Jetz muss ich lehrnen...

translation : 'Now I must learn', or more literatly, Now must I learn. German sentance stucture is whacky. First, puting something like 'now' at the begining of a sentance flips the subject and verb so that the verb comes befor the subject. 'Ich' meaning 'I' in german is not capitalized unless at the begining of a sentance. 'muss', the first person singular form of 'mussen' is a modal, or helping, verb which in german means that the main verb gets pushed to the end of the sentance in its infinitive form. Infinitive forms of german verbs almost always end in 'en'. whew. Enough grammar for you? I went to classes today! real german ones. The first one I went to turned out to be cancelled today and starting next week, so then I had lunch with Elena, Heike (from Luther) and Aife (from Irland). It was fun, and then we had an hour before our next class so we decided to all go rent a paddle boat on the Aasee! it was a little adventure, lots of fun. Then Elena and I both went to a German seminar called 'Vertragsituationen in Literature und Philosophie' translated meaning Contract situations in lit. and philosophy. It should be really interesting, we talked to the professor and she was really nice and said we could come talk to her if we ever need help. We'll be reading Roussaue and Kant and Foucault, auf Duetsch, so I'll probably need some help! We'll also be discussing Goethe's Faust, good thing I did that research paper on it last year :-P After that I went to a Vorlesing on the history of german language. Vorlesungs are just lecture classes. The Prof. seems like a nice funny old man and was pretty easy to understand so it should be a fairly interesting class, although by 4-6 o'clock I'm kinda burnt out, so it gets hard to concentrate. Cathy and Emma are in the class with me, I met Cathy last weekend she's friends with Elena, they'Re from Shefield, England and have funny accents :) but when I talk to them I want to start talking like them, although I don't think they's appreciate it. its just so cute! anyway, Then I came home and made myself some dinner. I'm getting slightly better at cooking, I generally just buy meat and vegatables and toss them in a pot with some oil and spices and make a stir fry, or stick it in the oven. It works. I'll have to try something fancyier some time. The food at the Mensa is not the greatest... everything tends to be battered and fried and drowned in brown gravy...mmmm. right. but they always have brotwurst! you can always count on germans to have brotwurst. Germans are a strange breed, not terribly friendly in general. They dont smile at people or talk to people they dont know over. I tend to smile at people without thinking about it and it gets me some strange looks, or it makes people think that I want to talk to them or something. The other day I was just out walking and the first guy I smilled at walked with me all the way to the Mensa. He was really nice though, a taxi draver from Iran, and asked me about where I was from and was telling me about his family and stuff. I told him MN was the land of 10,000 lakes and he said, 'maybe you have a lake nearby and go in the summer to make bar-b-q? Americans are very well known for bar-b-q.' he was funny. The next person I encountered that day was not so pleasent... in fact he was drunk- in the middle of the afternoon- and kept following me and telling me how he really wasn't a bad person and the governement is bad or something... I finally stoped at a park with lots of people and told him I was going to stay and he needed to go. I took him a while to get the picture, it was really really creepy. So... I'm not sure if I should continue to smile or not. It results in meeting interesting charactors anyway. OK, I'm tired, time to go back home and read for a bit. I bought 'Seek my Face' by John Updike in the big bookstore here that sells a few english books... I gave up on Harry Potter auf deutsch, I'll be getting enough german reading in my classes! Tschüss!