June 10 2012

Today has been really interesting and full. I biked to the Leucorea to use the internet at 7:30am and was offered a warm place by a fire and some coffee. I replied in Deutsche “nein, danke, Ich habe Fruhstuck um 9 Uhr. Ich bin OK.” I’m not sure how properly said that was but at least I didn’t shrink into a ball like I would have the first week and begged for them to speak English. After breakfast I rode back in at 10am and sat at Herr Weigel’s until 11:40am with a coffee. It is really good coffee. And I people watched for about an hour and then an older gentleman sat down at my table and got a drink and began to smoke, he asked me something in German. I don’t know what, and so I asked him if he spoke English. Herr Weigel came out and told him to only speak German to me since I am a student studying German. We probably ended up speaking half English, half Deutsche since there were a lot of times when I didn’t know how to say something or the right word, but he corrected me nicely and we had a good conversation. He is originally from Austria and we talked about California (where he lived for a little while, and he knew of where I am from in California) and then we talked a little about the DDR and the wall falling and when Russian was a more prominent language here. He was mainly explaining why so few speak English and why I need to work more on my German since people here won’t be able to speak English like him.  

While I was sitting there people would walk up and knock on the table and say “Hallo” so I asked him why they would do this and he explained that they did this when they arrived and left as a more hygienic way of saying hello, rather than having to shake hands with everyone. I like this custom,  I don’t know how widespread it is but it is very smart. 

Simonne and I also went with our Ghastfamilie to a schloss in Wörlitz and got a tour that was all in German and then we walked around for a bit.

After that we had a little coffee at the house and when Simonne went downstairs Herr Richter pulled out his notebook from when he was working on his English. From the conversation I gathered that he learned his little English from learning jokes in English and writing them down in this notebook. So he would first tell me the jokes in English and then tell them in German to Frau Richter, which was very useful for me to figure out some words and what they meant without having to look at a dictionary.