Things are good. I've been teaching and learning and having a lot of fun, which is what should have been happening up to this point. I have already written about the hockey games in Slovakia, so I will write about some other aspects of my life here in Germany.
My Apartment
I live in a 20 square meter apartment in the Goeggingen area of Augsburg. I can't believe I don't know how much that is in square feet. It is in a newish, clean and recently remodeled building. It has everything I need.
I can walk just up the street to catch the tram to go into the city, to the university, or to the train station from which I can get a train to pretty much anywhere in Europe. I am enjoying not relying on a car...for now. If I lived here all the time, I would definitely want a car to get around.
I like having a little kitchen, with a fridge that I can set to a really cold temperature. Most mornings and evenings I eat at home, which saves a lot of money. I will definitely miss that on the next part of the trip, where Ali and I will be staying in hotels exclusively.
Augsburg, the People, and Language
I have encountered some wonderful people on this trip. I honestly feel that Germany has gone through a bit of a renaissance of niceness. I can't remember encountering a surly shop assistant yet in the nearly two weeks that I've been here. That has not been my experience in the past, so I'm definitely enjoying it now.
People from Augsburg and the surrounding area speak with an interesting accent that I could never copy, but I enjoy listening to it. Bavaria is well-known for its dialect, and some Germans I have met from elsewhere claim to not understand it. But I am not having a problem. Of course if I were to go up into the Bavarian Alps and hear real "Bavarian" German I probably could not make heads or tails of it.
Speaking of, well, speaking...it is very tiring to speak German all day. I tend to speak more English socially. My friends here are either American, or Germans who speak wonderful English and want to practice. But work-related conversations are all in German. I definitely have lost some of my ease with the language after 5 years away from here, but I do surprise myself with what I manage to remember every day. I have been speaking German since I was a freshman in high school (25 years!), so my brain has had a long time to develop those pathways. :-)
Work
The reason I am here is to learn more about German law libraries, and to teach classes to German law students and librarians.
I am teaching an 8-hour class to law students in Augsburg that is an introduction to US law and law school. That class is halfway done and I've been enjoying the time spent with the students. I am doing that class in English to prepare them for going to the US.
Yesterday, I did a 5-hour Westlaw training at the Bavarian State Library School in Munich for 12 law librarians. This was in German. I prepared two PowerPoint presentations (one for the morning, one for the afternoon), each of which were about 75 slides. It was a little easier than I thought to explain how Westlaw, an American legal information database, works in German. But I fear that I overwhelmed those poor people. I gave them a lot of information, and by the end we were all pretty much exhausted. Commuting to Munich from Augsburg is relatively easy (45 minutes on the regional train in each direction), but we also had to go on the subway to the library school from the train station. I don't know if I could do that commute every day - it was fairly exhausting.
I will do a shorter version of this training (2 hours) at the university here in Augsburg next week, mainly for law students. They crave information about Westlaw. I do have to balance giving them the information they want, but also give them enough background information about American law to make it useful to them. This is a hard balance to strike. I think I will get better at it as I go along.
Culture
It is always fun to drop myself into German life and see what's up after many years away.
Lately, the buzz in Augsburg has been about the city's soccer club (in German, sorry), which, for the first time in its 104-year history, is being promoted to the first division of the German Bundesliga. The people here are beside themselves about this development.
The other big soccer story is that Borussia Dortmund are the champions of the premiere division in the Bundesliga this year. When I lived in Germany in 1996, Borussia won that year as well. They televised the celebration from Dortmund over the weekend. I think there are quite a few footballers and fans that got very little sleep and were feeling quite hungover by Monday morning, from the looks of the party up there.
The big "cultural" event that took place last weekend was the Eurovision Song Contest. I don't have a point of comparison for this extravaganza. I have never seen American Idol (I know) but I'm thinking it might be something like the American Idol competition, but for European countries. The winners of this year's contest, which took place in the soccer stadium in the German city of Duesseldorf, was the group from Azerbaijan. They were okay, but I preferred the girl from Austria, and the guy from Russia.
Never mind. This contest is all about the competition between the countries and not the quality of the singing. People can text in their votes during the show, but they can't vote for the competitor from their own country. So you know that the Scandinavian countries are going to vote for each other, and that all of Portugal's votes will go to Spain, and San Marino's to Italy, etc. There was also a lot of Eastern European countries sticking together in the voting. I enjoyed hearing the voting results more than watching the songs, to be honest.
Conclusion (for now)...
Well, I think that's enough for today. There are still plenty of things to talk about, but I will be back again. Sorry it was so long between posts.
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