A week of socialising

It's been a busy week, and I'm glad. It's distracted me from this feeling of not having much time left here.

A quick overview would run something like this: ice cream... impromptu invitation to a homemade pizza evening... trip to Essen... lots of sun, friends and photos... ice cream... evening beer and kebab in the park... girly evening in... party preparations... a long, mad flat party with Germans, salsa dancing, limbo and too much (??) amaretto... not much sleep... trip to Soest with other assistants... ice cream... FLOP!

Time is flying past. I want to hold on to every moment. Just one week until my dad comes to pick me up. I can't quite get my head around it!
I leave you with more photos from my week.

Scrub 'til it sparkles

"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes"

Agatha Christie

Now, I'm not planning a book, but I do agree with Ms Christie - there's something about housework that allows the mind to wander. I do rather like doing housework when I get down to it... but I like to do it when I have the house to myself. I don't know why. So my housemate flew off to Geneva for the weekend, and I got out the disinfectant. 4 hours later and the kitchen is perfect for the first time in a very long time. Plus I have the satisfaction factor of having got a lot done. Aaah, bliss! I may also be a little high on cleaning products. How rock and roll.

I'm looking forward to a few sociable days now, crashing on a friend's floor and tripping to Essen to meet up with a lot of other assistants, and then having a flat party the following evening. Should be fun!

One man and his dog

There's a man I often see when I walk into town. He must be about 60, and he is always walking a dalmatian. We always say hello. A few weeks ago he asked me, apropos de nothing, if I really always walked into the centre (a 75 minute walk). I gave him an answer - yes, not always, but often - and we went our separate ways. Yesterday I was on my way to the train station when I met him again, and we had a lovely little chat. I like moments like these, when strangers interact. I may never see him again, but I know random little facts about him, as he does about me.

I was going to the train station because I was heading to a town called Hameln. Never heard of it? How about its English name then, Hamelin. As in, the Pied Piper thereof. Us assistants were going on a daytrip into the Lower Saxony region, armed with a toy rat for all those Pied-Piper-y photo opportunities. The sun shone for the first time in weeks, for which we were all overdressed, and we wandered and took photos and ate ice-cream (ginger ice-cream - oh my!) and let time pass us by. It's a beautiful little town.

On the walk home the sun was sinking in the sky, and the evening light was beautiful, so I took the opportunity to take some nature photos as I was passing through the forest and past gardens. This pink flower was just crying out to be snapped:

As was this dandelion flower, and the dandelion clock (aren't dandelion clocks just the most fascinating "flowers"?)


And finally these tree-pictures. There's something magical about evening light, I find.

On being an English Language Assistant

For as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a language assistant in a foreign school. Every year my family always went on holiday to the same island off the coast of France, where my mum had been an assistant when she was studying, and we would hear stories of her Year Abroad and stay with her old mentor teacher. I caught the bug, and it was a big deciding factor for me in chosing to do a languages degree over English Literature.

So what does it involve? That depends on the country, the school, and the individual! For me, in a selective German high school, it means working with pupils between the ages of 10 and 20. Sometimes I work one-on-one giving tutoring. Sometimes I take a small group out of a class and work more intensely with them. Sometimes I teach grammar, sometimes I follow a text book, and sometimes I plan my own lessons. Sometimes I have a full class of thirty. I love the independence of those lessons. Sometimes I give conversation classes to whoever is interested. Sometimes I mark homeworks, and sometimes I go on school trips. My life as an assistant is nothing if not varied!

And it is coming to an end. Just one day of teaching left to do, in a week and a half (my contract is timed in a very silly manner with the public holidays here!!) and then it will all be over. Most of my classes already are. My other conversation class today presented me with a school hoody. AWESOME!! I live in hoodies at home. It's a tad on the big side, but it's soooooo comfy. They're such nice girls!

I got home and marked nineteen essays on cultural assimilation this afternoon - the level of English taught is so high - it really puts us Brits to shame. In school today I oversaw a debate on the merits of advertising with a group of 14 year olds, and discussed the problems of "multiculturalism: a melting pot or a salad bowl" as well as Nick Griffin and the bonkers attitude of the BNP with a class of 18 year olds. It's leagues above the level that languages are taught at British schools.

Right now I'm waiting for my dinner to cook - roasted sweet potato wedges, and cream of spinach soup. I'm hungry!! And it smells so good!

(Edited to add a foodie photo! Look at those colours!)

Baked apple loving

My new foodie obsession:


Meet my baked apple, stuffed with brown sugar, raisins and oats, with cinnamon yoghurt. I had it for the first time yesterday evening, and it blew my mind. So guess what I'm having for supper today. That's right!

So in the oven now is a Granny Smith, washed, and hulled with a sharp knife. In the resulting cavity is a mixture of raisins, quick cook oats and brown sugar which had been soaked in a tiny bit of water for ten minutes. That gets baked in the oven for about an hour at about 180 degrees celsius, and served with natural yoghurt sprinkled with cinnamon. Yum yum yum!
And now my inventive-cookery-mind is wondering, what other fillings could I put in the middle. Mincemeat springs to mind, so do ground almond and oatmeal, or maybe something using Cointreau... or chocolate... or peanut butter.... maybe dates and pecans.... ooooh the possibilities!

Today I took my conversataion class (2 18 year old girls) out for hot chocolate to say goodbye, so we sat and chatted, and at the end they gave me a thankyou present - a little bag of individual truffles from the speciality chocolatier where we live - they'd remembered from a class ages ago precicely which my favourite truffle was (cassis truffle, rolled in crushed freeze-dried berries) and bought me 4 of them and 4 random other truffles. It was so sweet and thoughtful - I felt very loved! I'll miss them!

Charmed

Today, I'm a proud woman. My Year 5s put on a play that we've been rehearsing for weeks. Set in a pet shop, revolving around a missing budgie, it was no Shakespeare, but they had put so much effort into it - learning their lines and collecting props. And today was the performance (staring me as a deaf Granddad... I'd forgotten to learn my lines so my hands looked like this with the words written on my palms - I couldn't let them down when they'd worked so hard!) and they were wonderful. Sure, it wasn't perfect. But it was lovely, and heartfelt.

But to the main topic of my post. Charm. Put simply, there's kind of a man in my life. Not in a sexual way, but a lovely, friendly way. I can spend hours with him and not get bored. He's got a good mixture of attributes: he's intelligent and witty, interesting and interested, funny but deep, confident (perhaps to excess) and content. He takes me seriously but we have a laugh, and he makes me feel totally appreciated but not at all taken for granted. Oh, and he charms me like I've never been charmed before. To be told that my hair looks good down, that my eyebrows look perfect today, that I have beautiful hands and nails, to have the clearness of my skin commented on... it makes me melt each time, and each time it takes me by surprise. No doubt it springs from past lack of self esteem, but I feel that, although there is nothing wrong with my body and I'm not ugly, my body itself is not one of my major attributes. There are plenty of things about met that might attract someone, but I would never consider my body as one of them. My body just *is*. And I never expected to react to charm in such a way. It feels... shallow, somehow. But good!! And so, while it lasts, I shall enjoy it. If ever my ego is feeling in need of an elastoplast, I now know to look for a good dose of flattery.

On a separate note, you will find that one thing that I love are clouds. Here are today's clouds - early evening as I was walking home in a fluttery post-flattery frame of mind.

The beginning of the end - The Year Abroad

A fortnight before my contract ends, I find myself saying goodbye to my first classes.

13:15 - Year 9 Conversation Class. The five girls were stood waiting for me, ready for 45 minutes of speaking English. We spent the time looking at a map of Europe, talking about places we'd lived, places we'd been and places we'd like to visit some day, while eating chocolate. With a fitting sense of pathetic fallacy, the weather outside changed from moderately sunny to undeniably rainy as the lesson drew to a close. At the snap of my camera (the five girls now immortalised on my hard-drive) it was over. We wished each other well for the future, they left, and I locked that door for the last time.

It's odd, this long, protracted farewell. Legally I don't leave until Monday 31st... but by midday on Thursday, my job here will be all but done. Sitting in the staffroom today I let life pass me by for ten minutes as the realisation of leaving hit me for the first time. I expected to feel sadder than I do... instead I have sadness mixed with satisfaction. I know I've made the best of this year that I could have. I know I've been a good English Language Assistant.

And so, "The Year Abroad". A compulsory part of my studies. An exciting learning opportunity. And the best year of my life to date. It didn't have to be an assistantship - though I was set on it for reasons I'll explain another day - it could have been any job, or even a university study programme. It is billed as a way of improving language skills, however I would argue that although my German has got better, that is only the tip of a very large iceberg. It has been a journey of incredible self-discovery.

In August 2009 I left England with rather little life experience behind me - two years at university and a few weeks of work here and there hadn't pushed me far beyond my comfort zone. And suddenly I had to register as a foreign citizen and open a bank account in German and start work. When you've coped in a foreign language, it makes doing anything in English seem easier, and I know just from that that I will return a much more confident person.


I have had the time, too, to discover myself - as cheesey as that sounds. The chance to reinvent oneself is always refreshing. I've done it twice now, and will doubtless do so again, keeping the aspects of myself that I like, and working to change the others. This year was a challenge to myself to become more confident, more relaxed and more loving... starting from the inside! And I've succeeded. Hooray!


I can't imagine how my life would have been had I not had this opportunity. For the sake of the student population, I think a year out should be a compulsory part of every degree! Not because everyone ought to practise a foreign language (although that in itself is an interesting topic) nor yet because everyone needs to find themselves, but because it is simply something else. It's not just another year at uni. It's meeting new people, having crazy experiences, doing things you would never normally do, travelling, working, living.

But now, time for a cup of tea.

The start of something new

It seems somewhat iconic to me that as one aspect of my life ends, a different one begins. And so, as I prepare to say my farewells to the country that has become my home over the past 9 months, I lay the foundations for my home on the blogosphere.

In a little town in North Rhine-Westphalia there is a bed, which is where I am, snuggled up to a too-big German pillow. My toes are in the here and now, complaining of the cold, but half of my mind is back in Yorkshire, discussing the origin of dreams. The other half is flitting between the composition of a certain blog entry and wondering how on earth the guitar next to me got to be so dusty.

With a weekend of less than inspiring greyness, a little guitar playing and plenty of musing behind me, I am faced with a week which is set to be charged with emotion: my last week of teaching. In-depth reflections on "The Year Abroad" and being an assistant will follow later in the week, when it isn't twenty to midnight and I'm slightly more alert!