General Consensus: Tastes Like Christmas!

"Catie, you could be studying Greek right now," you say? Yes, I could be. But I will be shortly, so hush. Instead I've been inspired by my current dessert and the festive explosion involved in consuming it. What is this mystery dessert you ask? Well, it's a little, innocuous-looking cookie that my friend Josh introduced me to last week when I offered to help him put up a rolling blind he'd bought at Ikea. Self-described as, "rubbish with these sorts of things," he'd gotten himself into a home-improvement situation that was a little more complicated than either of us had thought, and long story quite short, we wound up standing in his tiny room with his Verbindung (sort of like a frat...but so much more) friend Bertholt (who happens to be a paleoanthropologist) while Josh helped hold up the blind and I held the power strip aloft so Bertholt could reach the ceiling with the drill. Yup. I'm super useful. But good with tools, I swear! Just not determining the stubstance of strange walls. Anyway. Moving on. Upon finishing (such hard work), Josh offered us some of these cookies in a nice little holiday-red package. I took one bite and Christmas exploded in my mouth. It was amazing. Interestingly enough, Bertholt had the same reaction...I wish I could say it had been auf Deutsch, because that would have made for an even better story, but now I simply can't remember. We had these cookies again on Thursday when I stopped by Sinead's with some friends post-babysitting. Group consensus doesn't lie, folks, these goodies are Christmas in a cookie.

(thank you www.germanfoodgrocery.com)

They are, thankfully, available at Kaufland, along with the rest of the goodies that are part of the Christmas explosion that has taken place there in the last week. I guess it doesn't help that without Halloween and Thanksgiving, the next major holiday is Christmas and the weather has just gone from an unusally high week of 70's weather smack down to a solid 52. With all of the money I (...my parents) am saving on groceries (helloooo latest steal: potato salad, two large bottles of bio fizzy lemonade, two varieties of cheese, almonds, a squash, a huge bag of brussel sprouts, cookies, granola bars, and two kinder bueno for 12 Euro minus my 3 Euro Pfand return that I got for all of my plastic bottles) I'm going to knit myself 20 sweaters. Or buy all of the other cozy things appearing in stores. I did find it funny that everyone was in their winter coats today, however. Sure it was gray and a bit breezy but I wore a raincoat...

In other exciting news, my first day of English teaching is this Wednesday! I was informed today that I can pick up a book to use for the class, but it's not the kind of situation where my students will all have them. This basically means I have to put together a 90 minute class myself...for beginning English students. Just a tad daunting. The pay is great if you're not actually a professional teacher, though, and the experience will be great for grad school/professing, so I'm looking forward to it. On the plus side, I only have ten students at the company that is sponsoring classes for it's employees, so that takes a little bit of the pressure off.

I've also been working on my grad school applications, as well as trying to sort my courses out here. I paid a visit to the classical archaeology faculty today (in the castle, no big deal) and suddenly want to take everything they offer. Unfortunately I don't really have time for this, but after my Greek portraiture graduate seminar there are a couple of lectures that I could just go and sit in on. If you don't need a schein (a document that certifies you have credits for something) you can just show up and listen to lectures whenever you like, and both seem really appealing. One is given by the same professor from my seminar and is on the site of Olympia, and the other is given by the Erasmus liason for the department and is called Rome in the East. Something tells me as long as it's not dumping snow (unlikely) I'll be spending some of my extra time hanging out in the castle trying to understand German lectures. The Latin class is a little questionable right now, given that about a hundred people signed up for each of 9 sections and I'm somewhere down the list. When you sign up for a course, you can give a priority level of 1 (high) through 4 for the course, so I get the impression that a number of people must have put in for multiple course times to ensure that they got one...maybe? It seems impossible that 900 people want to take beginning Latin when many had it already in school. We'll find out. But seeing as it's necessary for me to take this class, it'll happen. Playing the international student card rarely fails.

Our DaF courses are also taken care of...we waited for an hour today while a supposedly bureaucracy-prone country botched a serious bureaucratic process and tried to get over 60 of us signed up for classes, but I'm firmly set in a course called Collage of German Post-War History with a number of people from my Startkurs class. I should have Thursdays and Fridays completely free if all goes well with Latin, so my schedule is shaping up rather nicely.

Now I'm off to actually work on my Greek. I've tried making sense of this language, but have realized it's a very inefficient use of my time....oh well!