The first week

Right then, this is where we get to the - probably vital - first week in Wernigerode/Ilsenburg, and typically this is where my memory starts to get a little fuzzy... it was over 2 weeks ago and a LOT has happened since then so it's not old age yet right...

Anyway (there will probably be a lot of "anyway"s in here, my brain's all over the place so god only knows what order everything will come out in and how many tangents i will go off on - a lot like this one..) So, in an attempt to follow on from the last entry i'll talk about what happened at the station in Cologne, well that's not really a lot from what i remember... it was a pretty unremarkable bus ride back, at least i think it was. I don't remember now but i probably did fall asleep again and that would be why it was unremarkable.

I arrived in Ilsenburg after a nice train journey through a pretty huge chunk of Germany (at least that's what it felt like!) The first stretch was from Cologne to Hanover which was nice, I was on the train with Poppy, Sophie (another girl from the course in case you couldn't already guess that..) and one of the former assistants whose name i actually can't remember right now, i hope she doesn't read this because 1) that would be awkward for the obvious reason that i forgot her name and 2) because that would mean she found my blog somehow which would be creepy soooo if you are reading this whatever your name is; i'm sorry i forgot your name but now you're stalking me which is not normal behavior so i think we can call it quits? and if she's not reading this then it's fine because you don't know that i don't know your name. So either way we're good. I told you my head's all over the place!

back to the train journey...! i don't have any pictures from the train trip, mainly because i was too tired to actually think about getting my camera out but also because it's really difficult to take pictures when you're going really fast through the countryside! - it must suck to be the roadrunner, you could never take pictures on the go... meep meep.

but anyway, soon enough we got to Hanover and it was time for me to struggle off the train and the others were all staying on the train for at least a little longer but thankfully the trains in Germany wait for a lot longer at the stations than English trains do, this was useful due to the fact, in case you've forgotten, i have a suitcase the size of a small planet. Poppy was also nice enough to help me lug it all off before half of my belongings were left to continue the journey to wherever the train was going to end up. 

From here on out I was on my own, at least for a little bit, so after deciding it would be stupid to lug said planet down the stairs on my own i went towards the lift, simple enough i hear you say. oh no. you haven't taken into account the fact that some germans just like to use the lift as a way of perusing the platforms but they don't get out. I'll explain, I was waiting politely for the lift and after an unusually long time, it finally comes up to the platform, completely full, but that's okay i thought to myself, this is the top level so they are obviously all going to get out here, right? wrong! they just stood in the lift, chilling and waiting for someone to try and get in, and seeing as i had my planet, and i am of the opinion that personal space is something i value, especially around people who use lifts like a london eye pod, i didn't get in and after a little while it went back down again. now this happened again, after about 5 minutes of waiting (they have to clean the pods on the london eye so i presume this is what they were doing in this time) and another group of sightseers came up and went down and by this point, i was considering just walking down, as some of the other people who had been in the queue had done but i braved it for slightly longer and it paid off, i was down in 30seconds. Score. 

But i then knew i would have to brave it again for the next platform, well apparently not, i had clearly moved down in the sightseeing scale of things as this lift was completely deserted - clearly they knew something about the other platform that i didn't... 

So anyway i get to the platform, and i think i was at least 20minutes early, i don't really remember but i just waited there as planets don't really allow you to have a tour of any other possibly sight worthy platforms or the like. And as i was waiting there, one of the teachers from the course turned up and stood waiting for the same train as me. Now this is a slight mystery to me, as he wasn't on the train before, i would have noticed him there on the platform, odd. He is also a slight mystery himself, as he was our Sachsen Anhalt teacher as it were, and he was an English teacher, however... he said he was only going to speak to us in German as we were there to practice our language bla bla yeah very good, but when we asked him something in English if we didn't know how to say it in German or it was just quicker in English, he definitely didn't understand what we were saying... at all... he'd try and cover it by giving an answer (in German) but it definitely didn't have anything to do with what we had asked.. interesting. - well probably not for you, and probably not for me when/if i read this back but hey.

i ramble too much! 

i'll give gold stars to people who read to the end ;)

So anyway, the train comes and with only a tiny bit of an issue (and two trips) i managed to get all of my stuff on the train and find a place. Now i don't know about you guys but i get quite stressed when i'm on a train or a bus and i know where i have to get off but i don't know what order the stops are in. I like to prepare myself for when to get off (especially with as much stuff as i had), and while i knew the time it was due to arrive in Ilsenburg, that only helps so much!

I do know that it was, again, a lovely trip, but i couldn't really tell you much about what i saw apart from the bit near the end when i knew i had enough time for my stop not to be too close but that it was coming up, and there are a lot of huge hills(mountains) round here! i think it would be even nicer to go through it now actually seeing as all the trees are changing/have changed colour by now. 

I think we're going to have to speed this whole week up a little bit or this is going to turn into a very long, very disjointed novel! 

I arrived in Ilsenburg and had a slight issue with getting everything off because this train had massively steep steps and was quite narrow so it was a slight issue but it's okay guys, i got off, i'm not writing this from a train. Waiting at the platform was Heidi, who's my sponsor teacher, and after a slightly awkward hello on both parts we put my stuff in her car and then went for an awkward coffee, with awkward conversation as i think she was pretty nervous and even though we started the conversation in English she really didn't understand a lot of what i was saying so then i was forced to do what i came here to do, which is speak German... woo! but that went okay and it was still a halted conversation but mainly because i'd just been picked up by a stranger. And that boys and girls is weird. 

Enough blabbing, we went to the school and had a quick tour while nobody was there, which is soo different from when it's full! and then went to see a possible house to live in which is with a family and they have 5 kids i think, but there's only one who still lives at home so they let out the room in the attic and by this point i was pretty shattered so after that and without making a final decision about it we went to the holiday apartment where i was going to be staying which was in Wernigerode (as was the house) and that's the next, bigger, village/town to Ilsenburg pretty much. And then Heidi went home, it was then that i realised that i had no food... which is great when you're shattered and in a completely new place, in a new country. so i was a massive girl and called my parents and had a minor break down, because, you might not understand this, but shops in foreign countries want to eat you, so going shopping isn't a fun idea. but i got a little kick up the bum from my parents, and got out of the house and found my way into the center of town and tried to look for a supermarket. Now if you don't know this place, it's really very difficult to find a normal supermarket, if you want to buy shoes however, the possibilities are endless.. but long story short, i found a little fancy ass supermarket and spent a crazy amount of money on milk, cereal (amazing cereal), tomato puree and gluten free pasta. now those last 2 things were accidental... i thought it was standard pasta... and i thought it was tomato sauce... who puts puree in a jar anyway!? and in case anyone is wondering, gluten is the best thing that ever happened to pasta. Ever. 

good cereal!!! + the new German brick!

i keep trying to cut this short but it keeps growing anyway!!! 

first weekend, i didn't do a lot, saw another house, it was further away from everything and had a crazy cat lady and a bathroom the size of a midgets cupboard where if you fell off the loo you would smack your head on the opposite wall which was also the end of the shower... now that was small. - before anyone says anything i've never fallen off the loo, but i'm going to put it out there, i would quite like to know that should i feel the need to fall off, or should anything happen, i'm not going to die.

On sunday i moved into the first house i looked at with the family and they also have an american english teacher who lives in their annex and that was pretty cool to meet her.

here below is a picture of one of the views i had from the holiday apartment...naiiiceee -not the man. 

the rest of the week was pretty good, i didn't actually do that much in the school, i had 2 music classes on the monday and i have learnt something from that - never give 11 year olds instruments... EVER. but they were cute... so maybe occasionally...

the tuesday i had a few english classes and while the 12 year olds had loads of questions the 16 year olds are demons... that's going to be fun. 

wednesday i had the day off for Germany unification day so that was good and then thursday i had a few classes and on friday i had the day off so everything went pretty quickly actually! 

i know the first few days are in crazy detail and then the actually week days are in pretty much no detail at all but i'm getting a little tired of typing now and i'm pretty sure anyone who's reading this is pretty tired of doing that too! I may come back to these few days and fill in some more detail about everything, including the bus links which are pretty awful! Now that i think about it i do have a few more things to fill in the gaps but right now i'm going to take a break! 

Just to leave you with something, this is the view from my room, ya know, standard castle.

Mini teacher training - try not to get too pregnant too fast

I'm going to start this post with having to disappoint some of you, this isn't actually about teaching "little people" (or whatever you're meant to call snow white's friends) how to teach.. it's just about 3 days of letting us pretend to not speak English. I understand if you've lost interest in this post now, can't say they'll be making an appearance in the post at all, panto time's almost here though..?

Anyway, I thought i'd break the posts up a little bit, partly to make it easier to read but partly also so that i don't go on rambling about things nobody really wants to hear about!
So on the first night of the course our first task was to put our massive suitcases into the storage room, now this seems easy enough, but if you think it was easy i think i'm going to have to refer you to one of the previous posts where i said how massive my suitcase is. I'TS HUGE. But still, this in itself wouldn't have been an issue, had the storage room not been down a flight of stairs which just made the whole thing more like a game of "who can get a injure themselves first". Well, that suitcase got stored and the next morning my shoulders killed, but that could have also been due to all the odd sleeping and lugging stuff round all day... but anyway back to the first night.

i'm really sorry if this is confusing, but on the plus side in a way you're time travelling.. you can thank me later.

I can't actually remember what they told us in the meeting on the first night.. good sign i know! but i'm fairly sure it was just an introduction and "Welcome to Germany" thingy, anyway i do remember that they then let us know who we were going to be sharing rooms with. The way they split it was actually pretty good, they did it by putting us with the people we were going to be closest to when we finally got to where we were going to teach, and we were in rooms of 1s 2s or 3s - i'm not sure why they had single rooms, because surely there would have been people close to the person in the single room.. but then again maybe the numbers just didn't add up. I'm really going to have to stop typing the random thoughts that come into my head or we're never going to make it to the present day!!

My name was called out in the long list of room allocations and it was called out with another girl's name which was Poppy, have a good giggle now - Pip and Pop laavely! but yes, so we went to find our room and had a bit of a chat before dinner time and i also managed to fall asleep - again.

but Poppy woke me up when it was time to go to dinner and by this point i think everyone was pretty hungry, including myself. So when they brought the dishes round and i saw the rice i thought that was good, and then they brought the mushrooms round.. and personally mushrooms are NOT my best friends, i actually think they're pretty gross and sluggy but there was no escaping them with this dish, as one of the other people said it was effectively mushrooms in mushroom soup, mmmmmmmm! but i wasn't about to turn down food so i ate it, and as you can tell i'm still alive to tell the tale, and i haven't turned into a slug, you can tell this from the typing - slugs can't type.

and the rest of the 3 days went on in pretty much the same way, Poppy and i got on really well and i met quite a few new people who were also lavely and i didn't have to eat mushrooms ever againnnn! (unfortunately not true but you'll have to wait for another post for that one, i'm not letting you time travel too much)
We had several talks while we were there, about living in Germany, the school systems, who to talk to if something's wrong and also one about the health insurance we receive and what is and isn't covered. this is where the sentence from the title comes in! Among other things, pregnancy isn't covered by the insurance and as the guy in charge put it "it costs thousands of pounds to give birth, so try not to get too pregnant too quickly"
We also did a practice class where we were in a group of 4 and taught parts of the body, a class which also featured simon says which was surprisingly entertaining.
Now if all else fails, the other people who are teaching in Sachsen Anhalt definitely have a future in foreign student imitation, they were very good at knowing nothing, including asking if the "ear" was called "leg".
I almost broke a finger in a particularly violent game of Irish snap, we ate some goood food - the cake at coffee time was amazing, chatted and laughed a lot, slept more, looked round the grounds, and then had a very entertaining quiz on the last night where we came in joint first... at one point in the rounds...ha!

Before we knew it, it was time to lug our stuff out of the store room and back up the stairs of doom (more injuries followed) to get back on the coaches and go on to wherever we were each going to be teaching. But i'm going to leave that for the next post!

I'll leave you with some random pictures from the 3 days so feel free to close this tab now! it just looks so boring otherwise...

 <-- the view from our window!

the weather was not wet at all.. -->

Getting to Altenberg..

Right then, so where we left off was getting to the coaches, and I say coaches but personally i hadn't realised that there was more than one, but then seeing as there were 95 people at the course it does make sense...

Anyway, we got on the coaches after making sure our luggage was all being stored in the hold bit of the coach - what do you even call that?! And then found a seat for the next hour or so. I was next to the window and was admiring the view of Cologne and thinking how nice it all looked for all of about 5 minutes before i fell asleep... good one! anyway i think i woke up on time and then fell asleep again, it's difficult to know as it was one of those cunning naps where you don't really realise when you fell asleep. But i definitely know i woke up again once more as the coach had stopped, so i looked out of the window to see that we were on a main looking road in the middle of nowhere, which fitted with my mental image of where we were staying but the only building was something that looked more like an old harvesters pub that hadn't been entered in about 15 years with a rusty and creepy looking playground. Not exactly what i had in mind for where i was going to spend the next 3 days but who am i?!

But it was fine because as I soon, (not that soon - my brain was still half asleep and was more captivated with working out why they'd choose a harvester to show us the wonders of Germany..) discovered we hadn't actually stopped there to get out, we'd only stopped because the coach had been pulled over - not to check our travel plans or whatever the coaches on school trips used to be stopped for - but because we'd been speeding... I don't think i've ever heard of a coach being stopped for speeding, i didn't even know coaches could speed! and personally i think the driver should have got a bonus for being able to reach a high speed with a full coach(+trailer) of people (not in the trailer..) and, presuming a coach carries 40(?) people, it was also carrying at least 30 years worth of clothes, now i think that's pretty impressive!

But back to the journey, we were soon allowed to carry on, and i'm not sure if the driver got a ticket or anything in the end. I'm pretty sure i fell asleep again... I don't know though, you'd have to ask Lawrie. We soon got to the old monastery - better than the harvester!