Student: How do you say "I'm going home"?
Me: Ich gehe nach Hause.
Student: How do you spell "Hause"?
Me: H-A-U-S-E.
Student: Oh, just like the English!
Me: ... *blink* ...
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
I live here, too.
Folwell Hall, home of the German department. My office is here, the classroom where I teach is here, all of my classes are here. This is a crappy picture - you can hardly see the gargoyles.
So, today was the first day of the spring semester here at U. Minn. I got a bit lucky this semester and don't actually have any real classes Tuesday or Thursday, so all I had to do today was teach, and even that was fairly minimal, since it was the first day. I just did a brief mixer so the students could refresh their German and get to know each other a little, then went over the syllabus with them. It was kind of weird, since I knew half of the students very well (they were in my 1001 section last semester) and the other half not at all (although I'd heard about a few of them, from the TAs for their 1001 sections). It looks like it's going to be a good semester - the students were all energetic and friendly right from the start.
In other news, I got my books for the semester ($176.40 for ten books, not too bad), and I bought a rat for Pablo. He was abominably foolish when I put the rat in his cage, though - he got so excited he struck the glass (twice!) before realizing where his dinner was, and by that point he was so scared by bumping his nose on the glass that he just sat there and looked at the poor rat for half an hour before trying anything.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
I live here.
So, this is where I live. It's an old brick building, ivy up the sides, lots of dogs (but surprisingly little noise), hallways smell perpetually like curry (but in a good way). I'm on the third floor.
This is the view from the front door. Yes, the window is cracked open, in Minnesota, in January. That heater between the window and the bookshelf puts out an obscene amount of heat - I think it'll probably melt through my various wires one of these days and burn the whole building down, but until then, I'm just happy that I don't have to worry about being cold. At all. Ever.
The half-down blind is to stop the sun from glaring on the monitor and interfering with my WoW obsession...
If you look left immediately after entering the apartment, you see what some might refer to as a kitchen. It works well enough, but it's about the same size as my closet, and the stove isn't big enough to hold a normal-sized cookie sheet, which makes me exceptionally sad.
The amusing part about the kitchen is that the landlord recently had it remodeled (which is nice in that everything works well but not so nice in other ways, as I will soon disclose). The trouble is that they apparently measured wrong or something, because the place where the fridge is supposed to go (where I currently have a shelf holding foodstuffs) is too narrow for a regular fridge. Well, damn. So for the first several months that I lived here, the fridge sat just on the other side of that wall, right in front of the closet in which I keep all my cleaning stuff, so that I had to move the fridge every time I needed paper towels. This, naturally, was beneficial in that it gave me an excellent excuse to not clean things, but it got old pretty quickly. Mom suggested over Christmas break that I get an extension cord and move the fridge to the other side of the room, so I did, and it's excellent, and I feel remarkably foolish for not having thought of that myself.
Hi, Fridge! (additional greetings go out to Boris the Turtle and a stack of tragically homeless cookbooks)
So there's that side of the living room. The couch is absurdly comfortable, so I overlook its ill-advised Southwesternness. I spend a great deal of time in it watching Lost, BSG, Mad Men, Jericho, etc., instead of writing papers.
And here's the other side, where I spend a great deal of time playing WoW instead of writing papers. Don't look at the cable in the doorway. I've got the hook-y things to put it up around the doorframe, but I'm terrified that I'm going to hammer one through my finger or something, so it's been there since September.
The bedroom, home to Pablo, some books, and a great deal of shoes.
The bedroom as seen from the bed. Disregard the dirty clothes - I'm planning on washing them tomorrow (which is to say, Sunday).
And, just to be thorough, the bedroom as seen from the window! Thrilling, no? Note the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. It's my favorite thing in the world. Behind the door (the one with the doorstop, not the one with the mirror) is a really big closet, but it's full of stuff, so you can't see it.
My tiny little bathroom. I have nothing to say about it, other than squeeeeeeeee I have a bathtub!!111!1 *cough*
Yes.
I do.
There is a window to nowhere on the other side of the bathtub (actually, it's apparently an old dumbwaiter, but it looks like a window). The windowsill holds a lot of unnecessary foofy girly things. Also, the bathtub is not actually that grubby - it's just the lighting. I should've made this picture black and white, just to be artsy. Bathtub windows require art, you know.
And that is where I live. The End.
This is the view from the front door. Yes, the window is cracked open, in Minnesota, in January. That heater between the window and the bookshelf puts out an obscene amount of heat - I think it'll probably melt through my various wires one of these days and burn the whole building down, but until then, I'm just happy that I don't have to worry about being cold. At all. Ever.
The half-down blind is to stop the sun from glaring on the monitor and interfering with my WoW obsession...
If you look left immediately after entering the apartment, you see what some might refer to as a kitchen. It works well enough, but it's about the same size as my closet, and the stove isn't big enough to hold a normal-sized cookie sheet, which makes me exceptionally sad.
The amusing part about the kitchen is that the landlord recently had it remodeled (which is nice in that everything works well but not so nice in other ways, as I will soon disclose). The trouble is that they apparently measured wrong or something, because the place where the fridge is supposed to go (where I currently have a shelf holding foodstuffs) is too narrow for a regular fridge. Well, damn. So for the first several months that I lived here, the fridge sat just on the other side of that wall, right in front of the closet in which I keep all my cleaning stuff, so that I had to move the fridge every time I needed paper towels. This, naturally, was beneficial in that it gave me an excellent excuse to not clean things, but it got old pretty quickly. Mom suggested over Christmas break that I get an extension cord and move the fridge to the other side of the room, so I did, and it's excellent, and I feel remarkably foolish for not having thought of that myself.
Hi, Fridge! (additional greetings go out to Boris the Turtle and a stack of tragically homeless cookbooks)
So there's that side of the living room. The couch is absurdly comfortable, so I overlook its ill-advised Southwesternness. I spend a great deal of time in it watching Lost, BSG, Mad Men, Jericho, etc., instead of writing papers.
And here's the other side, where I spend a great deal of time playing WoW instead of writing papers. Don't look at the cable in the doorway. I've got the hook-y things to put it up around the doorframe, but I'm terrified that I'm going to hammer one through my finger or something, so it's been there since September.
The bedroom, home to Pablo, some books, and a great deal of shoes.
The bedroom as seen from the bed. Disregard the dirty clothes - I'm planning on washing them tomorrow (which is to say, Sunday).
And, just to be thorough, the bedroom as seen from the window! Thrilling, no? Note the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. It's my favorite thing in the world. Behind the door (the one with the doorstop, not the one with the mirror) is a really big closet, but it's full of stuff, so you can't see it.
My tiny little bathroom. I have nothing to say about it, other than squeeeeeeeee I have a bathtub!!111!1 *cough*
Yes.
I do.
There is a window to nowhere on the other side of the bathtub (actually, it's apparently an old dumbwaiter, but it looks like a window). The windowsill holds a lot of unnecessary foofy girly things. Also, the bathtub is not actually that grubby - it's just the lighting. I should've made this picture black and white, just to be artsy. Bathtub windows require art, you know.
And that is where I live. The End.
Holy crap, I have a blog.
I completely forgot about this thing. I think I may start actually updating... First thing: pictures of my new apartment in Minneapolis! After that: updates on school, probably, and possibly amusing incidents from my students. And then: whatever the hell else I feel like, dammit.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Minneapolis.
So, I've accepted Minnesota's offer of admission. They've got a great German Medieval Studies department, and they offered me enough money that I will merely be a poor grad student rather than a possibly dead grad student. I went there a weekend or two ago to visit (April 2-5), and here is the story (and, more importantly, the pictures).
So, I left the house in the wee hours. I wound up waiting on my porch for nearly an hour for the taxi, but that was okay, because it was relatively warm and I had a good book (even though my neighborhood is a little sketchy at 3:30am). The airport was practically empty - it was me and perhaps a dozen other people waiting for the plane to Philadelphia, where we were all connecting to go to various fascinating places. The only way out of Williamsport is through Philly, you know.
My sleepy compatriates.
So, I got to Philly, had an overpriced sandwich, dealt with various rude people, and hopped on the longer flight to Minneapolis. This flight was mostly rather uninteresting, except for towards the very end, when I noticed that Minnesota is apparently coated with small, fluffy, oddly uniform clouds.
See?
And from the ground.
The people in the Minneapolis airport were much nicer than the ones in Philly (or I was more awake and less irritable, but I'm pretty sure they were nicer), and it was very easy to find my way around. I had to take the light rail to get to my hotel, and it was actually really weird, because the trains or trams or whatever they call them look just like the Strassenbahn in Dresden. I felt bizarrely homesick while riding them. Two interesting things: all the trains and buses have bike racks on them (because Minnesotans are wacky hippies) and the light rail stops all appear to have heaters in them that you can turn on if you're cold (because Minnesota is freaking cold).
Minneapolis, from the light rail station where I got off.
The hotel was fun (the Aloft, look it up if you're bored), and the school paid for it (along with the flight, the meals, etc.), so I enjoyed it. It was kind of pretensiously hip, which was amusing. The elevators had squooshy blue goo under mats on the floor, so you can squoosh it around while waiting, and it kind of quacks at every floor instead of dinging. The room was small but nice, and the only picture that came out was this one:
Why do all "modern" hotels have glass showers?
After checking in, I put away my things neatly (read: dumped them on the floor) and went to check out an apartment. It was about a half-hour walk, which was nice - let me see some of the city, and assured me that the apartment isn't in a creepy neighborhood.
Apartment is here:
It's the farthest building with a green thingamajob.
The apartment was fine (small, but had a shiny new kitchen area), and the landlord was nice, and there's a park across the street, and I can get a PUPPY. Or I could, if I weren't living on a grad student budget with a grad student amount of free time.
Anyway, the more interesting event happened just before I met up with the landlord. I was about half an hour early and absolutely starving, so I was looking around for a place where I could get something to eat, and I happened to find this place:
It says they make subs and Mexican food.
It looked promising. So I went in. The right half of the room was barren, except for a freezer case and a pile of lumber. The left half of the room was filled with rows of shelving and dusty canned goods, in front of which was a dingy deli case. In the deli case was half of a frozen lasagna. That is all. I do not lie. So, I'm taking all this in, and the Greekish guy behind the counter is looking at me with a perplexed expression on his face.
"Um...do you make subs?" I ask.
"No. No make sub," he replies in a remarkably thick accent, looking dejected.
"Aha."
I'm wondering what to say next, when all of a sudden his face absolutely transforms, and with a big smile he goes:
"I make gyro!"
"Okay. I guess I'll have a gyro then."
So I had a gyro. It was good. I ate it in the little park across from my prospective apartment building and got white sauce all over my sleeve. Fortunately, he gave me a handful of paper towels with the gyro.
That's all for now. The next two days of the trip will be coming in the next few days.
Part of the store (I couldn't very well take a picture of the guy making my gyro, could I? Would've been rude.).
So, I left the house in the wee hours. I wound up waiting on my porch for nearly an hour for the taxi, but that was okay, because it was relatively warm and I had a good book (even though my neighborhood is a little sketchy at 3:30am). The airport was practically empty - it was me and perhaps a dozen other people waiting for the plane to Philadelphia, where we were all connecting to go to various fascinating places. The only way out of Williamsport is through Philly, you know.
My sleepy compatriates.
So, I got to Philly, had an overpriced sandwich, dealt with various rude people, and hopped on the longer flight to Minneapolis. This flight was mostly rather uninteresting, except for towards the very end, when I noticed that Minnesota is apparently coated with small, fluffy, oddly uniform clouds.
See?
And from the ground.
The people in the Minneapolis airport were much nicer than the ones in Philly (or I was more awake and less irritable, but I'm pretty sure they were nicer), and it was very easy to find my way around. I had to take the light rail to get to my hotel, and it was actually really weird, because the trains or trams or whatever they call them look just like the Strassenbahn in Dresden. I felt bizarrely homesick while riding them. Two interesting things: all the trains and buses have bike racks on them (because Minnesotans are wacky hippies) and the light rail stops all appear to have heaters in them that you can turn on if you're cold (because Minnesota is freaking cold).
Minneapolis, from the light rail station where I got off.
The hotel was fun (the Aloft, look it up if you're bored), and the school paid for it (along with the flight, the meals, etc.), so I enjoyed it. It was kind of pretensiously hip, which was amusing. The elevators had squooshy blue goo under mats on the floor, so you can squoosh it around while waiting, and it kind of quacks at every floor instead of dinging. The room was small but nice, and the only picture that came out was this one:
Why do all "modern" hotels have glass showers?
After checking in, I put away my things neatly (read: dumped them on the floor) and went to check out an apartment. It was about a half-hour walk, which was nice - let me see some of the city, and assured me that the apartment isn't in a creepy neighborhood.
Apartment is here:
It's the farthest building with a green thingamajob.
The apartment was fine (small, but had a shiny new kitchen area), and the landlord was nice, and there's a park across the street, and I can get a PUPPY. Or I could, if I weren't living on a grad student budget with a grad student amount of free time.
Anyway, the more interesting event happened just before I met up with the landlord. I was about half an hour early and absolutely starving, so I was looking around for a place where I could get something to eat, and I happened to find this place:
It says they make subs and Mexican food.
It looked promising. So I went in. The right half of the room was barren, except for a freezer case and a pile of lumber. The left half of the room was filled with rows of shelving and dusty canned goods, in front of which was a dingy deli case. In the deli case was half of a frozen lasagna. That is all. I do not lie. So, I'm taking all this in, and the Greekish guy behind the counter is looking at me with a perplexed expression on his face.
"Um...do you make subs?" I ask.
"No. No make sub," he replies in a remarkably thick accent, looking dejected.
"Aha."
I'm wondering what to say next, when all of a sudden his face absolutely transforms, and with a big smile he goes:
"I make gyro!"
"Okay. I guess I'll have a gyro then."
So I had a gyro. It was good. I ate it in the little park across from my prospective apartment building and got white sauce all over my sleeve. Fortunately, he gave me a handful of paper towels with the gyro.
That's all for now. The next two days of the trip will be coming in the next few days.
Part of the store (I couldn't very well take a picture of the guy making my gyro, could I? Would've been rude.).
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
A brief update on my life.
So, when we last left off...I was about to move into a terrifying new abode and had no idea what time I would next be able to post. Well, that time happens to be now, approximately a year later.
Um. Yeah. Sorry.
Quite a lot has changed. The last few months in Germany were fun, and I actually got more exploring done due to my lack of internet (O Great Absorber of Free Time...) - I'll post the pictures when I have a bit more time. Upon getting home, I lived with Mom and Dad for a month or two and then moved when I got an exciting new job!
I'm currently teaching German (not real German, just baby German) at Lycoming College, same place I graduated from. The guy who was teaching introductory German there retired, and, since they had no better option, they hired me. I'm kind of a temporary fix for them, because I only have a Bachelor's degree instead of a graduate degree, but still - the kiddies learn German and I get a fun job. I'll post fun stories later - they are here in abundance. Of course, most of them have to do with semi-adult men being unable to contain themselves at the word "duschen,"* but still, stories are stories, yes?
So, like I said, this job is just temporary. Next plan? Move to Minnesota!
No, seriously, I'm really moving to Minnesota. From Pennsylvania to Michigan to Germany to Pennsylvania to Minnesota...this has been an interesting past few years. Yes, yes, you say, but WHY precisely are you moving to Minnesota? Grad school. I've just enrolled in their PhD program (#11 in the country for German, I might add) for Medieval German Studies. I'll probably never get a job with that degree, but it's what I want to study, and they're essentially paying me to do it, so it should be fun. I'm going to visit Minneapolis (on their dime, no less - full airfare and hotel and meals paid for) in about a week, so hopefully I will have fun stories and lots of pictures.
So, that's the short version of the last year in the life of Leah. I'll attempt to post more regularly now...but no promises.
*It means "to take a shower." Perverts.
Um. Yeah. Sorry.
Quite a lot has changed. The last few months in Germany were fun, and I actually got more exploring done due to my lack of internet (O Great Absorber of Free Time...) - I'll post the pictures when I have a bit more time. Upon getting home, I lived with Mom and Dad for a month or two and then moved when I got an exciting new job!
I'm currently teaching German (not real German, just baby German) at Lycoming College, same place I graduated from. The guy who was teaching introductory German there retired, and, since they had no better option, they hired me. I'm kind of a temporary fix for them, because I only have a Bachelor's degree instead of a graduate degree, but still - the kiddies learn German and I get a fun job. I'll post fun stories later - they are here in abundance. Of course, most of them have to do with semi-adult men being unable to contain themselves at the word "duschen,"* but still, stories are stories, yes?
So, like I said, this job is just temporary. Next plan? Move to Minnesota!
No, seriously, I'm really moving to Minnesota. From Pennsylvania to Michigan to Germany to Pennsylvania to Minnesota...this has been an interesting past few years. Yes, yes, you say, but WHY precisely are you moving to Minnesota? Grad school. I've just enrolled in their PhD program (#11 in the country for German, I might add) for Medieval German Studies. I'll probably never get a job with that degree, but it's what I want to study, and they're essentially paying me to do it, so it should be fun. I'm going to visit Minneapolis (on their dime, no less - full airfare and hotel and meals paid for) in about a week, so hopefully I will have fun stories and lots of pictures.
So, that's the short version of the last year in the life of Leah. I'll attempt to post more regularly now...but no promises.
*It means "to take a shower." Perverts.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
About that apartment...
So, I signed the contract thingy and got my keys and stuff to my new apartment today, and it's not nearly as icky as I remember it being. The kitchen is awful, yes, but the bathroom is reasonable nice, if small. The shower has actual water pressure, which is fantastic. The shower at my current apartment has about the same water pressure as the kitchen sink, only diffused over a larger area. I'd get a better shower from a plant mister. So, a shower with decent water pressure will be a welcome change. The living room is also bigger than I recall, although it's still teensy. If any of you want to visit me, you'll have to sleep standing up in the shower or outside. Yes, outside! I have a terrace! ...unfortunately, my apartment is underground, so it's really a cement-walled cell attached to the apartment. There's ivy growing down the sides, though, and if I look up I can see sky, so that's nice. The walls are neatly beveled, ostensibly so that any wayward kitties can climb out to safety instead of dying a horrible death trapped on my terrace. Pictures are here.
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