Accomplishments

Being in a different culture you are bound to do things, or not do things, that would seem like common sense in everyday life, at least to the locals. These include things such as weighing your fruit and getting a nice tag with a bar code so the cashier doesn't have to wander back to the fruit isle and get it for you.

There are also those things that would normally be a common, think nothing of it, sort of task in your own everyday life, but somehow when it needs to be done in a foreign country it becomes something that one feels as if they must conquer. When I arrived, I found an email with a tip from my predecessor, recommending a relatively cheap electronic store here in Germany along with the suggestion of signing up with SKYPE to keep in touch with friends and family. With the simple purchase of a headset, I can talk via the Internet for free or for 2 cents a minute, depending on who I call. In my wanderings around town, I passed by a Saturn store and decided to see if I could find an inexpensive headset. Not only did I find a headset, but I discovered that Gilmore Girls has made the German market, as has Flipper, Friends, and all John Wayne and Clint Eastwood films. Unfortunately the headset I purchased was defective, and I realized that I would need to make my way back to Saturn for an exchange. After a few trips to the cash register, I was successful, at both explaining the problem and finding the right person who could remedy the situation.

I also managed to get all that needed to be done to register for the Goethe Institute, and was able to do so mostly in German. Tomorrow the class really begins, and it will be good to start making more sense of the German language.

The Goethe Institute- Freiburg