Gesundheit!

One week of school down! This picture to the left is the flat that we are living in, 100 years old! We have a ten minute bus ride and a ten minute walk in the snow to school. A lot of times, Meg and I like to pretend we are walking on the beach! Haha! But the snow has been fun, I’ve never seen such big snow flakes!

My first day at school was exciting. My mentor teacher has 27 students. Half of them are “mother tongue” English speaking and the other half “partner tongue” which means their mother tongue is German. By the end of the day, I was a little overwhelmed just by learning a new school system and my teacher having me start teaching poetry on the third day! But everyday got better as I became more comfortable with the students and making myself LOVE poetry

The kids are starting to warm up to me, in the beginning I don’t think they really knew what to think about a “student teacher.” I’ve almost learned all of their names, probably won’t get to last names till next week  I’m still so amazed with this “bi-cultural/lingual school.” I sat in a 6th grade math class and half the time the teacher is speaking German and the other half in English. I’m learning a few words but I know when I teach that math class, I’ll be using a lot of English

Meg and I have mastered the grocery shopping, especially the part where you only buy what you can carry home! We had to get use to that real fast. It’s been fun trying to cook together.
This is a picture of Irmgart and I, she cooked for us to celebrate our “one week anniversary” and thankfully it was delicious pasta. One time she made us boiled eggs for breakfast and I was trying so hard not to laugh while Meg, who is not an egg person, swallowed pieces of it like a pill! Oh Meg…love you girl!







This is Meg and I in front of our flat! We have figured out our bus routes around Zehlendorf through lots of careless mistakes. The first time we made it home with only one time of getting on the bus and not getting lost, I think we were so excited we were giving each other high fives. I’m sure the locals were thinking, “What in the world?” Oh and I just have to say this, I thought it was so funny. One time, we were trying to get on the bus and Meg was trying to communicate as to where we were trying to go and there was definitely a language barrier and she kept saying yes but he was still saying something so then she just started saying “Si!” We laughed so hard, oh yeah they speak German not Spanish!

>On Saturday, Irmgart was so nice to take us around Mitte. She showed us a lot of museums, the Sony center, the different embassies, and the Brandenburg gate! She should definitely be a tour guide one day, it was great. Afterwards we got some coffee and cake. I got cheesecake and I could definitely tell that there was way less calories in a German cheesecake than any cheesecake I’ve ever had. Irmgart clued me inthat almost everything in America is so much sweeter! 

The Brandenburg Gate

It was a great week and we get Monday off for Martin Luther King! I’m thinking about getting my hair cut…I’ll need to get the phrase book out to make sure they don’t try to do something crazy!