My thoughts on December:
December is and always has been my favorite month, December in Germany just helps to reassure that. Advents calenders...so I guess I knew what they were in the US, but I never had one, and I didn't really understand what was so great about them. I know have a different opinion about them though, my advents calender is pretty dang fantastic. Where I live is a part of Germany that generally doesn't get much, if any, snow. In the last two-ish weeks, however, it's been snowing; not a ton but enough for the ground to be white and that's enough for me. The temps have also been down in the 20's. These two things together makes everything super funny, considering that in Minnesota it's considerably colder and we get a considerable amount more of snow. Was the last sentence grammatically correct; I think not, but I diverse. So when they've got 0.4 to 0.8 inches of snow everybody freaks out. Nobody drives faster than 30 miles an hour and they assume that just becuase it's 26 degrees that the roads are covered in ice and therefor unnavigable. So whenever anybody says anything about how bad the roads are or how cold it is or how they have a crazy amount of snow, I just laugh to myself. In Germany most people don't put up their Christmas trees until a few days before Christmas or not until Christmas eve. Which is pretty crazy, who wants to spend the time decorating a tree when you're only gonna have it up for 5 days? And since there isn't a tree up until Christmas tree up until Christmas eve, that means that there aren't any presents under the tree until Christmas eve, and Santa comes on Christmas eve while you're at church, so you open the presents from Santa on Christmas eve, and technically you don't get any gifts from your parents because they all come from Santa. German Christmas schedule run down. December 24th, Christmas eve; December 25th, 1st day of Christmas; December 26th, 2nd day of Christmas. The multiple days of Christmas are pretty cool I'd say. We made Christmas cookies a few weeks ago, which was cool, but there was no eating of the cookies allowed until the 1st advent, and they weren't the kind of cookies I would associate with Christmas. I do think that I will be able to survive one year without American Christmas cookies though. Buying Christmas presents is near impossible in Germany, or that's how I see it at least. So nobody made a Christmas list, and when I asked them what they wanted for Christmas and they were just kind of like "yeah I don't know" so buying gifts sucked. On Thursday the greatest day of the year will occur once again, yes you guessed it, my birthday. It'll be a pretty awesome day, I'll finally be getting my iPod and all of the mail that my family has deemed "Birthday Mail" and has been holding for me. Oh, and we're going to a Mexican restaurant! Everybody knows that Mexican food is the greatest thing on the planet and it's totally unfair that I've had to live without it for the last 5 months.
So it's been about a month since I've posted anything and I haven't really done a whole lot but what I have done, as you probably guessed, I don't really remember a whole lot of, but I'll do my best to recall as much of it as I can in a somewhat chronological order.
So on the 17th of November Markus and I went to a friend of ours, Jost, house to 'celebrate' his 16th birthday. Played some games, watched soccer, ate some food, and of course drank some beer. It was a pretty good Wednesday. Then on the 19th I went with Johannes and some of his friends to Harry Potter, which was fun, it was followed by a trip to McDonald's, where I won a cookie playing Micky D's Monopoly.
After that there was a week in which I went to school and nothing eventful happened. On the 27th (a Saturday) we had a school bazaar, so that meant no sleeping in. On the 26th, however, we didn't have any class, becuase we needed a day to get everything ready. So on the 27th I got up and went to school, not really all that excited that I had to go, becuase I though it was going to be dumb. My group had two people dressed up as "Africans" so there were in caveman like clothing and they had some make up to make them look black, and my job was to take pictures of them with people that wanted a picture with "Real Africans" with a African safari/dessert back round. We sold the pictures for 1 Euro, and a girl from my class' dad had a photoprinter, like at target, where it's all with touch screen and what not, so that was pretty cool. Some of the other groups in my class sold cake and make a movie. Other classes did other stuff, sold food, played games, and yeah I'm not really sure, but it ended up being better than I thought it would be. After the Bazaar we went to my Grandma's house to celebrate her birthday. I wasn't super excited about it becuase the whole family was going to be there and I had only met them once before, but it ended up being a lot better than I expected. We ate some meat that I'm not really sure what it was but it tasted good, and I also had some Weißwurst, which if you know anything about is notoriously disgusting, but it was actually super good. By that point in the day though I was super duper dead. I didn't get a ton of sleep the night before plus I had the school thing all day, and no nap, so I was happy when we left a little bit earlier than we had originally planned to. On Wednesday the 1st of December Andreas had his 50th birthday. So we open birthday presents at breakfast, which was a little strange I thought, but it's cool. He celebrated three times on Wednesday, twice with his co-workers, and then once for dinner with some people from town. So yeah I was lucky enough to help. Which involved running up and down the stairs a million times to bring plates of food to the tables, and whatnot. It wasn't really that bad, but I was up tooo late for a Wednesday. The highlight of the night was that we had Duck for dinner. I'd never had Duck before coming to Germany, and I'm not really sure why, becuase it's sooooo goood! So school is pretty good, homework sucks!!! But I've decided that if I don't have enough time to finish it all on a given day that I'm not gonna worry about it anymore. If it's not done then it's not done. On Friday, the 3rd, I went into town to do some shopping with Christoph, and after that a friend of mine, named Jost, went to Bremen to see a movie. Took the bus to Bremen, made a stop a Micky D's of course then proceeded to the movie theater. We saw Stichtag (Due Date in English) which was pretty dang awesome if I don't say so myself. After the movie we went to the train station and took a walk through becuase we had a half an hour 'til our bus came and it was freaking cold outside. Walking past a shop I looked in the window and I saw a bright green bottle, and it was you guessed it, Mountain Dew, so I bought some. 'Twas quite awesome. Then we went to the bus stop to wait for a while, the Christmas Market is currently open so, as we were waiting a lady and her husband came up to us and asked (very drunk) if we were up to no good and if they needed to call our mothers, which I thought was pretty dang hilarious. Then came the bus ride home, on which I almost fell asleep. Then on Saturday the 4th we celebrated Andreas' birthday once again, this time at a restaurant with the family, which was pretty good, but I was dead, as always. Today I was able to sleep in finally, got up and started to write this at about noon, then I went out and played soccer in the snow with Markus and one of his friends, then I went and worked at a Christmas Market for a while and now I'm back to writing this.
Oh, on the 27th of December to the 30th of December I will be going to visit my first host family in Hessen so that should be pretty cool. I'm looking forward to it. The month of December is already proving to fly by equally as fast as the month of November flew by. I actually can't believe that November is already over. I'm excited for the new year though. On New Years Eve I'm going to a party here in town, so it should be pretty awesome. The year is proving to fly by, which I don't really like, I tend to procrastinate to make it seem like time is going slower but it doesn't really help.
My thoughts on the German Language.
So yeah German....it's a language that I don't recommend learning. It's pretty much impossible. When you think you know a rule you learn that there are in fact many exceptions to the rule. Accusative and Dative are also pretty much impossible. If I'm not saying 'you' or 'I' then I don't know whether I should be using Accusative or Dative and at the end of the day I actually wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The words are getting better though, but as German words get better my English gets worse. I now find myself looking up words becuase I know what they mean in German but not in English. Which is actually kind of cool, but also a pain.
Oh, and a quick Happy Birthday to my mother and my aunt Cheri who will be 48 on December 7th (yeah it's pearl harbor day, it's a day fitting to the two of them)
Until later
