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.