First month of classes: Remembering how to be a student

It's kind of hard to believe I've already been in Germany for over 2 months and have been taking classes for a month. It's about the half-way point of my stay here.


The week or so before classes started I met some of the international students through the other Eastern students and did a little bit of exploring in the area. It's nice having two of the dorms pretty near each other and it makes it easy to get to know other people by hanging out in the kitchens since there isn't a real other place to hang out in the flats. And I finally met all of my roommates which took a while since almost everyone was still on vacation when I first got here.

Three of us took a day trip to Marburg to explore around the castle and old town.

A Medieval festival/market was also going on around that time. So Kaity and I went with two friends who had never been to such an event. It was fun to watch their expression when they saw everyone in costumes fitting of not only the timeframe, but also the region for each cultural group.

I then had to remember how to be a student. Well, learn how to be a German student. It's weird only having to be prepared for a course by reading instead of doing hours of homework a night. The classes are also only once a week and 90 minutes each, which is also a change. I don't have that kind of attention span for subjects I completely understand, let alone theoretical musical and dramatic texts in German. I also learned that the US has a primarily practical approach to teaching music where as in Germany it varies by university and "tada", I landed in a theoretical based one. I can't really explain what this has done to my thinking process, but I've very happy the course with the more ancient texts has us read the English translations.

 So after four weeks, my head doesn't hurt as much every Monday and Tuesday (which are the only days I have real class), I still have to fight to stay awake and attentive for 90 minutes-usually I entertain myself by trying to place dialects/accents, and I have most of my presentation topics picked. Now just to spend hours researching. Oh and Giessen doesn't have that great of a library so there will probably be many trips made to Frankfurt and Marburg on my long weekend to use their resources.

On a good note, my roommates say my German has already improved. And that I don't sound Dutch like one of my classmates said. I sound almost normal. And I'll take that.