Fun (With Some Pictures)!

Like the first weekend or so after classes started, my friend and I decided to take a trip to Strasbourg. I also speak French, so I was really excited about the opportunity to go to France. The trip was rather spontaneous. It is relatively cheap to get there and only takes about two hours from Heidelberg. We went on a Friday evening and came home Saturday evening. The city is not very big. Upon arriving, we first went to settle in at our hostel. We got dinner at the hostel and then decided to walk around the city by night (after getting a map from the guy at the main desk). The city was beautiful at night and I was rather disappointed that unfortunately my camera does not take night pictures well, so I was going to go back and take pictures during the day. We happened upon a small movie theater where they were showing SKYFALL. It turns out the movie came out in France I believe significantly earlier than it did in the US. All the movies at this theater were dubbed in French with no subtitles, however my friend wanted to see it anyway even though she did not speak any French. We saw the movie; I thought it was  pretty good! It turns out it is significantly easier to understand French that is dubbed than French that is naturally spoken in a movie. And now when I think of Daniel Craig, he will always speak French in my mind. My friend was a little bored... . When we left the theater, it was like 1 in the morning and it had started raining a lot. The trams and buses actually stop running very early in Strasbourg, which was rather unfortunate. We were trying to walk back to our hostel (the city is not very big) and got seriously lost. The streets all had signs, but the map we were given only showed large streets. So we knew what large street we were on, just not where or what direction we were going. Every so often, we would find a bus/tram station that had a map and we would temporarily figure out where we were... and then get lost again. And because of the rain, our map had pretty much disintegrated. We finally found a good tram line that we were able to almost follow back to our hostel. We arrived at our hostel soaked at 2:30 in the morning. It was very very annoying to get lost, but I knew nothing too bad would happen. The city is pretty small, so chances were that we would find our hostel just by wandering around randomly. It just could have taken until 6 in the morning. But all turned out ok! Here are some pictures of Strasbourg the next day:

Like Heidelberg, there is a main river that runs through the center of the city.

Thought this was an interesting building. It kind of comes right out at you.

The Cathedral

 Inside the Cathedral

 They let you climb the spiral staircase all the way to the top of the Cathedral. This is part way up.

These are all the views from all sides of the top of the Cathedral. It was a rather long and exhausting trip up. It kind of gives you the feeling of being claustrophobic, but by that point, the quickest way to get out of the staircase is by continuing to go up. 

La Petite France! An old area of Strasbourg.

 Swans!!!

 Funny looking brown and white swan that I found interesting and had never seen before.

Protestant church

Me with an interesting statue

European Union

My parents also came to visit me in early November. Very nice to have them come visit. I met them in Frankfurt on a Sunday and then we road the train to Zurich and visited with each other while viewing the outside landscape. We got to Zurich in the evening. When we tried to find a place to eat, we discovered that all the restaurants were ridiculously expensive! Actually not just the restaurants, everything was expensive. We managed to find a cheaper Italian place that was 20 Francs for a plate of pasta. 20 Francs is about equal to 20 Dollars. That was the best we could do. The food was very good though! While we were walking around looking for dinner, we encountered a whole bunch of people dressed in costume playing really loud percussion instruments. They had been in the train station as well. There must have been some kind of holiday or festival doing on, but have no idea what it was, even after asking around. 

All the festival people came into our restaurant!

Walking around Zurich in the morning.

My parents unfortunately left before Thanksgiving, so I was just here. Thursday night, I went to the Mensa where they were serving chicken. I have never heard of there being any turkey in Germany and I do not know about anyone else who has seen it here either. So, I had chicken and a beer and ended up meeting a friend for dinner. A nice dinner. Afterwards, I was walking around the Christmas Market that had recently begun in Heidelberg and encountered my friend from Scotland and her family. We did some more Christmas Market exploring. The next night, some friends from Spain and Italy decided they wanted to cook a Korean dinner, Bibimbap, which means 'mix of everything.' My Korean friend and I were invited. I considered it another version of Thanksgiving. My Korean friend did as well, since it turns out there is a Korean Thanksgiving, but it was back in September. 

Our dinner!!

The next weekend was interesting as well. I met my Korean friend and some German friends for dinner  at the Mensa and we then went to go see a popular Korean movie "Pieta." The title is not Korean; I am not specifically sure what it is actually called in Korea, or maybe it is called that. Anyway, the movie was showing in a small movie theater in Heidelberg. It was left in its original Korean, so my Korean friend understood it, and then it had German subtitles, so all my German friends got it easily. I actually got it pretty easily as well with the German subtitles. Surprisingly. It is really strange to listen to a movie in a completely foreign language and then read the movie in another foreign language, my brain goes "wow." It was a very well-done movie about the slums in Seoul. It was actually very unsettling; I do not think I would watch it again. 

image from Wikipedia.org

After, we went back to one of my friends' apartment and had sandwiches and Gluwein. Then, another Korean guy, a Peruvian girl, and a Brazilian girl came over. It was crazy! We had conversations going on in German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean!! It makes your head spin. A very interesting night.

The First Month of Classes

Classes start much later at Heidelberg than they do in the United States. While most colleges in the US start in late August or early September, classes at Heidelberg started October 15. This is apparently common in Germany, with some exceptions. Signing up for classes was also a different experience. I will assume that most people going on an exchange trip to Heidelberg will have had more German language experience than the absolutely none that I had. It was a little difficult to find the courses and their descriptions because there was not always a web page translation over to English. If I had not had some important links emailed to me from one of the study abroad coordinators, I would have found the task even more overwhelming. Once I had classes that I wanted to take, there were a couple different ways that I could sign up for them which were not completely straight forward. One way is to simply go to the class on the first day and hope that you get a seat. If you get a seat, the professor will most likely add you to the roster after class. However, this means you might have to get to class like 20 minutes early. Another way is to email the professor. The professor will then add you to the class roster him/herself. However, one of my professors who I had emailed never emailed me back. So, I decided to go to that class bright and early Monday morning and try to get a seat that way. There is a board in the English department with a list of all the English classes and room numbers and meeting times. My class was scheduled on that board, so I went to the correct room and only found two other people there and the professor never showed up. I never actually figured out what exactly had happened with that class. It turns out that a while afterwards, I found out there is in fact a way to sign up for courses online by using the LSF page for Heidelberg. That probably would have been the easiest way to sign up. It also probably would have said which classes were cancelled and what not. That would have been quite useful to know before I dragged myself out of bed on a Monday morning for a class that I do not think ever existed?

I will now go on to tell you about my experience in German classes. I will say that unfortunately because of classes, I have not been able to travel around so much since they started. A class generally meets once per week for about an hour and a half to two hours. Some students are lucky enough to have a class schedule worked out where they have all their classes on two or three days and then the rest of the four days in the week off. I am not this lucky and ended up with classes Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I have a German Language intensive class that meets two days per week (which counts as two classes for credits), a Morphology class, and a Language Acquisition class.

The German class has been very challenging since not enough people had signed up for my level, so I had to move up a level to still get all the credits for the class. The class is from 4:30-8 twice a week with a break in the middle. The first few classes, my head hurt from having to sit in a second language for so long and I had to concentrate a lot in order to understand the professor. Now, like a month and a half later, I can understand the professor relatively easily and my head does not hurt anymore, which I like! My biggest problem is that it has taken my speaking ability a lot longer to catch up with everyone else. There is also a very large portion of very basic vocabulary that I missed and would have learned in the second level. However, I am slowly catching up with that. The class is consists of people from all over, including France, Spain, Italy, Norway, US, Ukraine, and Brazil. It has been interesting because the entire class has been in German and some of my classmates do not speak any English at all. I spent the first few weeks of class sitting next to a girl from Ukraine and another girl from Brazil, neither of whom spoke English, but instead Russian and Spanish as other second languages. It was very challenging to do exercises in class because the teacher would explain the exercise in German and then either me or my partner would not completely understand the exercise and then one of us has to explain it to the other, but neither of us know that much German. It went so slowly because we were constantly looking up words in dictionaries. The Ukrainian girl is interesting, as she does track and field in Ukraine like I do at UMASS. I have actually learned a small amount of track and field vocabulary in trying to talk to her about it. Talking with her when the class first started was almost impossible for me because my speaking was so bad, but is much easier now (but still pretty slow). I now sit next to some girls from Spain who are very good at English. The nice thing about that is that although it is a German language class, it is nice to be able to have a few things clarified in English. Now when I try to do the exercises, things move faster and I feel like me and my partner get more out of it because we get more done. This language class is different from other classes at Heidelberg in that we have homework every night. The homework takes me a while, I think longer than other people, because I am still catching up with the class. We do a lot of reading about traveling abroad and what people need to bring with them when they go abroad and what foreigners need to bring with them if they want to work in Germany. We do listening exercises and then a lot about prepositions and relative clauses. We each will have one presentation about I think pretty much any topic and then a final test and then a two to three page paper in German with a relatively flexible topic. The paper has taken me a while because I cannot articulate concisely what I want to say in German like I can in English. My paper is ending up longer than it probably would be for my topic in English.

My other classes are linguistics classes for my major. Language Acquisition is interesting. It is about how children learn to speak their language, starting from the point at which they are born. The class is once per week and we do not have any homework, just weekly reading. The reading is only one chapter, so not too bad if you are interested in the material. Each week, there are different groups of people presenting each chapter. Mine was a presentation on how children first start to acquire syntax. My group members and I took about 45 minutes to present. Otherwise, the professors lectures (as expected) and a lot of the examples are in German. Most of the class is German. While it is not absolutely essential to understand the examples, it is rather helpful and I am glad to be taking my German Language course. The professor also shows up video clips as examples of children acquiring language and how language improves at different ages. At the end of this course, there is a 15 page paper required as the final. The paper can be on most anything having do with language acquisition. Mine will be on second and third language acquisition. I am researching on how second languages influence a person's learning of a third language and am also conducting an experiment to do so.

My Morphology class is probably my most interesting class. When you take a foreign language class, like German, you learn all the endings that go on the verbs, how to make a verb past tense, how to make a noun plural, how to agree and adjective with a noun, etc. This Morphology class is essentially the same thing, but in English and very advanced. I almost feel that the class would be easier if I were not a native speaker. It is easy to pick out different types of inflection and figure out how words go together in a foreign language because that is how you learn it. I never think about that in English, as English is my native language, so even though I fully understand all the material, I make silly mistakes. The class is similar to Language Acquisition in that each class, one student presents that topic. However, the student must find outside research besides the textbooks and enough research to talk about the topic for 20 minutes! The student then had to come up with some sort of short class activity at the end of the presentation. I had the misfortune of going first and actually found doing the research rather challenging. The copyright laws are way more strict in Germany than they are in the US. In the US, you can just look on Google Scholar. Here, you have to go through the HEIDI system in which the school has bought all these articles. However, it depends on your topic. I still had trouble accessing articles, but I know that some people who do science have no trouble at all. I would highly recommend using the UMASS library research (it does not know you are in Germany) or I know a lot of people have friends from their home countries do google searches, then save the pdf's, and then send them the pdf's by email. For the greatest success, you basically have to just plan ahead way more than you would in the US. And then, I would recommend asking your professor exactly how to site your sources, because that can be a little different as well. The other difference between the linguistics classes here and the linguistics classes at UMASS are that they are more theoretical. At UMASS, the test is basically on whether or not you can solve the problem, and sometimes you have to explain what you used to solve the problem. In this Morphology class at Heidelberg, the professor gave us a mock final exam to see how we would do. A large portion of the exam is choose one out of three important linguists and explain how they influenced the field of linguistics. I was not expecting to have to know this at all. It does not matter how well I can do the morphology problems, I still have to know this extra material as well. I can see how this material is important, it is just different than in the US.

Sorry to have written so much with so few pictures in this post. I just feel that if I had already known a lot of this stuff before having to experience it, life would have been significantly easier.

A Little Bit of the First Month

I arrived in Heidelberg in early September. This was the first time I had ever been outside the United States with the exception of Canada. I mean, I spent a week in Quebec speaking French, but that is nothing like a semester in Germany. To get here, I first flew into Spain and from there, flew into Frankfurt. This is both the furthest I've ever been away from home and the first time I've had to get around an unfamiliar place with a new language completely alone.

When I first got here, I spoke not a single word of German. Actually, all the international students arrived a month early for the specific purpose of learning at least enough German to function. In a few days, I was to start an intensive beginner German class through the Max Weber Haus. I signed up for my dorm and the sign-in lady gave me a shopping list of essentials and where to get them. There's a variety of different dorm styles here. Many of the dorms in the Altstadt are like apartments with a full kitchen and living room and then each of the maybe 5 people living there get their own room. My dorm is in Neunheim, the new part of the city where all the new science labs are. My dorm is situated in a residential area, like 2 minutes walking distance from the Necker River that cuts through Heidelberg. I have room of my own that came with a bed, a desk and chair, a shelf, and a wardrobe. I also have a kitchenette and bathroom that I share with my roommate Igor. He is finishing his Ph.D. in microbiology and is from Ukraine. He also has his own single room that is on the other side of our kitchen. This is what my room looks like:

The culture shock was also interesting, or different than I excepted. The difference in language for starters was quite shocking, even though I knew that would happen. In Canada, people realized you're speaking French with an American accent, so they respond to you in English. Here, everyone just speaks German to you, regardless of your foreign accent, which makes sense. Living here also requires significantly more planning than in the US. For instance, the grocery stores are closed on Sundays, so you preferably not run out of food at that time, which I have accidentally done... . There are also no 24-7 convenience stores. And then there's weird small things that you wouldn't expect to be shocking, but are. For instance, the keys go in the locks upside down compared to the US. Initially took me for ever to get my door unlocked. And then the 80x80cm pillow on the shopping list I was given is in fact really quite large. Although these small differences now more seem kind of comical.

The first month here, there were not many German students because everyone was still on Summer break. However, my German course through the Max Weber Haus gave me the opportunity to meet a variety of other international students who I continue to hang out with. My beginner German class consisted of a few other Americans and students from Italy, UK, Spain, Australia, and South Korea. The class was taught completely in German, even though no one had even learned German before. This helped everyone learn way faster than one might in the US. It also evened out the playing field. If the class was taught in English, all the native English speakers would have had a way easier time than the non-native English speakers.

The first Sunday after I got to Germany, I went out to go exploring and take pictures of Heidelberg. Here are the pics:

These two photos are me standing on the old bridge over the Necker looking at Neuenheim.

These two are the view of the Heidelberg Castle and Altstadt from the bridge.

The bridge I was standing on.

Altstadt.

My classmates all got really close and we all decided to go visit the castle, which has an amazing view of Heidelberg!!

Us with the castle in the background.

Climbing 314 steps to get to the castle...

Us at the castle!

The castle

Crazy awesome view of Heidelberg from the castle!

And then us with the view in the background.

I have loved having the opportunity to meet everyone! Most of our conversations revolve around the various different aspects of all of our countries, for instance, what is similar and what is different. One example is I have noticed that based on the people I have met so far, there seems to be a very big difference in how people go about "dating" in the West (US and Europe) vs. the East (South Korea, Japan). This is a popular lunch or dinner conversation topic. Through these conversations, I have learned that many people seem to be significantly more conservative about dating in the East. My friends from the East have many times seemed shocked upon hearing about everyone else's dating experiences in Europe and US. A lot of my friends have also asked me about "Jersey Shore" and "High   School Musical," wondering if the US is in fact like that. Another friend from Korea has also asked about comical scenes from "How I Met Your Mother." Scenes that Americans would normally laugh at are not funny to her at all, yet she still seems to like the show. 

Another popular topic among my international friends is politics. I have noticed that people abroad seem to be way more interested in the presidential election than my friends ever were back home. It is interesting to see the election from an international point of view. My international friends all seem to be pro-Obama and no one can imagine why any American could possibly be pro-Romney. In many countries in Europe and in Australia, there is public health care and everyone has to have some kind of health care, either private or public. No one seems to understand why this is such a big issue in the US. All of their questions have greatly improved my political awareness because I have keep up to date enough to be able to converse with everyone and answer the questions. I had another friend from France also come up and ask me what I thought about the potential economic impact of Hurricane Sandy and if I off the top of my head knew any prominent authors that he could use to research the American Recession. Now I obviously know there will be a huge economic impact from Hurricane Sandy, but I have no idea of the specifics. I also have no idea of any prominent authors that wrote about the American Recession. I am wondering, since people in Europe seem to much more politically knowledgeable than my friends back home, does he in fact know prominent economic authors in his own country France? Is that common? Maybe I should know these authors?

In late September, all the UMASS students in Baden-Wurttemberg met in Freiburg. We then took two buses and like a 30 minute walk to the lodge where we were staying in the Black Forest. The whole area was beautiful! It mainly consisted of huge green hills with some pastures and some spots of trees, and then sprinkled with cows. All the cows had cow-bells that you could hear! Every so often, there would be a town that consisted of roughly 30 houses. Here are some pictures!

The lodge that we stayed at.

This was the first time that I had been around all Americans since being in Germany. I never noticed before that we Americans have a particular style to us, but I notice it now. It's hard to describe. The other difference was that for the past month, all of my conversations revolved around what everyone's culture was in their respective countries. Now, everyone I was meeting was also from my school and I already knew about that. At first, it was almost shocking. But then it was crazy fun to meet everyone because although everyone was from UMASS, I had never known them before! I am beginning to think that when I come back to the US, I will be so used to living in Germany that it will initially be shocking as well, even though it's my own country. 

After the September German class was over, we had two weeks before Winter Semester classes started in October. This allowed for plenty of time to travel. My first trip was with a large group of international friends to Munich for Oktoberfest, a must-see attraction for all foreigners! With the cheapest tickets possible, it took about 5 hours to get there and then about 7 hours to get back, but we were dedicated! The group consisted of people from the US, UK, Switzerland, Australia, and South Korea. The place we ended up spending the night in Munich was really awesome and only like 20 Euros! It was "The Tent," which was as it sounds, a whole bunch of giant tents. They gave you lots of heavy blankets to make sure you kept warm!

We ate at a restaurant in Munich the night we got there =]

My friend and I at the entrance.

The carnival part, we got there early in the morning, so it wasn't that crowded yet. By the end of the day, it was packed!

Inside the tent at Oktoberfest, before everyone got there. It soon filled up!

Our table =]

My next trip was to Prague with one of my friends. Prague is amazing! It has a very different feel than Germany, which is hard to describe. I was not actually expecting it to be so different. My friend and I stayed overnight at a hostel which was really cheap. Actually, everything was extremely cheap. The smallest bill you could take out of the ATM was 1000Kc, but everything only costed like 30Kc. It was actually hard to spend all the money and not have any Kc left over. The first day, my friend and I explored the Prague Palace and the Cathedral. 

Really really big bird that someone was keeping tied up!

View of Prague!

Prague Palace

 Cathedral

More view of Prague!

We found a 3 hour tour group that was free and you payed tip after! Was a very good tour of Prague!

 Another cathedral with one tower bigger than the other. Supposedly some of the stones got stollen while they were building it, no one really seems to know.

 The clock that tells you like 10 different things besides time!

 Conscience...

Franz Kafka and his nightmare!

 And at night, my friend and I went to see the night scenes. We stood on the St. Charles bridge and looked at the lights. They light up the Prague Palace every night! We also went to a Czech restaurant for traditional Czech food, knee of the pig. Really good!