Unicycles

So, my host dad was trying to teach me how to ride a unicycle. My host sister would hold one end of like a fire-poker thing, my host dad the other, and then I would attempt to use the stick to help me balance myself. I ended up leaning forward once with too much weight, my host sister let go, and I got hit in the lip. It started to swell up, and was bleeding, but it´s all okay now. I had another lesson, but I kept falling over. I got REALLY dirty and yucky.

School is really nice. I corrected a German, in German, in Germany, and I felt really good ^^. I wasn´t just rudely correcting him, mind you, he did a math problem wrong and the teacher asked for someone to correct him. My French teacher thinks I don´t know French. But, I will show him! He told me not to do this one thing in class, because it would be too hard... I really appreciate my French classes in America now. But, there´s a lot of verbs in my French class that I´ve read so many times before, but never bothered to look up, so I wish I had looked them up... now, grammar will matter more too... on Monday I went to a badmitton club and met a boy who is fluent in American English, and whose mother is from America. Yesterday I met a German who had gone to America for an exchange year, and then today I met another one while playing in a field hockey club (technically it was before, we talked while waiting for it to start). I also heard that the field hockey coach gives better grades to the students in field hockey club, and he happens to be my biology teacher!

My receiver for my wireless keyboard broke. Now I can´t use that keyboard. So now I am using a German one :D. And I can do this; öäüß. Beat that.

I went to see part of the Berlin Wall with my host family, and it´s ALL covered in paint. It´s actually totally accepted to just walk up to it and paint graffiti on it. You can literally just take a chunk of the paint off, since there´s so many layers. My host father said that ever 2 days or so, the graffiti on the wall will be totally new. I also went to the library with my host parents, and we went into some clothing stores... I was walking around for most of the day, and my legs were so tired, that I sat down on a computer. Someone left their computer monitor out on the street corner.

Tommorow is Wandertag, where I will go dancing with my whole school. I have no school tommorow, I just HAVE to attend a school dance from 11:00-14:00. Nothing else. They also don't have substitute teacher in Germany. When a teacher isn't there, you just don't go to that class. I also only have a maximum of three different classes a day, but I have like... 10 or so different subjects all together.

Did I mention that here the really big packages of toilet paper have handles? I want handles on MY toilet paper! When I speak English on a bus or something, everyone stares at me. I actually had someone ask me 'are you Caitlin?', because they knew that I was 'the' exchange student. I´m also playing this really fun game with one of my classmates. He invented this game where he ignores me, and I ignore him, and whoever stops ignoring the other first, loses. Apparently he's just strange like that to everyone.

About the whole learning German thing, I am able to thing in German, although my grammar is awful, but I am learning grammar. It's really hard, because there's three different genders and then a plural. So we only have one article, 'the', but German has der, das, and die, but that's only in the nominative case. Because German also has four cases. And I forgot to mention that adjective endings change not only according to the gender and number of the noun they modify, but also the case it's in. There's also about 6 different ways to place verbs in a sentence, but only one is right. Some verbs have a seperable prefix that detaches and then goes to the end of the clause. Note; clause, not setence. There IS a difference. The normal case that the object a verb has usually takes the accusative case, but some verbs' objects take the dative. Prepositions also have a pre-determined case of the noun they're talking about, but there's a trillion of them, and some can take more than just one, depending on wether or not movement is being expressed. Go here if you want to know what I'm talking about; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_grammar. My first day in Berlin, I thought my host mom said we were going to eat the neighbor's cat... for all of the difficulties of the German language, I really like it. And I am starting to correctly form the adjectives for the nominative and accusative cases, and to use some prepositions correctly :D.

I am starting to wonder how I will have changed when I come back to America.