09 September 2011

Tag Acht (Day Eight)

Well, today’s quiz did not go too badly. It was more like a test, with four pages worth of questions on various grammar, vocabulary, listening comprehension, and sentence composition. After our quiz/test we had a couple hours of instruction before our teacher announced that we would be having a special activity. Our class and the level below us all went into the city, to the Oberstadt area of Marburg (Oberstadt being a portion of the city raised above the rest of it, accessible by many stairs or two elevators). There we split into smaller teams and proceeded to go on a factual scavenger hunt in which we had to approach people and ask them, auf Deutsch (in German), questions about the city, the university, and the state (Marburg is located in the state of Hesse). That concluded class for the day, and, as it was Friday, we did not have an informational session (Mondays and Wednesdays, for now) or a German movie (Tuesdays and Thursdays, for now). So I hung out with some friends who needed to go looking for a few things (one, in particular, needed an Ethernet cable…more on that in a minute), went back to the student dorms, then hung out with a bunch of people in the evening.

On the Ethernet cable…it has now come to the attention of at least part of our group that I am the go-to person for technology questions. Amusing, but I suppose it should just be said “That didn’t take long.” So far I have worked on three different laptops, a cell phone, and helped someone find the right Ethernet cable for their room.

A bit of German geography: The country of Germany is composed of sixteen Länder (singular Land). These states are much like American states (except that in German government, they maintain partial sovereignty). Thirteen of them, like Hesse, in which Marburg is located, are states of areas. Three of them, Bremen, Hamburg, and Berlin, are city-states composed of individual cities. Hamburg and Berlin are cities by themselves. The State of Bremen is composed of the city of Bremen and the city of Bremerhaven.

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