Finally in my favorite spot to write, the previously mentioned HADAG #62 Ferry on the Elbe. (One of the perks of an unlimited transit pass, the ferry becomes a floating café! If only they had wi-fi here…) Not only do you get that fun feeling of being on the water, but you get to watch all the tourists enjoying their first views of the truly awesome port of Hamburg. Right now, the ferry is rich with the unmistakable sounds of Austrian accents, as the Rapid Wien is playing the Hamburger SV in the big Europa-League game tonight. Your faithful correspondent will be in attendance tonight, and is rather excited, as it will be his first European soccer game! (A full report will, of course, follow)

As the last post was supposed to be a highlights reel, and turned into a rather lengthly work of prose, I am going to endeavor to keep this post relatively short, but talk a bit about what I have been up to at school, something which hasn't come up in this blog too much.
Things have been changing around a lot recently at school, as we perennially find ourselves a few teachers short… the unfortunate death of one of our colleagues, the pregnancy of the teacher with whom I worked most closely, and the wave of illness, including the swine-flu (PC: "New Flu") that hit the school, as if to announce for all of those who were unaware the arrival of old man Winter. The indications have been legion: the cold, the ever shorter days, the impenetrable fog, the sudden disappearance of all the tables and chairs from the sidewalks, or at least the stacking up and/or chaining together thereof, and last but certainly not least, the appearance of scarves around the neck of every passer-by. (See the picture of the HSV fans above!)
I spent the vast majority of my time at school working with the 7d and 8d, as their teacher CO**, knew she would be leaving sometime around Christmas break, and it would convenient for me to take over the class when she was ill, and make the transition easier when new teachers had to be found for the class. This point came a lot earlier than we though, i.e. last week, so I have recently been taking over a lot of classes. I've had some fun lessons with both of these classes, and we get along pretty well. The 8d has recently adopted a terrarium of "stick bugs" (there apparently is no better translation of Stabheuschrecke) as their class pets, and are always happy when I stay after class to help them feed their little friends. I also help out my mentor, Sel, with some of her classes, her 12b and 9e. With the 12th graders, we have been covering various aspects of the history and culture of India, as this is one of the possible themes for the Zentralabitur, the recently centralized mother of all final exams, required for acceptance at all German universities. I have also done a series of lessons on Media, both the MSM and the so-called "New Media" blogs, podcasts, and various forms of social media with Bo's 10 graders, an analysis of two poems with Tz's 13th graders, and am working with Htm on an ongoing series of lessons centering around the film "Erin Brockovich." This series will end with a mock trial-like discussion, which I think the kids will enjoy a lot.

** N.B. Out of respect for the privacy of the teachers I work with, I will be referring to them by their Kürzel, an abbreviation that every teacher at a German school gets. My Kürzel, in case you were wondering, is Smi.

Oh golly, a smörgåsbord!

My goodness, it has been quite a while since I updated this puppy! Needless to say, a lot has happened since then, much of which will covered only superficially (if at all) in this strange mishmash of unfinished posts from the past two months...

I'll start with the coolest (and most expensive) stories first. A few weeks ago I went to a concert of the british rock band MUSE with my friend and fellow Fulbrighter, Lucy. I had been meaning to look into tickets for this show months ago, but by the time I got around to it, the place was sold out. Luckily enough, I came across 2 tickets last minute over CouchSurfing.com's Hamburg Forum! While there, we looked through the brochures of upcoming concerts and I realized that both the Norwegian band "a-ha" (of the truly 80's song "Take on Me" fame) and the world's most well known syth-pop band, Depeche Mode were playing that weekend. At first I though, "Gee, it's a shame that I am going to miss both of these concerts..." but then I started to realize that with some luck and some good budgeting, I might actually be able to pull it off! As soon as I got home from MUSE, I started dredging the internet, looking for any remaining tickets to both of these sold out performances. I was especially desperate to find a ticket for a-ha, because this was to be one of their last performances in Germany, and the band is planning on going their separate ways come next year. After a bit of searching, I found a reasonably priced ticket on e-bay. It was a floor ticket in about the 10th row. When I got to the ColorLine Arena and met the guy selling me the ticket, there a was another woman there practically in hysterics, complaining about how she had won her auction fair and square, and how could he be out of tickets already? I was quite surprised to hear this myself, but it soon turned out that there had been a mix up as to the number of tickets available in each section. We ended up working it out so that hysterical woman got my ticket, and for a 15Euro reduction of the ticket price, I got a ticket one section further back. I didn't realize that this meant I would be in the very last row of the floor section, but it was too late, and I decided it was water under the bridge and proceeded to enjoy this great band.
So excited to have actually seen a-ha before they disbanded, I figured I would try and score a hat trick on concerts that weekend and try to get Depeche Mode tickets too. Hardly believing my luck, I found another auction on e-bay. This time, rather than someone who obviously bought extra tickets in order to scalp them, it was from a guy who really wanted to go to the concert but had to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances. After chatting with him for a while (he was very surprised to find out that I was an American) I went about the task of finding someone to come with me. I eventually managed to rope my roommate Adrian into coming along, but it took almost a whole day. He was a bit worried about transportation, and how long it would take to get there and back. Oh, right, I forgot the mention the concert was in Bremen, about an hour's train ride to the southwest. Ordinarily it would cost about 20Euros to get there, but because we both have full HVV passes, our tickets only cost 7Euros. I finally managed to convince him to come along, though it turns out he was right to worry... more about that in a minute! Anyway, the concert was really great! Depeche Mode is really impressive live. Unfortunately, the audience was not terribly impressive. These folks had obviously not been to a standing-room only concert in the past decade. People are going to be moving around, trying to get further forward, going to get a drink or relieve themselves. This point seemed to have been lost on the majority of the audience, which evidenced itself in the aggravated looks and occasional physical abuse of our fellow audience members every time Adrian and I attempted to move further than 3 inches. After the concert, we hurried to the train station, only to confirm that we had indeed missed the last train back to Hamburg by more than an hour. We were effectively stranded in Bremen until the next morning at 5:50am. This was simply to long for us to wake, so we did the only thing there was to do in this situation: we started asking every single person at the concert hall if they were heading to Hamburg. We struck out completely after asking what seemed like several thousand people. Giving up, we starting hanging out with some nice folks Adrian had met while trying to find a ride home. We must have spent at least an hour chatting about the concert and swapping stories about festivals we had been to, when they announced it was time for them to head home to Berlin and we were welcome to join them. Adrian and I decided that rather than sit idly around in the rainy and cold Bremen weather, we might as well have some fun, so we all climbed into their car and hit the Autobahn. A few hours later we arrived in Berlin, bought the boys a real Berliner currywurst and a Kindl, and made our way to the train station. Taking the first train back to Hamburg, we arrived a full 20minutes earlier than we would have, had we waited in Bremen all night!
N.B. It was not my intent at the time, but one of my friends later mentioned to me that while she was proud of herself for having been to all of the German city-states in one week, I had achieved it in one night, a record which someone would have to try pretty hard, and spent a lot of unnecessary money to beat!
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I love getting things that are actually important in my box at school. If there is anything in there at all, it is normally something that just gets distributed to all the teachers: how to instruct your pupils to avoid Swine Flu, new rules on how many tests students in the new "Profile Upperclass" system as compared to old major/minor system, etc. So it was much to my surprise the other day when I saw a letter addressed to me from the Ministry of Education inviting me to a conference in Kiel the next week. It was a chance for all of the Teaching Assistants (i.e. not just Amis and Brits, but our French and Spanish colleagues as well) to meet up and chat about how things have been going at our schools and to share our experiences, concerns, and suggestions with the Ministry. On top of that, we got a free lunch and a tour of the Landtag (state parliament) and of Kiel itself. Unfortunately the weather was truly miserable, so we spent most of our tour in the bus, peering through the rain and fog to marvel at the barely discernible outlines of whatever particular sight our tour guide was babbling on about. We managed to amuse ourselves nonetheless. It was nice to see the other Americans I had met in Altenberg again. It seems most of us followed the same logic, preferring to live in larger cities rather than our small towns, so there are a few in Kiel and Lübeck with similar commutes to Katie and me. I stayed in Kiel for a little while afterwards to hang out with some other Fulbrighters, and ended up traveling with them from Kiel to Neumünster. It irked me that Neumünster is 2 dinky stations outside of the area in which my train pass is valid on both the Nordbahn regional trains and the AKN light rail. I did a little research and found out that there is a bus I can ride from the last stop on the Nordbahn all the way to Neumünster, so I decided to try it out one Thursday afternoon. The bus was waiting at the station when the train pulled in, almost like it knew I was coming. My friend Amy was pretty surprised then when I called her and mentioned that I just happened to be in town! My impromptu visit conveniently coincided with the first meeting of the English Club at Amy's school, so the kids got treated to two Americans in the classroom for their first meeting! The timing between bus and train is unfortunately not as convenient on the return trip, a fact which lead to my getting to know the VERY provincial town of Rickling far better than I had ever imagined! It was freezing cold that evening and the "train station" was just a hunk of concrete with a roof near the train tracks, so I decided to check out the area on foot to keep warm. I set out in each of the three directions possible, walking 5 minutes out and 5 minutes back, only to discover than there really is NOTHING in Rickling! Apparently if I had gotten off the bus a few stops earlier there was a neighborhood bar/pizza joint that I could have checked out to pass the time, although the point of this exercise was not paying anything to get to and from Neumünster... we'll just have to figure that out the next time I'm in town.
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Other things I have been up to:
** Re-wiring our entire entire apartment for internet (LAN & Wi-Fi) + Telephone
** Trying to figure out what I want to do with my hair...
** Occasionally battling with a cold/the flu, but so far reigning supreme!
** Attempting to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and failing miserably.
** Getting strangely used to waking up at 6am...
** Catching flak for not updating my blog often enough, which is why this post is going to end...... now.