Christmas, among other things

So, it's been too long since I put one of these up, but such is life. I would claim to have been too busy, but it's mostly that I kept forgetting, or putting it off on account of some big event that was coming up, and thinking to myself, "I'll write one after that."

Lots has happened! Things are going well, and I'm feeling good. I turned 24 a little under two weeks ago, and it was a pretty good weekend, all things considered. I was in Heidelberg dancing on Friday night, and I got a birthday jam, which was great. For the non-dancers reading this: a birthday jam is where the birthday person starts dancing with someone in the middle of a circle of the other dancers, and then people come into the circle and steal the birthday person one by one, so that you dance with a bunch of different people. It's a little more complicated in Blues, since you're often in close embrace, but you don't have to be, and so long as the dancers are conscious of that fact, it works just fine. After that I spent the night at the house of two good friends of mine, Merle and Lorenz. Merle dances, and the couple have hosted me about five times, now, for which I brought them a gift that weekend. As usually happens when I stay there, we talked until far too early in the morning (I think it was around 6 or 6:30 this time), and we also watched Planet Terror, which I thought was absolutely hilarious.

That Saturday I met my friend Ozge (another dancer) in the city and we walked around for a bit, and she bought me dinner at the student Mensa, or cafeteria, which was nice of her. It was neat to get to know her a little better. I then met my friend Anette, the teacher with whom I'm traveling to Denmark in just a couple of days, and we intended to go to the movies, but discovered that the film we wanted to see had shown the previous week, and not that week. So instead she showed me one of the popular old bars in the town, where we had a drink, and then headed to an Irish pub for another round (though she was drinking soda, since she had to drive), and met a trio of Arizonans who had just moved to Heidelberg for work. They were friendly folks. Then we drove back to her place in Mannheim and had some Sekt and she gave me the tiniest birthday cake in the world (a little Lindt chocolate), which was sweet. I was not about to ask her to drive me back to Rimbach, and there were no trains, so I stayed over at her place, and took the train home in the morning. On Sunday I just met with a friend for coffee, and then had a quiet drink in my favorite pub. It was an uneventful birthday, in many ways, but a good one.

The end of school went fine, though I still have a number of Klausuren to correct (such is life), and Gluehwurst was nice. The faculty got together for Gluehwein (hot mulled wine) and wurst and Anette stuck around and we walked around Rimbach for a while because there was.....snow! We got a nice coating of snow, which I claimed to be Germany's birthday present to me, and the town looked gorgeous. Anette and I made dinner together, and then met some other teachers in Bistro, a bar in town. She had taken the train (because of Gluehwurst), and so crashed at my place before taking the train back the next morning.

I spent the 24th with my friend Jana's family, and had a lovely meal and a wonderful evening meeting her grandmother and aunt, who were really sweet. Jana and her parents sang a song together, with Bernd playing guitar and Silke playing mandolin. I ended up singing The Christmas Song with Bernd, as well. Around 10 or so we went to the Sonne, and had a couple of drinks before all going home. It was a really nice evening.

The 25th I spent with Linda Johnke, who was the second guest teacher of the new generation, about 9 years ago, and her husband Mick. We had a great day, just relaxing, eating together, playing games, and watching movies. We watched the movie Paul, which I found to be hilarious. It's about a pair of British nerds (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), who go to San Diego Comic-Con and end up meeting an alien. It was great, especially for people who caught all the geeky references, haha.

Last but not least, I just got back yesterday from the Black Forest, Rheinhaussen specifically, where my good friend Dan Hiller lives. Dan was an Rotary exchange student in Janesville more than a decade ago, and has since been back a couple of times. The last time I was in Germany, I spent more than three weeks with him and his parents and sister in Schramberg. It was great to see him, and meet his wife Silvia and their 21 month-old son Noah, and their one year-old Swiss mountain dog Samson. We went out for Thai, and went into the hills to hike in the snow a little bit, and let Samson run around (he was so excited about the snow!), and then Dan and I also went and saw the latest Mission Impossible film, which wasn't bad. Incidentally, that also has Simon Pegg in it. Alas it was dubbed, but oh well. It was still entertaining.

Now it's just packing, and then off to Mannheim for a New Year's party, and then off to Denmark a day after that! I hope all of you had lovely Christmases, and have a wonderful New Year. :-)

Of things that were, and things to come

So, it's been quite a while since I updated this, partially due at first to not much happening after Berlin, and then due to too much happening after Berlin.

I don't plan my blog posts out in advance, as you all may have figured out, so I'm attempting to recall precisely what all has gone on in the past month. A lot. After Berlin, I was correcting tests for the most part (took me longer than it should have, but now that I think I have the hang of it, the next ones won't be as bad). Then the MLS Christmas Concert took up most of the following week, what with tech rehearsals and the like. It went rather well, for the most part, though I am a little sad that the video I have of me singing "Call Me Irresponsible" with the Big Band is from the first night, since I (for some reason) had a music stand on stage, even though I didn't need the music. So I stayed more or less rooted to the spot and sang, and while I sang it all right that night, it wasn't as entertaining as I could have (and indeed, did) made it. The next two nights went progressively better, concerning my singing, and on the last night I borrowed a fedora from a sound techie, and sang in that, and made a proper show of it. It was a blast. I also sang with the choir, with the Voice Boys a capella group, and played with the orchestra. All in all it was a fun concert; the school's percussion ensemble put on an especially entertaining show. The conductor wrote a piece played on toys, and it was really neat.

That Sunday I also went to Heidelberg to finish planning out the Jukin' Blues intro I'm teaching with a dancer who lives there named Annette; she's a fabulous dancer, and I'm pumped to be teaching with her. It's fun to teach in a scene outside of MN, too. We taught our first class last Friday, and it went pretty well, though some people didn't show up. This past weekend was also a Solo Blues workshop with a dancer from France named Joyss, which was neat, and helped me in a number of ways, though some of the stuff we covered wasn't really my thing. It's really good for me to work on my solo dancing, though, and Joyss was an interesting instructor. I also DJed more than I ever had before; an hour to hour and 45 minute set Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. It was fun, and a good learning experience about DJing for dancers. I got pretty positive feedback about it, too, so that was good.

Not everything has been going well, since I was also kind of in an uncertain situation with a local girl, who was (understandably) back and forth about getting involved with me, since I would be leaving at the end of the year, though that is over now that she's interested in someone else. Still a little weird to hang out with her under the circumstances, but all things considered, I'm pretty much just over it.

Some of the things that help with that is making new friends! One of the fellows I stayed with during the Blues workshop was a Finn who lives in Amsterdam, and we had a lot of fun talking over the weekend. He also has an awesome name: Ilari. So that was cool. There is also a new teacher at the MLS (who is taking over for a teacher who is on maternity leave), with whom I have become fast friends; she's interested in theater and dancing, so it's not too far fetched. She even came out to part of the Blues dancing party on Friday night to see what it was all about. She follows well, too.

Of things to come: This coming weekend I'll be going to Frankfurt to see a friend I met in Brazil, so that should be a lot of fun.

I have another class test for my students coming up, this one being on the novel we're reading, The Giver, by Lois Lowry. It's a good book, and not too difficult to understand. I feel like I've been a little too easy on them with how much reading I've been giving them, though. Oh well. After that it's Christmas Break, which should be fun.

I will be celebrating the start of the break with the teacher dinner group that meets here and there, which should be fun. Then Christmas Eve will be with my friend Jana's family, and Christmas day will probably be spent Skyping with some people back home. After that I think I'll be heading to the Black Forest area to visit Dan, a former exchange student from waaay back when. I stayed with him and his parents when I was here last, seven years ago, and now he has a family of his own, so I'll be visiting them. And after that....Denmark! Another two exchange students invited me to Copenhagen, and the teacher I mentioned above had mentioned something about traveling together somewhere (she called it an intensive practical English course for her, speaking with a native speaker for extended periods of time, haha), and I suggested Copenhagen, so we're currently organizing that. I can't wait!

So, things are going well, all in all. I also just got a chocolate Santa from my neighbor for St. Niklaus Abend, so that's fun ^_^

I hope you all have a wonderful December and Christmas, and New Year (though there will probably be blogs before then).

Also, I turn 24 in less than two weeks. Weird. Dunno what I'll do.

Berlin and Center Stage

Well, I have just returned from Berlin, which was a really great experience for several reasons. I was one of the chaperones sent with the first half of the 11th grade class, though I was not assigned my own particular "P group," or my own group of students to look after. Instead I sort of floated with different groups as needed, helping out whichever teacher was in charge, and going to whichever exhibits or museums they did. I had some choice in the matter, which was nice, though not always, of course. It was a really fun trip, though also busy, and a little stressful at times. it's difficult to be a good chaperone (or a good teacher/supervisor, etc) when your language skills are not up to par. Making very basic language mistakes while attempting to tell a student to be quiet, or to stay with the rest of the group, etc, tends to detract some from the weight of your authority.

Anyway, the trip was good, and I saw and heard a lot of interesting things. Berlin is a fascinating city; you can see evidence of its history, conflict, and change on almost every corner. I would love to go back there some day and just wander around for a while. I'm not a big fan of structured trips, so the schedule of the Klassenfahrt got a little irritating to me, in some ways, but we ended up having a bit more free time than I expected. Of course, that also meant that I hadn't really planned or looked into what I would like to do during that free time, so I mostly bummed along with other teachers. I did go see Blue Man Group, which was really neat, but I would not pay that ticket price to see them again. I would see them again, for a lower price, but I bought the tickets regardless of the price, in this case, because I figured I probably won't get a chance to see them again. They put on a really unique show. Music, comedy, general strangeness. I would have LOVED to have been the audience member they pulled onstage. They're a very funny group.

I came back to some bad news, as well, though. One of the students from Center Stage I had charged with finding out whether or not another student was planning on continuing to come or not emailed me and said that Julia would not, in fact, be continuing with the group. With the three members that came to me the week before Berlin (the day I had printed the scripts for The Importance of Being Earnest, a show which requires at least 8 people) and said that they would not be continuing with us, and a student who was on the Berlin trip with me as well has said she probably won't, either. So now I've gone from having a cast of 9 and a show picked out to having a cast of 4, and no show. So guess what I'll be looking for this week? -_-

Herbst Ferien und Klausuren

So, I just returned from Herbst Ferien (Fall holidays, for the English-speaking crowd), a week of which I spent hanging out in the area of Munich, spending time with a friend I met in Brazil. She and I met on a bus tour around the Northeast of Brazil five years ago, and this is the first time we've seen each other since. It was a blast, though. She plays on a Regional League volleyball team, one step under the Bundesliga, or national level. Her team hopes to move up to the Bundesliga, and I went and watched one of their games an one of their practices. They have some hardcore drills. For example, there is a player on the team who is a specified defensive player; she doesn't have to serve, and she can come into the rotation at different times. One exercise involved her standing on a narrow beam while the other players took turns spiking balls at her, which she then tried to return. Her balance and coordination under the circumstances were very impressive. I'd have been falling all over the place.

We also went hiking in the mountains, and then went to see Schloss Linderhof, which in this case would most accurately be translated as Manor House Linderhof, since it is rather small, and shares very little with castles like Neuschwanstein. It's a beautiful area, though, and I learned some rather interesting things about Ludwig II, such as the fact that he preferred to sleep during the day and work during the night, and that on the rare occurrences where he gave audiences, he made them come to see him in the evening hours, rather than getting up for them. I'd been there once before, actually, seven years ago, but it was neat to go again, especially at a point where I appreciate such things a little more.

I also caught up with a fellow Ole in Munich, Chenoa Albertson. She's a dancer, and is working as an au pair here for a year. Another highlight was meeting my friend Franziska and her boyfriend for dinner. Franziska and I met only once, seven years ago, on almost the very last night I was in Germany. I went out to a bar with my friend Chrissy Hiller, whose family I was staying with, and Franziska was one of her friends, and we've kept in touch on and off since then. It's always wonderful to me that we can make and keep such connections, despite long absences, or not seeing each other often.

The only other major thing that has been occupying my time is correcting Klausuren, which has taken me significantly longer than I expected. Partially because of the work itself, but partially also because I'm dragging my feet a little at doing them. Some of the scores are rather lower than I'd hoped, and I feel bad giving back such grades; I like my students, and I'm anticipating some poor reactions to their grades, for some of them. :-/ But such is the role of a teacher, I suppose. I hope it will motivate them to work a little harder. Some of the mistakes I'm seeing are things they should really be past, though we have been doing some grammar and language review, of course. And most of the grades aren't bad, else I would need to seriously reexamine my test, etc. That's one thing for which I will always be grateful to my experience at Explo: the simple lesson that my teaching and my curriculum is not always good, and even when it is, it is always open for reflection and improvement.

Next week is the Berlin trip, which I'm looking forward to. You can probably expect another blog right after it, telling you all about it.

I also had my first bike-related injury in Munich. Well, in Iffeldorf, actually. I fell and scraped my up hand pretty good, though nothing to cause a fuss over. I'm lucky I didn't do anything worse, since I also hit my cheekbone on the pavement and bent my glasses a bit. They bent back easily and don't look any the worse for wear, and thankfully my cheekbone also shows no marks. It wouldn't be fun to come back and teach with a scraped up face. :-P

All the best to you all.

Bikexperiment, Day 2

(For those wondering, that should be pronounced "bike-speriment," with "bike" being pronounced normally.)

So, day two of riding. I rode for approximately an hour-ish today, though I don't know exactly how much. I braved the embarrassment of riding in front of others and rode around my neighborhood a bit (there's very little traffic there, so it's not a big deal), though one across the train tracks definitely pointed and evidently got a kick out of my obviously novice bike riding. Oh well. I've never minded making a fool of myself in public, so long as I knew I was doing it, and did it on purpose. I'll deal with it.

It went pretty well. I can get started/stay upright the vast majority of the time, though I'm still rather unskilled with things like turning and going uphill (though I managed uphill a couple of times, on a relatively low-incline hill), but I'm getting better all the time, that I can tell. I'm also rather sore right now, because I tense up way too much, and only start to relax when I'm going downhill, or something like that. Keeping my fingers on the brakes keeps me from squeezing the handlebars too tightly, which is also a good thing.

Hope all is well with all of you!

I'm on a Bike

Props to you if you recognize the reference, but don't worry about it if you don't, because it's not a very good song anyway.

If I wanted to reference a good song, I'd have put something along the lines of "I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my biiike..." (Thank you, Queen, for writing so many songs that involve bicycles. Even if they are rather bizarre lyrics to include.)

So, it's Herbst Ferien, which means I have two weeks of no school to get through. I say "get through" because the first week of that is a little tough. My social circle is not very large in Rimbach, right now, so I'm, well, a little bored. I went out to dinner and then watched a thoroughly bizarre Danish film called "Adam's Apples" with some other teachers on Friday night (a film I'm still not sure if I actually liked. Some parts were funny, but on a whole, I'm not certain that I'd bother watching it again.), but other than that I don't have much by way of plans. Hanging out with a friend tomorrow, which should be fun, and I was potentially going to go to some kind of ski-aerobics class with another friend tonight, but I may not go to that, because my tennis shoes are soaked, and I'm a little sore.

Which brings me to the title of this post (it's official, I'm needlessly verbose. It took me....what, twenty lines of text to get to the point?), which is that I have officially begun to teach myself how to ride a bike. Before you all go crazy and ask "You can't ride a bike? Can you swim?" (If I am asked that question one more time, I swear, I might explode.), yes, I can't ride a bike. I got to training wheels as a child, and refused to learn how to ride properly. Mostly it was because the continued failure to actually learn it made me furious (yes, I know that falling down a bunch is normal; didn't make me any less mad), and I was a very stubborn child. I'm pretty much just happy that I didn't break the bike in the moments I was angry enough to really want to break something.

See, I used to have a really bad temper. An irrationally bad temper. Yes, anger is usually irrational, but I would get angry at the smallest, stupidest things. For the most part it was a childhood thing, and I grew out of it. I was pretty sure in Brazil, for example, that I had nothing to worry about as far as my temper went anymore. I have discovered over time that certain things will still set me off pretty easily. One of those things is feeling incompetent or failing repeatedly at something, which usually leads to the feeling incompetent. This doesn't happen too horribly often, since I usually also tend to try not to take anything too seriously, since whatever it is I'm doing probably isn't exactly life-changing. But every once in a while, something really gets me going. Attempting to ride a bike today was one of those things.

Anyone who has spent the majority of their life unable to do something that 90% of the population does without actively thinking about, and has tried to learn said thing, knows what I'm talking about. It's even a cliche. "It's just like riding a bike." I loved when people would say that to me, so that I could calmly turn to them and say, "I can't ride a bike." And then watch their face contort as they tried to think of what to say to that. But seriously, it is ridiculously frustrating and embarrassing to have so much difficulty learning something that is essentially the poster-child of "easy."

Which is why I took my bike to an abandoned patch of grass, out of view, and practiced for two hours.

I can stay upright, at least for a while, though I probably could have chosen a better spot to practice, since the ground was uneven and the grass ridiculously long. But I'm getting it. I need a lot of practice, but the simple fact that I actually TRIED today is pretty huge. So I thought I'd share.

And no, I'm not riding on the street much yet. I don't feel like getting hit by a car anytime soon, so I'd rather have much better control before I actually try to go anywhere.

Bitchfresse

So, I went to the Mannheim National Theater fest, and saw a number of neat previews of the season's shows, as well as a couple snippets of "Avenue Q," which will be performed at the theater sometime next year, I believe. I'm not sure exactly when. It's translated into German, which I find a little unfortunate - some of the syllabation was a bit forced in the translation - but all in all I think they did a great job of it. It'll be a good show. I also got to see a preview of former guest teacher Linda's show, Bitchfresse, which is about hip hop and the like in Germany. I went and saw that this past Sunday, and that was quite a good time. I couldn't understand everything, but I got most of it, and it was hilarious. The two actors/singers who performed it played off each other very well, and were great both musically and physically. One of them seemed a bit nervous, as I saw him visibly shaking at one point, but I've certainly been there. My intermediate acting final I was shaking like a leaf during my last monologue. Thankfully it looked at least semi-intentional.

Things are going well otherwise. My English students had to take their first Klausur (one of the two major tests during their term, for the Americans reading), and I received a few unkind glances in regards to it, but I think most teachers get that when giving a test. All in all they look pretty good, though now of course I have the joyous task of correcting them. It's a little more complex than grading homework. But I'll survive, since after this week it's fall break, during which I'll be spending a week in Munich. I can't wait; the friend I'll be staying with is a girl I met in the Amazon while in Brazil, and I haven't seen her for five years. I'll also probably stop by and see a friend I made last time I was in Germany, seven years ago, and catch up a little with her. It should be a great break.

I have decided (almost 100% certainly) that Center Stage will be performing "The Importance of Being Earnest," by Oscar Wilde. I think it's a good show, and relatively simple in meaning, though of course not all of Wilde's puns and innuendo will carry to a German audience. I think we can make it work well, though, and it should be a good experience for both me and the actors in the group. I'm excited.

That's all for now. Hope all is well with all of you.