february {photos}

the leap month 

school parking lot

left hand poems

oh Süskind you sly devil

attention span assesment

Weimar GIVE midyear seminar

mephisto

alethia, mila, dana

just a teenage furl with a ukulele

princess spotting

 being historic isn't always positive here... 

Buchenwald

Halle Zoo 

'twas a humid place

Maßstab: Schaf und Lamm oooomg

some like em in the pot 3 DAYS OLD

cutest person-caprinae combo i've ever seen

ami, deutsche, brit

sloth ^

sad winter elephant

All in All
February and March seem like yesterday. It was damn cold, but by the time all the snow was gone and the sun started coming out again like it did when I went out and found this ladybug, I was so used to suiting up in at least a few jackets that I definitely wasn't getting very much Vitamin D. In February there was a week of vacation and Hsister and I went to Oma's where we played a lot of Rummi and took "culture days" to see Naumberger Dom and museums in Apolda. I was still working on a lot of grammar and working through some books in German, and that was a great break from the school schedule to relax and work on those. At this point it had been four months since I'd seen another American, but I was heavily resorting to SNL and the garrison keillor / chris thile transition on prairie home companion in my free time so I had something familiar. The English guilt was killer, and I had some trouble participating in class (speaking German in front of my classmates made me freeze up like my funny accent would exile me off the face of the earth.) I didn't want to speak English, I couldn't speak Spanish, and I was scared to speak German. I listened a lot. I wrote a lot of poetry, a doodled everywhere in my notes. I made friends with the quiet people. At some point, I started to get really into Alphabets. I learned how to read Cyrillic, and started learning that a fourth language comes terribly slow when there's no context for it. Almost everyone around me here can speak at least a bit of Russian, but outside of Russia and school, they don't use it. Context makes all the difference, as someone recently said to me. It's true.

We all met in Weimar for GIVE's PPP American pre-spring reunion. By the end of the week I was impressed with the diversity of people in our group, and the collective energy. There's nothing I appreciate more than hearing about who people are and what they are interested in and where they come from, because although comparing experiences is great, it's not a very freeing conversation. We don't learn anything new when we only listen to ourselves. There's pressure to stay at the surface of conversation, talking about what our competitive egos might want us to say and not about what we really want to talk about. Anyways, I tried to meet everyone in the group, and that was a lot of fun for me.
Our visit to Buchenwald was the most noteworthy of the field trips that we took together, but it is hard to describe visiting a concentration camp I don't take photos of them, so I borrowed the photo here from Rowan. ^ It's an on-site memorial, a flat square meter of metal kept at people skin temperature standing for 50,000 people.  KZs are hard places. The atmosphere is gravel, emotionless, and empty. Where once barracks and other structures stood, stones signify the length and width of each building and plaques explain the history and purpose of the buildings. It's like walking around an invisible city on a blueprint map. Where the woods have taken back some of the property, moss covered pieces of foundation look out of place on a bright sunny day. Buchenwald is a place almost a century away from its evil history and oblivious citizens, still nestled in the deciduous hills ten minutes from Weimar, but no one is going to be forgetting history here anytime soon.
Aside from somberness, we had a great time exploring the little bookworm city of Weimar during the seminar, even getting up at dark to take walks in the fresh air along the river. A little music shop renewed my spirits and a ukulele ocarina band was formed, mainly for the purpose of playing the theme song from Game of Thrones while walking down cobblestone streets late at night. We discussed life in denglish in the hole in the bridge. (where else?) We were almost the only people out at night in Weimar, except for a pair of drunk Ukrainians who were confounded about where all the parties were. We had a round table political discussion in English, and a few discussions about culture and experiences in German, and then we parted ways full of new enthusiasm and excitement about being the weird American exchange student. At least I don't think that was just me.

The rest would be pictures from a trip to the zoo with a friend from school and her temporary English ex. student. I was so glad they invited me to come with them, it was really cool to meet a few of the Brits that week. The next day a few of us went out for waffles after school. The elephants looked bored, and the mini baby hippo was amazing, all and all just a smaller zoo in the winter. Around this time I got a chance to see several of the cool museums in Halle but I didn't bring my camera with.

tbc..

{november through january in photos} {sorry not sorry}

*the blog is bach?*


{november}

{christmas time}

the Weihnachtsmarkt; a street market community gathering where you drink Glühwein with your parent's friends and awkwardly dodge your school teachers drinking Glühwein with their friends!

                                     

Gastcuties

die Cousine ohne Hanka

before the snow...

leipzisch

Leipzig has some of my favorite cathedrals that I've seen this year, and it's like the Austin TX of Germanland

the man himself

toothpaste savers? thanks ddr

inside. bachs. freaking. church.

kool 'struments also everywhere here 

the louvre of leipzig

1am light pollution in winter wonderland

more schnow

learning how to ski in Austria, where you can ski next to actual babies on the baby hill

behold the earth (and my history teacher)

austrian pups!

definitely full of Kaiserschmarrn at this point

emma, mila, pia

my winter break knitting adventure in use

good ol Kaminfeuer fireplace dvd on the 8 hour drive back

back home the snow was still falling! and I was surprised that all of these birds were still hanging out.

the pictures that I have are dark because the sun was almost gone by the time I got home from school everyday in january.

for christmas, I started a new journal that has been my Tagebuch for almost everything this year. possibly one of the reasons that I haven't bothered to upload pictures to the internet, but no matter, it's been a nice way to write thoughts and express creative squirts in somewhat organized chaos.

here you can see one of the pages that looks somewhat coherent, no russian or german vocabulary scribbled sideways in the very middle.. actually now that I take a closer look I'm not sure...

under are the ducks I was hanging out with that morning before I ran faster than Usain to catch the train for school

All in All

Though November and December I was very mentally consumed with the stress of applying to schools, and in the end I only finished one solid application which helped reduce the stress of picking between schools. If I had to choose anything not to do this year, it would be being chained to life in the US by applying for college and finishing high school online. Perhaps others get these done with no sweat, but I struggle with writing focus issues and tend to wait until just the right idea comes to me at the last minute to write everything that I care about. I care a lot about my writing, and I found it extremely hard to balance everything at the same time when I was stretched between living in a second language without really being able to live completely in that second language. Example A, blogging. Hence the photos. 

In January with the grip of essay writing behind me, I had a blast in Austria with my classmates and even though I forgot how to ski sometime in the last few years (what? can you do that? isn't it like riding a bike? anyways...) the learning curve made me feel great about being focused on learning just one thing. Because the school was so nice to let me join at the last minute, I still have some major amounts of thank you cards to make before I leave. That trip has been the only time I've been out of Germany this year (soon to be followed by Prague). It was the most exhausted I've been, and I also wrote some mega deep exhaustion poems for myself which are fun keepsakes. Maybe all of my hobbies are weird. Maybe not. I'm not telling. Right before I left, I got to go to a friend's house and play upright bass for the first time since July. It was life saving, really a highlight on its own. The lightbulb went off. Everything I want to do is here in my fingertips! I can make friends! People like me when I'm social! School is still really fricking hard but it's getting better! (This all kind of was able to culminate in Weimar at the midyear meeting)

tbc...