Things
SO I GUESS I haven't been around much lately OH LOOK OVER THERE, WHAT'S THAT?
Never mind, it's gone.
I am currently on the other side of the world from where I normally am! In Germany! Back at high school just after I'd finished there :E
It's snowed here. We normally never get snow at home (well, there was that one time last year... but ti wasn't like it actually lasted). I may have a white christmas for the first time in my life. In some ways it's quite difficult here, because although I've learned German for three or four years it was a very piecemeal and inconsistent education, so I don't understand very much of what is said. Though I'm already better at it than I was when I arrived a week ago.
I've actually understood a fair amount of the written handouts in classes, though. I've always understood things better in reading and seeing than in listening - it's part of the reason why my sight-reading is so good in music, but I'm not good at improvising or picking out accompaniment. Nevertheless I was quite impressed by my ability to understand vector maths in German despite the fact that I'd never done vectors before.
On Wednesday my exchange partner's chemistry class went on a field trip to the Süd Zucker sugar refinery (the name means south sugar). That was about two hours to the north by bus. I could see the difference as we went north: in the city where I'm staying everything is white with snow, but as we went north the snow disappeared and the whole landscape was grey and green and dripping. At the refinery they make sugar out of a root vegetable - a sugar beet. I wasn't originally certain that there was such a thing, and I thought the vegetable might be a parsnip, but I'm told that it was in fact a sugar beet. So taht's all well and good. There's a big production line process where they wash the things and mash them and soak them and refine the syrup, and they showed us around the factory. Outside the temperature was around 3-5 degrees and it was raining, but inside by the big vats it got up to about 25 degrees. We all got fed there, and then we got free stuff, including a couple of recipe books.
On Saturday we went to the Weinachtsmarkt - Christmas market - in the city center. It was evening, and everything smelled of cider and snow and smoke and cinnamon. It was raining, and there were many buskers. Although a lot of them were quite young and as a consequence not that good, one man playing christmas tunes on an old accordion fitted perfectly into the atmosphere, the uneven cobblestones and the old architecture.
There's so much time contained in this city. So much time that's gone into making it. New Zealand is by contrast a very very young country.
I've been reading a couple of books of Ursula le Guin's short stories while I've been here: The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose. Although some of the stories, particularly in The Wind's Twelve Quarters are early and quite naive compared to her later works, many of the stories are still capable of striking tremendous chords in me. I particularly recommend Winter's King, Sur and The Author of the Acacia Seeds, which may be one of the reasons why I'm going to study Linguistics next year.
Never mind, it's gone.
I am currently on the other side of the world from where I normally am! In Germany! Back at high school just after I'd finished there :E
It's snowed here. We normally never get snow at home (well, there was that one time last year... but ti wasn't like it actually lasted). I may have a white christmas for the first time in my life. In some ways it's quite difficult here, because although I've learned German for three or four years it was a very piecemeal and inconsistent education, so I don't understand very much of what is said. Though I'm already better at it than I was when I arrived a week ago.
I've actually understood a fair amount of the written handouts in classes, though. I've always understood things better in reading and seeing than in listening - it's part of the reason why my sight-reading is so good in music, but I'm not good at improvising or picking out accompaniment. Nevertheless I was quite impressed by my ability to understand vector maths in German despite the fact that I'd never done vectors before.
On Wednesday my exchange partner's chemistry class went on a field trip to the Süd Zucker sugar refinery (the name means south sugar). That was about two hours to the north by bus. I could see the difference as we went north: in the city where I'm staying everything is white with snow, but as we went north the snow disappeared and the whole landscape was grey and green and dripping. At the refinery they make sugar out of a root vegetable - a sugar beet. I wasn't originally certain that there was such a thing, and I thought the vegetable might be a parsnip, but I'm told that it was in fact a sugar beet. So taht's all well and good. There's a big production line process where they wash the things and mash them and soak them and refine the syrup, and they showed us around the factory. Outside the temperature was around 3-5 degrees and it was raining, but inside by the big vats it got up to about 25 degrees. We all got fed there, and then we got free stuff, including a couple of recipe books.
On Saturday we went to the Weinachtsmarkt - Christmas market - in the city center. It was evening, and everything smelled of cider and snow and smoke and cinnamon. It was raining, and there were many buskers. Although a lot of them were quite young and as a consequence not that good, one man playing christmas tunes on an old accordion fitted perfectly into the atmosphere, the uneven cobblestones and the old architecture.
There's so much time contained in this city. So much time that's gone into making it. New Zealand is by contrast a very very young country.
I've been reading a couple of books of Ursula le Guin's short stories while I've been here: The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose. Although some of the stories, particularly in The Wind's Twelve Quarters are early and quite naive compared to her later works, many of the stories are still capable of striking tremendous chords in me. I particularly recommend Winter's King, Sur and The Author of the Acacia Seeds, which may be one of the reasons why I'm going to study Linguistics next year.