Life in Austria
My favorite Innsbruck moment (besides the part where we spent the entire day finding the hostel and watching Cole and Phoebe get drunk):
Me: Entschuldigung, aber wissen Sie wo ________gasse ist?
Old Lady: Entschuldigung, ich kann kein Englisch.
Me *in head*: Fucking American accent . . .
My new kids are cute. They´re crazy, but cute. I´ve decided to give up on the whole "I can´t understand what you´re saying! English, please!" charade. I´m with the really little ones who don´t know how to construct sentences in English, so it´s rather useless to make them "speak only English." I only keep it up with the annoying ones. For example, there´s this one annoying girl: she´s 10 years old and cries if she´s seperated from her parents for more than a few minutes. Her father has to hang outside on the bench for the entire 8 hour day. If he´s not there for some reason, she will immediately ask if she can call her father in her whiny crying voice, so I tell her I don´t understand her and tell her to go away. Unfortunately she actually has friends (usually crazy kids like that don´t have any) who can actually speak English, so the "message gets across." Fuck her little friends. They´re only friends with her because her dad brings them pizza.
Anywho, my kids have the funniest conversations in front of me in German because they think I don´t understand. One was about what you have to do to make sure you live to be 120 (they decided it was OK to smoke cigars, but only once a month, lol! only in Austria . . .), another was about if English was actually necessary to survive in the adult world (they decided you need English for everything besides being a cook, because all a cook does is cook, lol), and another was about people their parents/grandparents knew who killed themselves (they decided you have to be really really sad to kill yourself). I wish I could actually speak German to them and join in. It´s so hard to resist the urge!
I have the cutest little girl in my "class." Her name´s Laura, and she´s surprisingly good at English for a 6-year-old who has had very little formal English training. The first day she drew a picture of a princess and put "Larissa" on it. It was the best present I got, ever! She even calls me Princess Larissa on occasion. LOVE IT! The little kids are wonderful, because they feel like it´s their sworn duty to teach me German ("How could someone NOT speak my language?"). They mostly teach me words I already know, but occasionally I learn some new words.
My New Vocabulary:
Spitzer: pencil sharpener
Fäsche: fan
wegschmießen: throw away
Insel: island
Fangen: tag
Verstecken: Hide ´N´ Go Seek
geil: cool / horny
Kracken; octopus
ausmahlen: color in
Lügerei: a bunch of lies . . . although this might be just some made-up word, because all the other kids laughed when this kid said it
Yeah, so that´s my life. Tschüss for now!
Me: Entschuldigung, aber wissen Sie wo ________gasse ist?
Old Lady: Entschuldigung, ich kann kein Englisch.
Me *in head*: Fucking American accent . . .
My new kids are cute. They´re crazy, but cute. I´ve decided to give up on the whole "I can´t understand what you´re saying! English, please!" charade. I´m with the really little ones who don´t know how to construct sentences in English, so it´s rather useless to make them "speak only English." I only keep it up with the annoying ones. For example, there´s this one annoying girl: she´s 10 years old and cries if she´s seperated from her parents for more than a few minutes. Her father has to hang outside on the bench for the entire 8 hour day. If he´s not there for some reason, she will immediately ask if she can call her father in her whiny crying voice, so I tell her I don´t understand her and tell her to go away. Unfortunately she actually has friends (usually crazy kids like that don´t have any) who can actually speak English, so the "message gets across." Fuck her little friends. They´re only friends with her because her dad brings them pizza.
Anywho, my kids have the funniest conversations in front of me in German because they think I don´t understand. One was about what you have to do to make sure you live to be 120 (they decided it was OK to smoke cigars, but only once a month, lol! only in Austria . . .), another was about if English was actually necessary to survive in the adult world (they decided you need English for everything besides being a cook, because all a cook does is cook, lol), and another was about people their parents/grandparents knew who killed themselves (they decided you have to be really really sad to kill yourself). I wish I could actually speak German to them and join in. It´s so hard to resist the urge!
I have the cutest little girl in my "class." Her name´s Laura, and she´s surprisingly good at English for a 6-year-old who has had very little formal English training. The first day she drew a picture of a princess and put "Larissa" on it. It was the best present I got, ever! She even calls me Princess Larissa on occasion. LOVE IT! The little kids are wonderful, because they feel like it´s their sworn duty to teach me German ("How could someone NOT speak my language?"). They mostly teach me words I already know, but occasionally I learn some new words.
My New Vocabulary:
Spitzer: pencil sharpener
Fäsche: fan
wegschmießen: throw away
Insel: island
Fangen: tag
Verstecken: Hide ´N´ Go Seek
geil: cool / horny
Kracken; octopus
ausmahlen: color in
Lügerei: a bunch of lies . . . although this might be just some made-up word, because all the other kids laughed when this kid said it
Yeah, so that´s my life. Tschüss for now!