Day 15: TWO WEEKS!

We have been in Germany for two weeks! We can hardly believe it. It has been an awesome two weeks, for sure.

We had nearly blue skies this morning. It was lovely.  Amelia attempted rather unsuccessfully to make a panoramic photo of the Goethe-Institut courtyard.

Amelia's class had a substitute teacher today. Karin had warned us yesterday that she would be out and we'd have Svenya instead. Svenya was fun. She speaks German a bit too fast but it seems to stem from her enthusiasm and who are we to complain about people talking fast...?  She had us going lots of interactive activities and finally got through Amelia's skull the info about the exception to the rule that the dative (indirect object) goes first in the sentence, except when the direct object is a pronoun. That never sunk in before but today the light bulb went off. It was a good class but we are tired now.

During the coffee break, Amelia and Andrew spent time chatting with a group of Amelia's classmates who are all 30 or 31 years old (the Indian mathematicians, Geetha and Bakky, and the Turkish imam, Osman). We feel so old. Amelia took her first German class in high school before any of these students were born.

At the end of class, we played a 20 questions type game. Here's Geetha trying to guess the word on the board behind her (buchstabieren) by asking us yes/no questions.

Andy's class spent some time today in the Mediothek researching cities for imaginary vacations. His group picked Heidelberg since that is where we are going for the weekend.

Today, we had our usual classes and then a lovely lunch of Wurst and potatoes in the Mensa. Mmmm...

We sat with three of Andy's classmates at lunch, Michael from Connecticut and Boston, Daniele from Genoa, Italy, and Deni is from China via Philadephia.  It's embarrassing to be speaking to people in our first or second languages when one or both of those languages is their third or fourth language. Seriously. The USA needs to put more emphasis on young people learning a second language since once a second one is learned the following languages can be learned more easily, supposedly. Age 50 is NOT the ideal time to learn your first second language, indeed.

Then, we walked to Osiander bookstore again to buy yet another work book. This one was suggested by Svenya. We will have enough of these to keep us busy when we get home, hopefully.  We also ordered a little spinning wheel think to help learn irregular verbs. It'll be in tomorrow, although I don't know if we can get there to pick it up and the other book we ordered, on tomorrow. They might have to wait until Monday.

We saw this bench on a side street. Bleibe is the German verb for to remain, conjugated in first person (I remain). Or, it's a noun meaning abode.

Then, we headed home, stopping for a can of coke along the way for an afternoon snack. We had small Cokes and some chocolate for our afternoon snack. Sorry, no pictures of the chocolate because we ate it all before thinking of photographs. ;-)

Today we are studying more since Amelia has a test tomorrow and Andy has lots of homework.

Later we walked to the Drogerie (basically adrug store but not apothecary, so everything drug-store-like that the Walgreens would have except the prescriptions) for a couple of things and also to the Geldautomat (ATM) and then we went off to dinner at the Hotel Goldener Adler, where we stayed our first few days.  Amelia had her favorite on that menu, the ox chops with white wine sauce, carrots, kohlrabi, and roasted potatoes. Andy ordered something new called Bierkutscherpfänne.

We walked home and ran into our friend Terry along the way and he walked with us to the nearby ice cream shop where we had dessert and a nice chat with Terry and a couple who sat near us with a beautiful dog.

Then, home for more studying.