Briefly

My family is here! I picked them up last Wednesday in Frankfurt since I had the day off from school. We were able to check out the Weihnachtsmarkt there before catching our train back.

I'll say more later, but it is so fun to have them all here! We are all sleeping in my one-room apartment. Needless to say it's cozy with two cots and an extra mattress on the floor. You really have to be careful where you step at night. But we have had a great time just hanging out and playing games (I am SO good at Boggle, it's kind of sad) and visiting the Weihnachtsmärkte in Aachen and Düsseldorf. Today I had to do some laundry and do the readings for my university class, so the fam is on their own exploring Cologne.

I've been addicted to a new artist lately that my friend Tom recommended, so I thought I'd pass it along...

November

November, the third month of this crazy adventure. Also the busiest by far of the three months. It seems like almost every weekend there was something. Pretty fantastic. The past several months have been so unlike the last three years of having just a few minutes between school, work, and activities that I sort of felt like I was doing something wrong. So to have things to fill up some of that extra time was really nice.

First - a day trip with Robert to Aachen and the place called the "Dreiländerecke," or the "Three Country Corner," where Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium all meet. First, in Aachen we visited the cathedral. I'm pretty sure it is the most beautiful church I've been to. There are unbelievable mosaics depicting different saints, apostles, and just patterns decorating every single arch, curve, and wall. Everything is sparkly and brilliantly colored. The stained glass windows are incredible. Worth a trip.

We spent a little bit of time walking through the pedestrian areas full of shops and little fountains or sculptures, where we found this slightly creepy yet uniquely interactive fountain. Each of the several figures had moveable joints, so you could bend them into really odd poses.

But the main attraction for us on this particular day to the far eastern reaches of Germany was the Dreiländerecke, or the three-country corner where Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands meet. It turned into a bit more of a safari than the half-hour bus ride and five-minute walk we had imagined it to be. It was actually more like a half-hour bus ride, and a half-hour hike along a dirt road and trail through a forest to get to the top of the hill. But it was worth the effort. Just before we reached the official corner, we climbed an observation tower to check out the view.

Semi-creepy, yet pretty forest. Robert: "this is just like those
movies where the hikers get lost and then killed by the
serial killer!" *quote may or may not be exactly accurate,
but the gist is the same.

Some would say this is the best view of all...

We kept going. Just another 20 minutes and we were there! It was glorious. There were snacks!

Practicing for the main event...see below

On the ground there are lines to mark the national boundaries.
I totally jumped over Belgium.

I'm playing in the Big Band and Wind Band with Nicolaus Cusanus Gymnasium, the school I work at. The week after our trip to the Dreiländerecke, I got to go on the bands' 3-day retreat. We took a bus out to a hostel in a small town about an hour northeast of Bergisch Gladbach, where we slept, ate, and rehearsed Wednesday through Friday. It was a great opportunity to get to know some more students and for them to sort of get used to me as well. I discovered they play a card game they call "Arschloch," or "Asshole" in English, but my family plays it too! Except we call it Slimeball. I spent a few hours playing with them one evening, and it was fun to just sit around with some students and a few teachers. I roomed with a music teacher from NCG, whose class I sit in on every Friday, and learned that he played trombone in the Deutscher Oper in Berlin for a few years before he became a teacher! It isn't every day that you get to meet a professional musician of that level who is now teaching.

The  next weekend, I went to Düsseldorf for a meeting of all the foreign language assistants working in the Cologne-Düsseldorf area. That's roughly half or a bit more of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and it includes assistants from Spain, France, Italy, Poland, Russia, China, etc., so there were lots of us there. It was especially nice to see some people from the Fulbright program that I had only seen once since orientation. I also enjoyed meeting several other assistants in Cologne, and learn that there are a few that actually live pretty close to me.

Apart from having lots of opportunities to chat with other assistants, we got a tour of the NRW government building, got to visit a museum about the Ruhr region, the Weihnachtsmarkt in the Altstadt of the city, and several other things that gave us the chance to learn and see more of the region we all work so close to.

Other things I did this month:

• Played in the Big Band/Wind Band concert.
• Went skiing at an indoor, one-run "Skihalle."
• Taught a lesson in a 13th grade class.
• Celebrated Thanksgiving by buying a counter-top oven and baking a pizza.

Travels

Man, a two-week fall break is pretty sweet! It gave me lots of time to stay up until the wee hours of the morning and sleep in until noon if I wanted to. That's quite a change from having to get up at 5:45.  I was fortunate in a way to have my university class cancelled for the same two weeks, so I had absolutely no obligations to worry about during the break.

My original plan was to spend the entire two weeks just traveling around Germany, spending a day or two in a city before moving on. That means spending a lot of money and planning well in advance where I wanted to go, neither of which I was prepared to do. So instead, I chose two cities in an area of Germany I had never been to and spend 5 days checking them out.

First stop: Lübeck, about 5 hours north of Cologne in the state of Schleswig-Holstein.

Welcoming Oktober

Well, I've been in Germany for over a month now. So much has happened! I've been through orientation, where I was "trained" to teach English to students, I found an apartment, I have a consistent work schedule, I've taught three lessons and sat in on or helped in countless more, I'm officially a student at the Universität zu Köln, I've seen the view from the top of the Cologne cathedral, I've visited Beethoven's house, attended a concert celebrating Beethoven, and as of two weeks ago, I've spent a weekend in Bayern and experienced Oktoberfest.

The Little Things

• The view from my window.

• Being able to tell someone how to work the machines at the laundromat.

• The student that says hello in the hall.

• Being called "Mr. Mitsuyasu."

• A landlord who helps me set up a bank account and register as a long-term resident, and who drives you to school 3 days a week.

• A landlord who is willing to wait for over a month to let me pay rent after my bank account is set up and my first paycheck comes in.

• Getting free, unlimited travel in North Rhine-Westphalia because you're a university student.

• Taking a university course and understanding almost everything.

• Standing in front of a class.

• Writing on a chalkboard.

• Using the letter X, Q, Z, or J and a "Triple Word" square in the same turn while playing Words With Friends.

• Actually, just using the letter X, Q, Z, or J and getting more than 11 points.

• Chocolate-filled croissants.

• Fresh bread ALL THE TIME.

• Being able to get anywhere in a huge city by train or subway.  Going downtown, just because I can.

• The fact that Nutella or Nutella-flavored products are more common than peanut butter.

• Bike lanes on sidewalks and the sheer number of people that use bicycles.

• Having cars stop for you at a crosswalk every time.

• Meeting other English Teaching Assistants from around the world working in and around Cologne.

• Making kick-ass homemade food that's (usually) healthy.

• Learning the bari sax so I can play in the school's Big Band and concert band.

Mixtape!

I meant to post this before I left for Germany. It's sort of my "music I listened to the most over the summer/songs that hit me just right, right now" playlist. I tried to keep it to one song per artist, but Passion Pit doesn't really play by the rules. After almost two years, I still can't get enough, so I suppose it's okay. 

Home, Sweet Home

Not a bad view, eh?

I finally found an apartment! Actually, I think my apartment found me. I was with a 5th grade class on their introduction to the school library, kind of awkwardly hanging out while the librarian explained how the library worked, when my Betreuungslehrer (supervising teacher) came in and told me he'd heard of an apartment. So we ran downstairs to the teachers lounge where the landlord was sitting on his break. He's one of the music teachers at the Gymnasium, and he had the 4th floor of his house/apartment building up for rent. I got to visit that afternoon after school, and of course I took it! I moved in two days later. 

Grüße aus Deutschland!

Köln Hauptbahnhof

It's been about a week since I got here, and I can hardly believe it. So much has happened already! I've lost 24 hours due to flight time/time difference, been to Frankfurt and Cologne, spent 4 days at a conference, settled into one room, resettled into another room immediately after, and I've visited the school where I'm working. 

Six Weeks

In six weeks I will be starting my year in another country. That boggles my mind a little bit. One week from now will make six weeks since the beginning of the Master in Teaching program at Whitworth. That boggles my mind a little bit too. I don't really know where the time went.

What will my MIT friends be doing in the fall? I won't be here to listen to their stories about their first breakthrough with a student, won't get to laugh about our professors' quirks during class. I'm going to miss the good times we had this summer. I wish I'd been able to hang out with them more often. In a sense, I'm still student teaching this fall too, just about 4000 miles away in a town called Bergisch Gladbach. I wish I could bring my classmates with me.

Germany is exciting. I am practicing my German and starting to plan what I need to pack. At REI today I got a voltage and outlet converter to protect my computer and camera chargers. I used my discount code and got 25% off! I took a gander through some photos from my last visit to Germany. Here's a couple, one from Berlin, one from Dresden.

The Sony Center, from the Reichstag in Berlin

Dresden

Can't stop listening

I cannot concentrate on my homework so I thought I would share a song that I am obsessed with right now. I discovered Friendly Fires earlier this summer and they knock my socks off. Plus, I was just in Hawaii and anything that reminds me of how awesome that trip was just makes me happy.

One of my favorite pics I took in Hawaii: we're up on Diamond Head in Waikiki.

One of my favorite people ever ended up being in Waikiki at the same time. Getting to have dinner with Tyler and Ali Pau was friggin' awesome. 

Pics!

Not for the faint at heart. I finally uploaded my face onto my computer so you can see my stitches and stuff from my bike crash! Don't look if you don't like wounds. I actually hadn't looked at these pictures until now...gross! This one isn't too bad though.


I had a few more of my hands I was going to put up but they are all blurry. Sorry!

Introduction, really

I suppose I should introduce this blog. Or maybe I shouldn't but I'm going to anyway.

My name is James. I just graduated from Whitworth University with a B.A. in Music Performance in May. I'm currently enrolled in Whitworth's Master in Teaching program to get some certification to begin teaching middle or high school band, and the plan is to also get endorsed to teach German in the near future as well. The program is awesome! I will be in class through the end of July when "summer break" begins for the program, and then I am postponing the rest until fall term 2012.

In the meantime I received a Fulbright English Teaching Assisstantship to Germany. That begins this September and will continue through June 2012. It's a pretty sweet deal-I'm getting paid to work in an English classroom in Germany for a year to help students improve their English skills, develop relationships with the students and the community and hopefully be a positive representation of American culture while coming to a greater understanding of German culture and language myself. I'm hoping to join an orchestra and/or choir while I'm there to keep up my musical skills, and maybe take some lessons too if it works out.

One of my best friends from high school also got a Fulbright ETA and will be in Germany at the same time as me! I'm looking forward to being able to share some of my experiences with her and beginning our adventure together by being seat buddies on the flight from Seattle to Frankfurt.

I've been planning on starting a blog to document my time in Germany but since I'm not around my family too much this summer I thought it would be fun to start one now so that they can maybe read up on me every now and then if they want (see previous post). It isn't going to be a daily kind of blog, but I may post several days in a row if I feel like it. There will be pictures and maybe some quotes and some YouTube videos of things that I think are funny, but mostly I think it will end up being a random assortment of stories and maybe a lot of posts about music I'm listening to.

Starting a blog, I think, can be a lot like starting a Facebook account. There are all sorts of funny stories that wouldn't take very much to write down, all kinds of things to do to my blog to make it look cool or more interesting to look at. I must resist the urge to post everything I do!

Spokane's Got Me In Stitches

I've only been back in Spokane for a week and I'm already bruised and scraped and split open. On Wednesday I was riding my bike from my house to school over in Hawthorne, just minding my own business. It was funny because someone had honked at me, not like a toot, but like an actual "braaaaaap" kind of honk because apparently I was taking up too much of the shoulder by riding a little to the left of the white line and he/she didn't want to move over. So I was thinking about that a little bit and thinking about how many issues drivers have with bikes and how frustrating that is when I was getting to the driveway of Hawthorne. I leaned into the turn as I started going around the corner when I hit a patch of gravel and lost traction with my front wheel. As I was going down I reached out to catch myself with both hands which didn't actually help that much, thought "Oh crap I think this'll hurt," and then slammed my chin on the ground. Luckily there weren't any cars coming and there was a lady walking so she came over to see if I was okay. I got up and shook myself off, but she noticed that I was bleeding so she gave me a Kleenex she had in her pocket until I could get to a bathroom for some paper towels.
I went into the bathroom in Hawthorne, checked it out and saw how awesome the gash in my chin looked, then went to check in with my professor and let her know I was going to be a little late after all. Then I walked over to the health center, which is actually closed all summer, then I walked home to get my car and drive myself to the urgent care center down the road a bit.

I swear, the lines in urgent care are like the slowest lines ever. there were 3 people in front of me but it took at least a half-hour to talk to the receptionist. Once I was through that, it was another hour or so until someone could see me. The gauze I'd gotten was definitely stuck to my chin, so the nurse had to pour water all over it until it sort of came unstuck enough to peel it off. Gross. Then I got to sit through the scrubbing and rinsing, which felt weird more than painful, and thinking about it now makes me squirm. Then the doc came in and checked it out, and then I got some nice anesthetic shots to numb the stitching. The great part is the shots hurt more than anything. I actually almost passed out, which is funny because that has never happened to me before and I only started getting lightheaded a minute or two after the most painful shot.

I went with blue stitches to go with my bike. 9 sutures and 5 knots is the final tally, and some reasonably deep scrapes on my palms. Bandaids on the insides of your hands are nearly impossible to keep from falling off. Those big bandaids that cover huge wounds? Not really that sticky.

Inventory of pain as of Saturday morning: stitches in my chin, sore jaw/can't open my mouth wide enough to eat sandwiches, stiff neck, scraped palms, bruised right shoulder, bruise on my hip, scrape on my right shin. Pictures soon.