You Can Call Me El

Good day to you all, and happy weekend! I didn't write a post earlier this week because I had absolutely nothing to write about. Last weekend I had four days off in a row, as Monday was a bank holiday. I had planned to go to Mannheim, but ended up not being able to face the journey; the trains were striking again, and a five and half hour journey could have ended up inestimably longer, as the transfer times were about five minutes for each change. Basically I chickened out of the journey because travelling is very stressful and I am a big baby and also a wet lettuce. I did spend some time this week meeting up with various language assistants; as we officially finished on the 31st May, everyone's last day was on Thursday or Friday. I, on the other hand, stupidly agreed to go in on Monday 1st June as a favour to one of the teachers. This didn't seem like a bad idea at the time, as I do really like this teacher and I knew I'd be hanging around for a while after we offici...

Last weekend I went to BERLIN! We should all take a moment to thank Abbie, whose excellent idea it was to go and see Laura Marling in concert on the Saturday night. This motivated us to schedule the weekend in Berlin which an amazing seven of the eight of us in our house next year were able to attend. I was lucky in that I had the second shortest journey; it only takes two and a half hours or so to get to Berlin from Chemnitz. Poor Dan drew the short straw; his coach from Freiburg to Berlin took eleven hours. GOD. Anyway, after a certain amount of organisation and quite a lot more faffing around and ignoring the fact that we actually had to arrange something at some point, astonishingly all seven of us made it to Berlin by Friday evening. Five of us shared an Airbnb in Schö neberg (again, found by Abbie - THANK YOU) which was a lovely first experience of this setup for me. Airbnb allows people to rent out their rooms for a night, several nights, or an extended period of time, b...

Last week was organised slightly differently from usual, in that I did the interesting things on Thursday and Friday and achieved nothing at all worth writing about on Saturday and Sunday.  Görlitz/ Zgorzelec   In order to say farewell to the language assistants in the Chemnitz area, the town council organised a day trip to Görlitz/Zgorzelec for us on Thursday. This is on the German/Polish border;  Görlitz is the town on the German side, and  Zgorzelec  is across the river on the Polish side. As one of the few remaining towns that survived the wars almost unscathed, it is a popular film set. The Grand Budapest Hotel was filmed in  Görlitz, as was part of Inglourious Basterds and The Reader , among others. We did manage to get a look at the building that was the actual hotel in Grand Budapest Hotel , although in typical style it was being renovated, so pressing our noses against the windows and peering in at the darkened staircase was the best ...

So a bit of a cheat this weekend - I did not, in fact, spend the weekend travelling. HOWEVER, that does not mean it and the week before were not eventful! Last week went very quickly as usual, but was marked firstly by the introduction to a new class. I've agreed to help Caro, the trainee teacher, with a simulation for her 11th grade (English year 12) to help them learn Everyday English. The class will cover topics such as going out to eat, what to do in an emergency, how to apply for jobs, how to return things in shops - all things they've already learnt at some point in their school career but have definitely forgotten. We've also got them to invent roles for themselves (such a huge number of them put 'football' and 'sport'/'keeping fit' as their hobbies that it was sickening) and put them into 'flats' of three, i.e. they sit at tables of three to do the individual tasks.  Although it is rather late to be starting new classes, it's be...