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| From Bavarian Summer |
Summer Come and Gone
I've now been in Germany for seven months and I have been quite pleased with all I have seen and done so far. The time has flown!
The title picture is the view from my bedroom window. There have been many cool cloud and light shows from the occasional summer storms. I really like where I live. I'm in very nice part of Munich with grocery stores, a variety of restaurants, the English movie theatre, and parks all within walking distance. I'm six-minutes walk from the U-Bahn (underground) and nine minutes from the S-Bahn (over and under ground train). It makes it nice that I don't always have to take the same route to get home.
I've made a ton of great friends since being here, mostly from church and from work. There is no shortage of fun and interesting people to be around.
My work has been going great. I know it seems like all I do is travel and take pictures when you read my blog, but I have been working a little bit this Summer as well. As I have mentioned previously, I teach week-long intensive English courses at a private institute. This means that in one week I might be teaching 9-hours a day, Monday through Friday, while in the next week I might not work at all. I love this schedule because life never gets stuck in boring routines and I have time to travel, study, work on music, help the missionaries, or whatever.
I also like this work schedule because it means that each week I work I get to meet someone new and interesting. So far I have been very lucky to have almost all fun students.
I had one student who was really into movies and he and I shared the same favorite movie: Star Wars. So on one day I brought in The Empire Strikes Back (which I just happened to be borrowing from a friend) and we watched through part of it looking at phrasal verbs, the uses of the present perfect, and meanings of the word "get." I also made a worksheet of phrases from Yoda that my student had to correct. He really liked it .
I also had a student who was an avid hiker and one day he brought in his maps and showed me a bunch of great hikes in the Alps.
One of the games I often play with my students is one that Dad used to play with us as kids. I will tell two or three stories and then the student has to guess which one is true and one is false. Then he must tell two or three stories and I have to guess. It's a great exercise because the student has to pay careful attention to your story and then he must practice his fluency when he tells his stories (it's great for working on the past tenses.)
The institute where I teach is just a block or two away from the Englischer Garten, Munich's "green lung." This means that if it's a beautiful afternoon, I will sometimes take my student into the park for the final few hours of the day. A few weeks ago I was sitting on a shady park bench on a beautiful summer day eating an ice cream with my student as he may or may not have been lying to me about an experience scuba diving in South Africa; and I thought to myself, "I'm getting paid for this?"
Sometimes English teaching can get boring though, so I have my bad days as well, don't worry.
A few weeks ago I was given ANOTHER calling at church. My first calling is that I'm second councilor in the Young Men's presidency. Basically, I am one of three other guys in charge of teaching the four or five teenage boys on Sunday and having an activity with them every week or so (usually fußball). But I have also been asked to teach the Sunday School lesson once a month to the Young Men/Young Women. I reluctantly agreed to take the calling, but my German still is not that great and it can be difficult. I've taught once so far and I just made sure I asked a lot of questions and got a lot of class participation (but with teenagers, that's not always easy.) I do have a supportive Sunday School president who is there in the class with me and is there to back me up if I get into a language corner (he's who I borrowed Star Wars from, actually.)
So there you have it, a bit more information about life here in Munich these days.
Small cars...
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| From Bavarian Summer |
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6 Deep thoughts:
I loved reading about your "normal" everyday life. I enjoy reading about your travels, too, but this was a fun way to visualize what you do when you are in Munich. Lots of Love...
~Mom
You have had an interesting summer exploring Germany. My new REI t-shirt says it best. " Not all who wander are lost".
What are your plans for the future? Are there job openings next fall?
Phew! I was worried you were wasting your time over there. It sounds like over all you are having a good experience. Now what are you doing surfing the internet? Get to work.
:p
Boy, you think your job is tough, I've got an interview with Charlie Gibson this week--and that's not even my job; it's just part of the job interview for the job I hope to get in January. I'll know if I got it or not in November. At any rate, these mooseburgers are good.
Hey, I play the three stories game with my kids when we put them to bed. My mother-in-law says the only bad thing about it is that when the kids get older, they may not remember which ones were true/false. That is how rumors get started, ya know!
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