You Can Call Me El

I'm in an exceptionally good mood as I write this because things are going well and there's loads to look forward to, so I wanted to write a short post just to document it a bit! Yesterday I went to my first Orientalischer Tanz class at the Volkshochschule . It was really fun, and I don't think it would be overly optimistic or premature to confidently say that I was born to belly-dance. However I think I will need the couple of weeks between now and the next class in order to work out how these dancers manage to move their hips up and down. I don't know how that is anatomically possible, but yet I have seen people do it...? So that's the next challenge. Today is the first German conversation class, which will hopefully be good practice and not too demoralising. Beth is coming too, which is nice but also means there will be a witness to my shame. Fortunately she's very tactful, and won't mention it if I do manage to destroy the German language and my...

Last week was the 25th anniversary of the peaceful protests in Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification. To celebrate this, Lichtfest was held, in Leipzig, apparently in Chemnitz also, although none of us knew it was happening, and in other cities in Germany. On Wednesday I went to see a film with Beth and her housemate Susan (who is German and never speaks English - good German practice points!). It was in the absolutely lovely Clubkino Siegmar in Chemnitz, a kind of art-house-y cinema that shows unusual, old, or foreign films. I've been told that the downstairs screen is brilliant and has armchairs, tables, and a bar in the back, while the screen upstairs showing our film was less comfortable but still interesting, with rows of wooden chairs rather than several attached to each other like in a normal cinema, in a tiny, intimate room with mood lighting. The film was a short documentary filmed by some schoolchildren a few years ago about the protests that...

Today, the 8th October, marks an entire month since I came to live in Germany. This post is a short recap of the story so far, and also a quick look at character development. This first month has been a rollercoaster and a half. To quickly recap – the course in Cologne, and meeting the other ELAs; the journey to Chemnitz and the debacle with Zietenstraße 70, the flat that was never meant to be; moving from house to house and living out of a suitcase; seeing Dresden and fifth-wheeling with Heike’s family and Marcel; living in Caro’s flat for nearly two weeks and going to McDonald’s every evening to use the wifi, then coming home and reading Tamora Pierce on my laptop before going to sleep to the sounds of the man in the room next door growling and groaning all night; starting school-life and meeting the pupils and teachers; attending the staff meeting and having to do a speech to introduce myself that no one had warned me about; going to Leipzig for the first time and being incredibl...

On Friday, my day off work, I decided to go on an expedition to Burg Rabenstein, the smallest castle in Sachsen. There were tempting posters all around the city last week advertising 'Wikinger auf Burg Rabenstein, 3-5 Oktober' - Vikings! From this I concluded that there would be some sort of fair, like the ones we love to go to in Wrest Park in Bedfordshire with everyone dressed up in medieval costume doing jousting and the like. What's not to love? So on Friday I set off on the long cycle ride to the Burg. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the thought of a 14-mile round trip did not deter me until right at the end, when I realised that Google maps did not account for hills/small mountains. However, after a certain amount of pushing my bike up seemingly vertical slopes while breathing heavily and sweating likewise, I arrived at the castle, and it did not disappoint. Looks just like the pictures on Google! But I promise this is one of my own. I went to investigate t...

This week I've had my first experiences with real teaching, rather than the previous weeks of mostly sitting at the back of the classroom and introducing myself to every class, regardless of whether I had met them before. Children all look the same, okay? They're all reserved, suspicious, and kind of hostile until you get them to talk to you, and I can't tell any of them apart, let alone learn their names. As I still didn't have a timetable, I was informed of my Monday off work on Sunday evening, via WhatsApp. Difficult though it has been, I am finally beginning to get over the utter weirdness of WhatsApping with teachers - teachers should email! Or talk to face to face! Not text or use instant messaging for goodness sake! After a day of freedom, on Monday evening I was informed, via the same medium, that I had a class the next day. So, I turned up to that class feeling fresh and ready for another hour and a half of sitting in the classroom and possibly reading out a ...

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 ...