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Living in Germany

Hello Friends and Family,
I'm sorry I have not written in so long... from now on I will be posting once or twice a month... I promise!
So I'll start out with the past... I lived for six weeks with a host family in a subarb of a village (ya thats right... a village's village) called Talheim (Valley Home in English) where I had no internet at my house and lived with a 72 year old Housewife and a retired Blacksmith who worked for Daimler-Chrysler for 40+ years. It was really interesting... the food was excellent and almost all of it came from their awsome garden. I had the entire upstairs to myself, which was as big as an apartment and my guest mom, Luzia, cooked awsome food every night... My favorite was Kuerbis Suppe (Pumpkin Soup) which always made her laugh because it was one the easiest things she made. She made dough every week and took it to the local bakery to have it baked, which I had every morning with homemade marmelade from raspberries, blackberries, plums, and elder berries. In Germany the breakfasts and dinners are both cold, and they never toast their bread. I Couchsurfed with a guy in Stuttgart once and he ate untoasted bread with butter and nutella... and he piled on both. They put butter on every peice of bread no matter what else they have on it... butter with honey, marmelade, cheese, nutella. One time I ate cheese with my bread without putting butter on the bread first and Luzia looked at me like I was crazy and insisted that I should put butter on it. It's really funny. The school I was at in this village (the school was in Horb, of which Talheim is the subarb) was only for international students to take intensive German language, so I met several people from other countries, but with whom I could speak in German... it was really cool. I actually went to Frankfurt for the biggest auto show in the world with four Brazilians, and the whole time we spoke German together... totally sweet. Every weekend the school would take us on a trip to a city close by and so I saw a few of the more famous university cities in the state (which is called Baden-Wuerttemberg). Twice I went with a hiking group from Talheim on hikes and that was super cool. It was with my host moms guest brother, Bernhardt, who is really funny and really friendly. These couple of hikes were really cool because it was basically just talking with random old people the entire day, but all in German (I was the youngest by like thirty years). And the second one we took a charter bus to a wine region and ate at the winery's restaurant, so the people were really funny on the way home, all drunk and singing german songs and stuff. Ok... now to the present...
So I'm living in Tuebingen, which is 45 minutes south of Stuttgart( Capital of Baden-wuerttemberg and home to Mercedes and Porsche) in a High rise Student housing building. My room is on the ninth floor and it faces the sunset, so its really gorgeous in the evening when its not too cloudy. My room isn't too great because I have not gotten any posters or decorations yet, so it's kinda like a prison cell, but a nice one :-). My floor mates are all really nice... I was invited to make pizza with a few of them and that was really fun. This week and next I'm still doing orientation stuff for the most part, but tomorrow I'll start my Intercultural communication class and my German Literatur class. On Friday I'll have German History and in two weeks I'll start my German language and comprehension course which is nine hours a week and apparently pretty difficult. Tonight I'm going to try my hand (and foot) at Taekwondo... there's a class offered twice a week for free and its for beginners so I figure what the heck?
Hope all is well and don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions!
Tschuess!

Posted by clawrence on 2009-10-20 13:46:36 | Rating: