My first "White Christmas"

So today is not, in fact, Christmas but Christmas Eve or "Heiligabend" as it is known in Germany.  However, "Heiligabend" is the big Christmas celebration day in Germany, so it's kind of like Christmas.  In about an hour I'll head to Louisa's house (a teacher of mine) where I'll be celebrating with her family.  We'll go to church in the late afternoon, eat a big meal and then they will open presents.  Even though it doesn't really feel like Christmas to me, it seems more like I'll be "observing" a foreign, German holiday with a foreign family.  I am excited about spending it at Louisa's house since her two sons will be home, one of which studied in Canada for a year and is on break from his Civil Service period in Bolivia and the other lives in Australia with his Australian wife and child.  Bonus points: the wife doesn't speak much German, so I have the perfect excuse to speak some English!

In addition to the 2-3 inches Hannover got last Friday, it snowed about another inch on Monday night, which has now melted a little bit and resulted in a pseudo-white/slushy Christmas.  Walking back from the grocery store I almost had a major wipeout since there is about a 1" layer of ice in some places.

Well, I should probably get ready to head out, but I wanted to wish everyone a Frohe Weihnachten!  That's "Merry Christmas" in German, just in case you didn't catch that.

It's freakin' cold...

I was originally going to choose a poetic or lyrical title such as "White Christmas" or "Baby, It's Cold Outside," but I can't help but think that "It's freakin' cold" is a little more accurate.  It's currently 18°F or 9°F with the windchill (-8°C/-13°C), which is pretty cold to me--especially considering this is at 3:00 pm.  The upside to this is that Hannover is currently blanketed in about 1-1.5" of snow.  It started snowing around 11:30 pm last night and it has pretty much been light snow since.  This morning I was feeling a little better, so after snagging a few pictures out of my window I went on a short adventure through Hannover with Bill.

I give you pictures of Hannover during the first snowfall of 2009:

 

 

 

 

Things to Know, Part II

So tonight marks the first time that I'm starting to feel a little better after this cold or as my colleagues call it "my flu".  I'm pretty sure it isn't/wasn't the flu, but they all keep on referring to it as die Grippe or flu.  After two and a half days of almost exclusively lying in bed and going through approximately three packs of tissues, I'm starting to feel a little bit more like myself.  To honor this, I thought I would continue a series of posts I started back in September: Things to Know--my cultural observations as an American in Germany.

German fashion can be a bit weird.  Normally it looks pretty similar to American fashion from the 1980s (this means you, Berlin), but there are two fashion trends in Germany that I find particularly troublesome: Fanny packs and Ed Hardy.

• I hestitate to say that fanny packs are cool in Germany, but they are definitely more prevalent amongst the under thirty crowd here.  While in the US fanny packs are viewed as pretty dorky, here they are mostly worn by the urban crowd (as in slightly more thuggish).  Side note, fanny packs are known in the UK/Australia as bum bags because fanny means...well, something different.
  
• Ed Hardy is something I normally associate with white trash whether it's southern or Jersey, but it's pretty much evenly dispersed here.  Makes me wonder why people consider Europeans to have a more developed sense of fashion. 

Germans bring their dogs everywhere.  Seriously, everywhere.  It doesn't matter whether you are in a restaurant, on the subway, in the mall or at a bar, chances are someone has their dog with them.  The one positive side to this is that most German dogs are considerably better behaved than their American counterparts.  The downside is that there is much less of a taboo about cleaning up after your dog.  I've stepped in dog poop at least twice this month alone.  Really Germans, clean up after your dogs. 

Christmas Eve, or Heilige Abend as it's known in in Germany, is more important than Christmas Day.  On Heilige Abend you exchange gifts and eat a large Christmas dinner, usually goose, and Christmas Day is kind of a do nothing holiday with the family. 

Social Etiquette is quite different here in Germany or at least less strictly followed here than in the US.  For example, in Bremen we were trying to take pictures in those little woodcuts where it's a picture and you stick your head through one side and crazy Germans kept on walking right in our picture--even when they saw what was going on they didn't seem to care (and it was quite obvious).  No, this is not universally true, but it definitely seems to be a recurring issue.  Second example, multiple times I've found myself getting cut while waiting to order food at a to go restaurant.  I really don't even think it crosses their mind, but in Germany when you want something you go up to the very front and kind of yell what you want while in the US you politely wait until someone sees you and asks you what you want.  In general maybe this section could be titled, "American Politeness Won't Get You Far in Germany".  A further example: it's not that rude in Germany to stare at someone (makes me pretty uncomfortable on the subway) but smiling at someone can earn you a dirty or at least confused look.

On an unrelated note, it's currently snowing north of here in Germany, and it's supposed to snow in Hannover tomorrow!  Get pumped!

M.I.A.

So you'll have to excuse me for this bit of an absence--after going a little overboard on the "fun" this weekend, I'm currently fighting my first German cold (hopefully).  The only thing that motivated me to get out of bed today was to run to the library to get a movie I could watch in bed and take back a book that was due as well as a quick trip to the grocery store for some provisions including ingredients for chicken noodle soup.

I've also been the recipient of two awesome care packages this week (I feel pretty important, now!) from Sam and my dad so shout outs to them!

Well, my chicken noodle soup is almost done, so I'm going to grab a big bowl and start my movie!
Also, Bill (one of the other two Fulbrighters in Hannover) keeps a blog with his girlfriend Sarah and updates it a little bit more consistently than me (I'm working on it, though!).  Check it out at http://sarahandbilly.blogspot.com/.

Bananas in Pyjamas

So this probably doesn't really count as an adventure, but last night certaintly felt like one.  Bill's girlfriend Sarah is in town for the week from Cambridge so I met up with them, Judy and Paul at this Irish bar called the Dublin Inn which is in the Altstadt near the Weihnachtsmarkt.  Bill chose the Dublin Inn because apparently it has an English pub quiz on Thursday nights--sounds great, right?  Turns out that a pub quiz to the English is what most American bars simply advertise as trivia night.  The only difference this time, was that the lady who read out the questions had a thick Irish accent and was most likely incredibly drunk.

Seriously.  Half of her questions didn't really make sense from the start and the other half were jumbled up so much by her inability to speak that they were rendered pretty much intelligible  Ok, it couldn't have been that bad because we ended up, somehow, getting fourth place (which we had to go ask about since we were the only team whose final score wasn't read out loud).  But really, drunk Irish people are funny though, and we had a great time mostly because we were guessing at not only the answers but the questions as well.

One memorable example, she asked for the four main actors/actresses from Gone with the Wind which as I proud Southerner I quickly figured out with Bill's girlfriend Sarah.  Five minutes later she said she changed her mind and wanted the four main characters from the movie--umm, ok.  Then when she read the answers she only said two (so we had no idea about the other half).  Whatever crazy, drunk Irish pub quiz question reader.

Very Important Person

News Update:


Check out my school's homepage at http://www.bbs-me.de/.  I can't help but feel like my students are going to rib me about this on Monday!

I thought Spring Break was in Mexico?

So today marks the end of another week of school here in Hannover and all in all I'm feeling pretty happy with my current situation.  While some of my students originally were quite shy towards me and sometimes even borderline rude, they have really begun to respect me in a certain sense.  I think I owe a lot of this to the teachers at my school, who really do treat me in many ways like an equal to them and as another member of the teaching staff--my students see this on a regular basis and now view me in that light.  I'm also lucky because since I'm not a full-time, normal teacher, I don't have to worry about some of the formality and professionalism that they must maintain, and I'm able to forge more personal/friendly relationships with students.

It's funny because for a while I was afraid to speak German with my students outside of class because I thought if they realized I don't speak perfect German, they wouldn't respect me in their English lessons.  They don't even seem to bat an eye at me when I misconjugate a verb or use a wrong tense--I guess they realized what I should have realized a lot sooner: I'm here to teach English as a native speaker and to learn German as a foreign language and they don't overlap as much as I thought.  What I mean is, in the US if a teacher or teaching assistant, even in a foreign language class, couldn't speak English that well, students automatically stopped paying attention and would give awful evaluations that they were an awful teacher.  If you are teaching German or French or Spanish it shouldn't really matter whether your English is perfect or not (with the possible exception of introductory courses) but that you know the language you are teaching.  Hell, I taught German to third graders at an elementary school in downtown Columbia, and we weren't even supposed to speak English.  It forces you and the students to communicate and understand each other in the new language which not only promotes learning but also reinforces the usefulness, efficacy and functionality of the new language.

I thought today I would answer a question I get a lot when I talk to family and friends back home--how does the weather in Hannover compare to the weather back home?  Of course, I needed to do this as scientifically as possible (why use words when you can use scientific graphs!).

 

According to the climate comparisons tool on weather.com, it shows that the average temperature in Columbia, SC is 18°F warmer than the temperature in Hannover, Germany.  I think it's interesting how the temperatures in Columbia seem to vary more than in Hannover--there seems to be a bigger difference between not only daily highs and lows but also summer highs to winter lows in Columbia.

Since on numerous occasions I've referred to this year in Hannover as just a "halfway home" before moving to Chicago next year, I decided to check out the climate comparison between Hannover, Germany and Evanston, IL (home of Northwestern University) as well.

 

I thought this comparison was possibly the most interesting.  If you just read the facts on the results table the climate comparison tool gives you, Evanston is on average approximately 1°F warmer than Hannover.  However, if you look at the graph Evanston not only gets significantly warmer in the summer, approximately 8°F, but also a bit colder in the winter.  Pretty interesting, right?

Last but not least, the title of this post refers to a question posed to me by a student this week.  One of my classes had an exam this week when I would normally teach the class, so I went to a different class with my host teacher Martina (one I'd never met before).  I did a short intro of myself and then we had a Q&A session about myself and America which I've become quite adept at here in Germany.  Of course Spring Break, like always, was brought up because through things like Girls Gone Wild and MTV's Spring Break programming, they think Spring Break is some mythical place in Mexico where there is always free alcohol and tons of hot college girls taking their shirts off.  I don't like to completely burst their bubbles, so I started off slowly with the explanation that there is no city called Spring Break, Mexico or anywhere for that matter and it's the same thing as their Spring Break.