You Can Call Me El

I was saving this blog title until I felt fully settled in Chemnitz – or at least until I had all the components necessary to feel fully settled. I feel justified in using it today, for the latter reason. Let me outline the following factors that have allowed me to feel like this: A Place To Live For Months At A Time I now have a room all of my own! I moved on Friday to the Johannes Kepler Internat, Hofer Straße 2. An Internat is in many ways like halls of residence; this one has younger children rather than students, but as far as I can work out it seems to be like a boarding house. The kids go to school here in Chemnitz, stay in the Internat during the week, and go home at the weekends. At least I think that’s why I haven’t seen any of the other inhabitants this weekend. A spot of detective work on the part of Jack – “Have we been eating anything with chocolate sprinkles?” “No...?” “Someone else has been in the kitchen today!!” – and the mysterious moving around of toothbrushe...

I wanted to write a post about my school, because I haven't said much about it yet. Today, a lovely Year 7 class took me on a tour that they had prepared for me in their English lesson. I learnt that the school is a listed building more than 150 years old, hence the very old-fashioned furniture and decor that they are seemingly not allowed to modernise, and that it has an observatory, an imposing assembly hall, and art rooms that I had no idea existed. It was named after George Bauer, a doctor, scientist and general great guy who was born in the 1400s, and who seems to have had several schools named after him, according to Google; whenever I look up my school on Google maps (which is often, as I'm still not entirely sure where it is), another one in Glauchau of exactly the same name pops up in the list. Note the numerous terrifying statues Agricola-Gymnasium Chemnitz, however, is special because of its bilingual focus; it is one of only six or seven schools in Sachsen to ...

I'm writing this in Chemnitz's public library, with some difficulty; I've already used the 20 free minutes of internet, so I'm going to write this before attempting to get online again. So if it posts, you should all congratulate me for having worked it out (or broken into the system, which should equally deserve congratulations, as I certainly don't have the skill to do that). As the title of this post hints, I am still homeless. I've been spending spare moments whenever I have wifi on wg-gesucht.de, desperately trying to find a WG (a shared flat) that is furnished, available for me to move into this week, near(ish) to the school, full of Germans for me to talk to, reasonably-priced, and generally not a revolting place to live. This is proving somewhat difficult. At the moment I'm staying in the flat of the school's Referendarin, Caro, who has very kindly allowed me to use it while she stays in Dresden. I've heard rumours of another flat that I ca...

Hallo! I'm in Germany! And I've been in a state of surreal confusion since the 4am(ish) start on Monday, 8th September, when I left Bedford and began the journey to Germany and the first stop: Cologne! All the ELAs (English Language Assistants, for those of you who otherwise wouldn't understand the excellent puns I am convinced I can make about ELAs and my own name) from Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand who had been placed in certain German states met in Cologne Hauptbahnhof on Monday, to be taken to our two-day-long training course in the Hotel Maria in der Aue. There, we were given incomprehensible paperwork concerning insurance and other bureaucracy, ritually humiliated, which took the form of teaching a lesson to the other ELAs while they pretended to be small German children, and provided with four or five excellent meals per day, all largely meat-, cheese- and cake-based. Personally, I had a fantastic time - it was lovely meeting the other ELAs ...