Many of you may be familiar with the Occupy movement, which has been brought to great prominence in the news, especially with the group of protestors known as Occupy Wall Street. Today was a day of international Occupy protests, with Occupy groups in cities all over the United States and the world staging Occupy-protests. A few of us decided to go to Frankfurt, which was supposed to be the location of one of the protests. The same student-passes that we have that give us free access the bus system in Marburg also give us free transit aboard some of the trains in the state of Hessen. We left mid-morning, took the hour-long train ride, and then wandered around the area of the train station for a while before the protestors were scheduled to gather. Students in Germany traditionally will gather to protest just about anything, or so we had been told. There were not many students at this protest though. Most of the people were late 30s to early 50s. It seemed like while the protest itself was organised, yet what the protestors wanted was far from such. We walked along with part of the protest march, listened to one of the speeches, and then went to go find a place called Sportsarena. Sportsarena is one of the biggest sporting goods stores in Germany and the location where I and my friend Marc hoped to find German team jerseys! We were able to find them…a lot of them. After a bit more wandering in the city, we headed to the train station to take the next ride back to Marburg. All in all, it was a fun, new, and interesting experience. Aside from that, the evening should be very relaxing, in preparation for new classes this upcoming week.
With pre-semester over, this next week will start the regular-semester, where the normal, non-study abroad students start their classes as well. Thus, we will all be in classes with other German students, taught by university teachers. One of my classes is an archaeology class on ancient high-technology. This class is being taught in German, but my friends Marc and Niki are in the class with me, which should help with understanding and studying. My other class is on American science fiction in the 20th century. This class is taught in English (by a German teacher). For those of us in this study abroad program, we all have “tutorial” sessions for each class. These tutorial classes, especially for the classes taught in German, will serve as a study session where things can be clarified. They will be led by English-speaking German students who are studying in the field related to the class (and have probably taken it as well). In addition to these two classes, I also signed up for a conversation course. This conversation course will be comprised of the people from my language class, and a leader to facilitate our…conversation. The focus of this once-per-week meeting is to just improve our speaking skills and keep them sharp. Supposedly, we will be doing things like going and ordering in German at cafés, playing games in German, watching German movies, etc. Since it does not cost any more, provides one extra credit for university transfer, and will help my German, I think I will be taking it (it is completely optional, except once you start going, you have to continue to attend in order to get credit for it). One last opportunity that we found out about was the possibility of tandem learning during this semester. The university matches us up with a German student who is working on learning English. They connect us and we can meet as often as we would like, just for conversation and to help the other person improve their ability in their foreign language. More information to come with all of these new things as the week gets underway!
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