4/3/08

I can honestly say that German class has gotten much more entertaining over the past few days! Besides learning the basics of German, our teacher has also introduced us to German words that one would not want to repeat at church.

Yesterday in German class our teacher was telling us how to count in German. She used her hand as a tool and ended up giving us all the one-fingered salute! This launched us into a talk about German slang! Since she didn’t seem to have any problem flipping us off, we thought she would be a good source for German slang! We started the talk and it lasted for about a good 30 minutes! I will stop now without getting into to much detail.

Today consisted of much more of the same, German class, lunch, and more German class! After class, all of us international students were supposed to get a tour of Bad Mergentheim….unfortunately it was raining. We instead stuck to our information packets and listened to our would be tour guide give us some interesting information within one of the classrooms at the university about the “romantic road,” a building where Beethoven supposedly stayed within the city for about two weeks (don’t worry I have a picture of it), a restaurant within BM that has grape vines growing on the ceiling, and other areas of interest within BM. Aside from the tour guide stuff, we learned that we will be visiting Wurzburg, Germany as a class to view some of the sights within that city. Another day trip for the whole class is a trip to the headquarters of Audi!!! These day trips will be taking place on something the school calls “excursion days.” They are placed throughout the 12 weeks of school and are meant to give us an opportunity to see things that we may not have the chance to see on our own.

We have been trying to get internet within our apartment for some time now! After eating some dinner tonight, Scott and I figured that we needed to take things into our own hands to accomplish anything regarding establishing an internet connection. We have noticed that we get a strong signal from some other secured wireless network very close to our apartment. As it turns out, it is coming from the apartment above ours! The daughter of our landlord lives there with her three children. So us knowing full well that she does not speak any English, wrote her a note in German using the skills that we have gained from this short week of language class. We ventured up to her apartment and gave her the note. Basically what we were asking her for was the password to her wireless network so we could use the internet from our own apartment to call our family and friends. We offered to pay part of her monthly bill if she would let us use it. What ensued were a lot of SCHIZAS….obviously coming from her mouth! She was clearly upset at the language barrier. What came out of the “very hard to understand conversation,” was that she will let us know tomorrow if it will be ok for us to use her wireless internet. Hopefully she lets us….!