Catch Up Blog

I know it's been a while since I've posted last, but now is my time to make up for that! 

I've been rather busy with classes and dealing with annoying people who piggyback off your project, but I've also had some non-school related events to blog about. 

(By the way, if you were wondering, I gave my presentation and got my grade. The difference between my grade and that girl's grade was only a .3 difference... Here the grading scale goes from 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest you can get, and 5 the lowest. Needless to say, I argued the grade, and am still waiting to hear back from the professor about it. He may have forgotten. I should probably remind him.)

Anyway...

A while back, I went with Hannah and Rachel to go see THE AVENGERS! It was marvelous by the way. There is a US military base near Stuttgart, so they have a theater that shows movies in English for them and their families. 

The Tony Stark sarcasm. Never gets old.

Before the show it was hailing and raining outside. Afterwards, there was a beautiful double-rainbow. You can really only see the one here.

There is a giant Spiderman outside the theaters on the way up the stairs. It was kind of scary. He was probably feeling a little down, because he wasn't invited to avenge with the team.

 The weather has been really nice lately. With the nice weather, we've been going to the park to read and catch up on homework. I was laying down reading A Tale of Two Cities for one of my classes, and decided to take a picture:

On top of the nice weather, my birthday was this month! 21! Not that it really matters here, but still was something to celebrate I suppose. After my long day in classes, as my birthday was on a Monday this year, I headed over to Hannah's. At Hannah's we had a bit of a party. They made dinner, baked a cake, made some cookies, and had me open presents.

A poster from Hannah. Hunger Games. Good life choices.

Also got some music, a mug, and a beautiful scarf from Helina (which Hannah thought was toilet paper at first, so now it is the standing joke any time I wear it).

 Rachel got me a book to fill with memories from our year in Germany! I am still working on that one!

And then Jake's present came along. Jake, being the planner that he is, wrapped up something like 8 phone books, which were free in the market for anyone to take, and put little clues in them for me to find my present. Here I am opening the phone books. I was wondering what it was, because it was so heavy. Phone books. That's what it was. Oh, Jake.

 As I am playing catch-up, I must blog about our trip two days ago. All the Tuebingen students from Valpo were invited (and I say "invited" a bit ironically, as we were told we had to go to) to go to Rottenburg am Neckar for the day. I had to skip a class to go to this event, which lasted about six hours. We met Tim Malchow at the train station and hopped a train to Rottenburg. There we were greeted by someone who went with us to eat before showing us around the city. We climbed up high and got a good view of the city:

 After walking around for a while, we walked to a museum to learn more about the Roman ruins of Rottenburg. On the way to the museum, Rachel found a store that she could identify with:

After the museum, we had to try and read some poetry written in Swabian dialect. To give you an idea of Swabian, here's a video of the Barackness monster:

Hochdeutsch (or high German) is completely different. I was fortunate enough to come to a part of Germany that speaks in a Swabian accent. You know, so I can practice all my German. 

Well, that's it for now. On Sunday, I head to London for my Pentecost (Pfingstferien) break. My trip is a week long, and I'm sure that I will have lots to blog about and a lot of pictures!

I look forward to blogging again soon, as I know I will have lots to write about! Until next time!

Back to School

Okay, I know I haven't blogged in a while, and there's a reason for that. For the last three weeks, I have been getting back into school mode!

While most of you are at home patiently awaiting summer, which is just around the corner, I am sitting in lectures and trying not to pull my hair out.

Most of my classes are fine. There are a few of my classes that I really enjoy, and others that are...well... interesting.

One of my professors lectures in English. As a native speaker, she seems to have trouble with some of the words that are key to the point she is trying to lecture about.

For instance:

Abe Lincoln became Abe-ah Lincoln

John Wilkes Booth turned into John Wilk-ES Booth

Cabinet (as in the President's Cabinet) became his Cabinay

One of the more recent instances was instead of saying prostrate, she said prostate. A bit of a difference there.

This professor seemed nice enough, and the mispronunciations kept lectures a bit more interesting, until this past week. She was going through the slides a little too fast, and I even had a hard time keeping up, even with English being my first language. One of the Germans asked if she was going to put the slides up online. She said flat out, "No". She then kept going with the lecture. Another German raised her hand and said that she was having trouble paying attention while taking notes, and asked the professor if she could put the slides online. The professor said she wouldn't, and the lecture continued. Now, I didn't think that that was an unreasonable request. After this incident, she also managed (in the same class period) to drop the F-bomb while lecturing. She used it in an example when talking about a frustrated worker.

First of all, she used it incorrectly. The Germans sometimes have difficulty using that one correctly.

Second of all, it was really inappropriate to use that, even in a hypothetical case.

And finally, I'm the ONLY one who seemed to notice anything happened that was out of the ordinary. 

To say the least: I was shocked. SHOCKED I TELL YOU!

Anyway, to move on from that class.

The rest of my classes are going okay, except for the project that I have coming up for my American Civil War class. The first day of classes I signed up for a project by myself, so that I wouldn't have to coordinate with anyone else, and I could get all my work done faster. The next week, this girl comes up to me in class. She asked me where I was from. I said the US. She asked what topic I had for my project. I told her. She gets up, walks to the professor, talks with him for a minute, comes back, and says, "I have that topic too!". I was a little mad about this, as she didn't even ask if it was okay with me that she would be on my project, but I shrugged it off somewhat. She only signed up for my project, because I'm a native speaker, which ordinarily would be okay, if she was willing to do the work. The first time we set to meet, she cancelled. 

I did the entire handout myself. When we finally did meet on Monday after our class, she didn't have any of the research done. Well according to her, she did, because she went to Wikipedia. She had sent me an email before saying that she had two sources already: our text, and Wikipedia. I sent her an email back saying that Wikipedia was not a credible source, and that it would only be used for a head start on understanding the topic, not actual research itself. She then looked at my notes, compared to hers and she told me flat out that she didn't like to work. 

NOBODY DOES! BUT WE HAVE TO DO IT ANYWAY!!!

 Even at this point, I was able to keep my cool. I told her that we should meet in three days, so that would give her time to do her research. The whole time we were talking about our project, she was beyond frazzled. Our project is really only like a twenty minute presentation. All we had to do is make a slide show. And she couldn't handle it. 

I figured that I would give her the three days to work on it. Wednesday night came around. I had just spent three hours of my life working to fix our handout, and I did my slides for the presentation. I then gave myself a break and checked my email and Facebook. I saw that she sent me an email. She asked if we really had to meet on Thursday, because, we could coordinate everything as easily over email. 

I JUST SPENT THREE HOURS WORKING ON THIS PROJECT AND SHE WANTS TO POSTPONE, BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T HAVE THE WORK DONE?!

Frustration level rising. Consider the knives sharpened. I sent her an email back saying that I would rather meet in person so that we wouldn't have it looming over our heads this weekend. I went to bed thinking the issue was resolved. 

Thursday morning. I woke up and checked my email. She sent me an email saying 

"Alright, but to be honest, I didn't have the time or rather the nerves to work on it, so I guess I'll just have to take it theoretically..."

So, I'm supposed to waste my time meeting with her when she hasn't done any work, because she doesn't have the "nerves" to work on it? She has been piggy-backing on my project since day one. Taking advantage of the fact that I'm a native speaker. Now, I don't want to fail this project, so I looked up everything and did research even on her part, so that even if she flops in our presentation, I'll still be okay. 

At this point, I have no more patience. I sent her an email saying that the whole purpose of meeting was to put our two halves together, and if she didn't do the work, there is no point in meeting. If she's not willing to put forth the work, I'm not going to make it any easier for her!

At this point, I'm just so frustrated. I'm dealing with a girl who's acting like a five year old who doesn't want to clean her room. Well, too bad. Do the work and suck it UP!

 Thank you Dwight, you said it all.. well almost.

A little scary, I know, but I love Sherlock!

Anyway, so today I have a planning session with everyone here for our upcoming trips! This has been a lovely way to vent, but now it's back to the real world!

Hope everyone is enjoying the lovely weather! Until next time!