Week One, Official Day One

I'm going to start with a preview of my shower, which is much more compelling and much less erotic than it sounds, unless you're weird.




It can travel through time and shoot lasers. There's another pic of it at the end of this post. Can you fight through to the end? I promise it'll be worth it. Besides, it's a big one that will take some time to load and it's only good if the whole thing is loaded, so why not bore yourselves with my thoughts and stories?

I woke up at four in the morning yesterday and studied German from five until ten. I don't know what gave me the ability to be so obsessive, although I guess it could be that I understand roughly 50% of my host family's accent and dialect and half of what I do understand is made up of words I have never heard.

That brings me to one big concern of mine: I know the rules of German grammar, but I should have made sure that my latest year of progress prepared me for the vocabulary. I should have done more independent work, and I know that I certainly would have preferred to discuss vocabulary in a way that allowed long-term comprehension over what I allowed to happen, which was talking about Germany's general cultural history, green energy policies, etc., being tested on vocabulary and then never using those words again at any point in the rest of the curriculum. Thank God I'm done with gen-ed classes. Both inside and outside of class, I took a technical approach and consequently ignored certain areas of importance, such as WORDS. Sure, I can explain and then use the first and second subjunctive moods and that will be extremely useful in my continuing linguistic development but where will that get me when I go to Austria and I can't even order a cup of coffee because I either don't know what to say or can't understand what is being said to me? Gaarr. Es ärgert mich.

After considering that wonderful gem of a realization, I had breakfast with my host family, four lovely people who will remain without description until I have the presence of mind to photograph them and prove that they exist. They seem to be very understanding of my predilection for listening rather than speaking - I think they are acutely aware of the differences between standard German and Graz-speak. I estimate that I'll fully understand the accent in two weeks; hoping for less would be too optimistic.

Yesterday's plan was to pick up a fellow IU student and go to Leoben. While I waited for that to happen, the kids got a little restless and I was forced to defend myself. Blows were exchanged and furniture was dismantled.

Leoben was pretty good - we visited an exhibit about Alexander the Great and then went to the "Asian Spa," which has a spa section and a wing that serves as a small indoor waterpark. We had a lot of fun, but I was a little saddened to realize that Austria's hot dogs (not their sausages, I'm talking about their ripoff of our own Americanized fast food) are much better than America's version. To their credit, the Austrians pretty much invented the practice of stuffing meat into animal casings for inexplicable use as food, so I shouldn't be surprised. Oh, well; I'm slowly discovering that literally everything in Austria is produced at a higher standard.

EDIT: Had my first classes today. The profs are good and my new colleagues are intelligent and witty people with a wide variety of academic backgrounds and personal motivations. I'll be studying the German language and Austrian culture. If it's important to anyone, I haven't done my homework yet.

My motto here is "es ist egal," the German equivalent of "I don't care" or "whatever you prefer;" I find it is the perfect response to any question my host family asks me. Want to go to Leoben? Egal. Want to go camping on the Italian coast? Egal. More wine? Egal. They like that response - I'm a low-maintenance guest.

Here's the image I mentioned earlier. It's a pretty heavy .gif, so let it load if it hasn't already. If you look through the steam, you will see an illuminated control panel with twelve buttons that serve many, many functions, including the operation of steam emitters, a radio/CD/mp3 player, and something that looks a lot like a telephone. You'll also see me, but that's not particularly interesting considering I'm standing next to a time machine that can wash hair and I happen to be fully clothed.








Bis später,
-Jared Boze