"Du findst alles gut?"

There are lots of NEW things in my life. Yesterday I moved in with my host family and today is the day that I officially started learning German. I had my first German class this morning. Let’s just say it was interesting to say the least. I wanted to die laughing the entire time. Let me just set the scene for you. There are ten students. Three from the United States, one from Brazil, one from Spain, two from Korea, one from China, one from Czech Republic and the other two I had either never heard of the country or couldn’t understand where they were from. We started out by going around and saying our names in German and asking the person next to us, “Wie heisst du? and “Woher kommst du?” Literally practiced three questions the ENTIRE time, but the worst part is I came home and practiced them on my family and got them all wrong. Perfect. The funniest part was when we practiced the alphabet. I almost peed my pants. Some people have crazy accents so they can’t make certain sounds so she just makes them keep doing it. Literally we sounded like a bunch of animals. The alphabet is the worst. I mean you say “e” for the “I” and “a” for the “e” and I forgot to mention we add a bunch of letters to the alphabet, which have dots over them. And lucky me, one is in my last name. Of the three questions we practiced, I can’t say my last name correctly or the street I live on. I asked the teacher like 6 times how to say ö and my street is Rue Dioderot, which is French and the teacher thought I was writing the wrong street. Thanks, but I know where I live.

Seriously though, for those of you who have heard me sing the German alphabet to you, I was singing it so wrong the whole time. Or so the teacher informed me today. We learned how to count too, and I can’t say the number 10, which is “zehn.” It looks easy, but the z is a “ts” sound and I can’t do that. Bad news is once you get past nine they all have that sound in them. Dreizehn, vierzehn, funfzehn….etc. Great. All in all, it was so funny hearing people trying to say words and letters, me included. We sounded like a farm full of animals. When we were doing a partner activity, my partner and I finished early so we were talking in English and she was telling me why she came to Berlin two days ago and then asked what I was doing. I told her and she was super excited that I was a Christian and that I liked sports. The teacher then comes over to us and says, “Now is not a good time to be having a conversation in English.” I wanted to say, “As opposed to having one in German?  Since clearly we are here in the beginner of all beginners class for German. What would you like us to speak in?” I was pretty annoyed since we were having a good conversation. 

Hertha BSC game at Olympia Stadion

The other exciting thing I got to do was go to my first professional soccer game. I went to the Hertha BSC game last Friday; Karin hooked me up with two tickets. It was amazing. Olympia Stadion is incredible; there were 50,000 people there for the game. These people are like hardcore fans too. It was a lot of fun and a really neat atmosphere except the cigarette smoke that was coming at me from all sides. I swear my lungs were collapsing as we sat there. Last week, I also went to the zoo. One of the girls that I lived with in Colorado last summer is studying in Cyprus for the semester and they are taking a two week trip to nine countries so they were in Berlin for the day. We went to the zoo. I love big animals. They are so fascinating to me; I wish I could just ride an elephant or go and pet the tiger. The lemurs were allowed to crawl on us. They didn’t crawl on me though, which was fine. Never know when they might have to go #2. Eeeww. It was a fun, refreshing day hanging out with Bekah and two of her friends. We had good spiritual conversations and I brought them to the Berlin version of “Chipotle”.



The girls and I in front of the TIGER.



On Sunday, I moved in with my host family. I now have a BIG bed and a great family. I met my “brother” today. He seems really cool and smart. He studies Pharmacy here. I am trying to teach myself how to speak slowly because often times I get the look that they have no idea what I just said. I wonder how many times people just pretend to understand me. Probably a lot. I realize how much slang I use here when I talk. Today at PT, I asked my physio if he wanted me to roll over (onto my stomach). And then he proceeded to tell me about a human getting killed by an auto and what it was called in Germany. I was slightly confused how that related. Maybe the whole idea of a rollover accident? Not sure. All in all, that has been my last week. Really busy, hence I have stunk at blogging. I am going to try and get better, but I will have homework these days. And we all know how much I am on top of my studies. Oh yeah I forgot to mention when I was on the train today on my way home, there was this 12 year old boy that was just digging for gold in his nose for like five minutes. I seriously wanted to shout over at him and say, “Du findst alles gut?” which isn’t even correct, but close enough to, ”You finding anything good?” It was one of those, is this for real moments? Once again public transportation comes through for me. Well that’s all for now. More to come.