau, and then he had to teach our university class all by himself because I was eating cake with the English teachers. It was good cake too.

Thursday: Dave got a for real job!!!

Today: We have no water for the entire middle of the day because they are fixing the plumbing. And tomorrow eight of us teaching assistants are going off to Leipzig to the Weihnachtsmarkt.

Bremerhaven

(trip to Bremen, con'td).








On Saturday, we went to Bremerhaven. Bremerhaven has a bit of a unique status in Germany. There are sixteen Bundesländer in Germany (states). Three of them are cities: Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen. Bremen does not have a coast, so a long time ago, the ruler of Bremen bought the town of Bremerhaven from the surrounding territories. The two are not connected by land, but belong to one government. It takes about an hour on the train to get to Bremerhaven.

We went to Bremerhaven to visit the Deutsche Auswanderer Haus (German Emigration House). Bremerhaven is sort of the opposite of Ellis Island in New York. A huge amount of the immigrants to the United States from all over Europe went through Bremerhaven on their way to the New World. The museum was incredibly well done. It was designed to let you see what it was like to travel on board a steamer. Each exhibition room was redone to look like different parts of the boat. At the end, you could research any of your ancestors that may have immigrated to the United States. Unfortunately, I didn't know we were going to go to the museum beforehand so I didn't get to look anything up about our family.

Bremen

Last weekend, I traveled to Bremen, in the northwestern corner of Germany, to visit a former rowing coach who is currently living there (and grew up there). The train ride was nice and quiet and uneventful. The train from Ilmenau was late (as usual), but it was okay because I had a twenty minute layover in Neudietendorf. Neudietendorf is a stupid little hole in the wall station, but you often have to transfer at it in order to go somewhere to the west of Thüringen. I caught a regional express train from Neudietendorf to Göttingen, and then took the ICE from Göttingen to Bremen. Apparently the ICE that run on the Munich to Bremen line are the first generation of ICEs, so they’re quite old school. In terms of the actual niceness of the train, the regional express train was much nicer.
Mark (also known as MOK from his initials, Mark Oliver Klages) picked me up at the train station and then we went on a tour of the old city of Bremen after dropping the stuff off at his mother’s house. Bremen is a quite cute little city, full of little tiny narrow alleyways and cute old shops. Most of the buildings along these little alleys are just stores, but some are houses. According to MOK, they are very expensive and ritzy, but the tradeoff is that you have to deal with tourists wandering by all the time.
Bremen is famous for the Bremen Stadtmusikanten – that old legend about the four animals who decide to travel to Bremen in order to earn a living as street musicians. They come to a house along the way and decide to spend the night there. Little do they know, but a band of robbers has made this house their headquarters. The animals (a donkey, a dog, a rooster, and something else) pile on top of each other in order to see in the window. The robbers are so scared of this strange four-headed beast, they run away and never come back. The four Bremer Stadtmusikanten decide they like the house so they just stay there and live there and they never actually make it to Bremen.

First Snow in Ilmenau

Today was officially the first real sticking snow in Ilmenau. There was snow on the ground yesterday morning, but it melted by the time I went to school. Today, we probably got at least four inches and it was fairly blizzard-like at times. In Frauenwald, which is more in the mountains, they got half a meter last night. It is going to be a long winter, especially since last year it apparently didn't snow at all the entire time. One of the things Dave and I were talking about the other day was that it must be a pain to shovel all the sidewalks (since they are mostly cobblestone). It's not. They have little mini-plows that plow the sidewalks. They are nice, except then you have to walk around them in the road.

Last Saturday, we went down to the new ice rink here in Ilmenau (which is beautiful) to watch an Eisstocksport Tournament. Eisstocksport is curling - but it was German curling, meaning no brooms and it's not such a precision sport as the Canadian version. Instead of pushing the stones across the ice, you bowl them. The Ilmenau team was pretty bad. They kept throwing their stones and they would land crookedly and sort of wobble across the ice. Most of the time they didn't even make it into the target zone. Oh well. The stones are different as well. They are smaller and lighter and have interchangeable bottoms. It would be my guess that the different bottoms have different coefficients of friction.

And now I need help from all of my readers out there: I am teaching one of the German social studies classes in two weeks. They are about to start learning about the United States. I have been asked to do a short introduction. One of the questions that the teacher wants me to address is: Why are Americans so proud of their country and of being America? Please write me a comment and tell me what your answer would be. Your own personal opinion, please.

Yesterday it snowed for the first time (for real). It actually snowed a couple of weeks ago, but only a bit. But it snowed just about all day yesterday - big, heavy, wet flakes. Nothing stuck here in Ilmenau, but I can look out at the mountains and see lots of snow. Every once in a while you see a car riding around with six inches of snow on the top, but nothing is really on the ground here still. The woman at the library definitely sounded depressed when she said, "There's going to be five more months of this," to me yesterday while I was checking out some movies.

On Wednesday, I, along with all of the other Fulbrighters in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia got invited to the US consulate in Leipzig. It was sort of silly because we didn't do much - but it was nice to see everyone from our training course and to meet more Fulbrighters in my area. There are quite a few research scholars in Jena and Weimar who I didn't know about. First we had a little mix-and-mingle over tea, coffee and bagels (I haven't had a bagel in forever). Then the consul general for Leipzig, the Cultural Attaché in Berlin and the Public Affairs guy for Leipzig talked to us for a bit about various things. Then we all headed over to the Museum for Contemporary History of the DDR for a nice English tour.

I finally have a fairly consistent work schedule going on, now that we've actually been back in school for a few weeks. Although apparently Germans freak out if they don't see a holiday coming in the future because we are having a random floating holiday weekend on Thanksgiving weekend so that we have four days off. Too bad I didn't know that before - could have made the trip home for Thanksgiving. Oh well.

I am teaching 5th, 6th, and 12th grade classes at the moment. Depending on the teacher, I either get used appropriately or not. I'm giving it another week in order for us to get comfortable first before I push for a little more autonomy for those who don't give me any. One teacher just uses me for reading exercises in her 5th grade classes, but in her 6th grade class she gives me a lot more responsibility. Last week, I talked about class schedules in America for a bit and this week I am supposed to talk about sight-seeing attractions in London. (Because obviously I am British). Oh well. At least I have been to London. The other teachers for 5th and 6th usually just write me a little note about what they are going to cover in class, and then sort of let me cover it in my own way.