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16/7/10 week five in Munich

                School is finally coming to an end and summer vacation has just begun, and not a moment too soon.  It is scorching hot here and sunny every day.  And I will not lie; the schoolroom became a veritable hell in the last week.  The air becomes humid and sticky, the sun shines in on the back of your neck, and you begin to horribly regret your decision to wear a shirt that morning.  A decision that is made in the coldest part of the day can never stand the test of time.  You listen to the teacher drone away and in my case you probably only understand a third of what he’s saying.  It would be difficult to stay awake in class even if you did understand what he was discussing, in my case, I find myself jolted awake every five minutes or so.  I’m not trying to be rude; it’s just very hard to maintain polity uprightness when the deeper meaning of the conversation escapes you.  Of course this is also the case in many other conversations I’m witness to, but for some reason the ones at school are the only ones that seem to bore me.  When I first arrived in Munich, there was a little party thrown for me.  Susanne invited one other family for dinner and cocktails.  The father in this family was an Englishman who moved to Germany with his wife and learned to speak almost perfect Deutsch.  Despite living in Germany for many years he still spoke the king’s in a very proper oxford fashion.  He told me that when he first arrived in Germany he was very lost when attempting to carry a conversation, but that as time went one he began to develop a good ear.  He also told me that the first step to learning to speak German was getting to the point when one can begin to pick individual words , that you already know, out of rapid conversation and start to comprehend there meanings within said conversations. 

He turned out to be quite right.  As I sat at the table for the rest of the evening I could understand so little of what was being said, sure I pretended to understand some things, I laughed when the others did, so as not to seem rude, but truthfully I was sitting there in a little world of ignorance doing my best to contain my frustration.  That night I cried a little, I had no idea how much the ability to have a descent conversation had meant to me. 

My frustration only grew immensely over the next week.  I’m sure anyone who’s been on an exchange knows what I’m talking about,  the urge to socialize with intelligent banter is very strong, and yet one cannot,  you can only stand there and smile stupidly at everyone, laugh at jokes, and try not to reveal you’re inferior language abilities.  I’m not very talkative by nature but, when I get home I will talk my head off.  For the first couple of days I will off handedly muse about Schrodinger’s cat, and chaos theory, and for next three days I will bore everyone with obscure and lengthy observations on the nature of Vespasian during the year of four emperors, such is my desire for sophisticated chatter. 

Still, things have improved of the last two weeks, I can almost always figure out the gist of what is being said in social speech, and the simpler discussions I understand completely.  I’ve and a roughly ten days ago I started be able to pick familiar words out of sentences just like the English father had been talking about.  And as summer sets in and people get off school my life here has begun to take a drastic change for the better. 

(Next week I will be doing an internship with Lenny, at a baker.  I will be documenting my five days there on a semi daily basis.  I will also start taking more pictures; I realize that I haven’t been taken nearly enough pictures.)