Hello, everyone!
It’s been quite a while since my last update, and I apologize, but I have been busy adjusting, making friends, studying, traveling, all that jazz.
You haven’t missed much – in a nutshell, I am absolutely in love with this country, and specifically, Marburg.
This tiny town is a place I’ve made into my home. I’ve never felt so at ease, even despite knowing limited German (I’m working on it!) I know where everything is, and just when I feel as if I’ve seen all it has to offer, it surprises me again and again.
The first six weeks in Marburg, I took an intensive German language class as well as a German culture, politics and history course. Language acquisition seems to come pretty naturally to me. Spanish was easy to pick up because of its similarities to Tagalog, but I have no real background in German. I expected a huge challenge, and don’t get me wrong, it has been challenging, but that’s been part of the excitement – learning day by day, and being able to understand more and more of the world around me.
This week, I started my regular semester courses. I’m taking a German conversation course, a Shakespeare course and a linguistics course. Since my program runs from February-June, and the German semester runs from April-September, we make up for the lost credit hours in weekly tutorials. My German conversation class meets twice a week for two hours. “Page to Screen: Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Plays” meets for 2 hours in seminar (regular class with German students), and an additional 4 hours of tutorial (meeting with the professor and other students from my program), where we go over the content of the seminar and address any questions. My linguistics class is a block seminar, which means that the regular class (with the German students) is held for 4 hours on only 4 Mondays during the semester. The bulk of the course is taught in tutorial, which meets for 3 hours every week. Weird, I know.
For everyone at home wondering, I’M FINE! I’ve made friends from the midwest, Canada, New England and even San Diego – and that’s just counting the people from my program. I’ve been lucky to meet German students who are more than welcoming to us Yankees and offer help in any way they can.
Now, the juicy stuff: TRAVEL! So far, I’ve been to Wiesbaden, Gießen, Berlin and Porto. My next trips will be to Dresden, Hamburg, Zadar and hopefully one or two more cities before I go home in June! These will each be getting their own blog post, so stay tuned! Thank you for going on this journey with me, and I promise I’ll be more diligent about posting 🙂 Now, enjoy some of my favorite pictures of this wonderful little town!
xoxo,
Julia
where in the world is julia? 