Do-gooder hiatus

One of our good friends here resigned from the international school this week. His reason is primarily that he's not doing the work he wants to do.  He wanted to become a teacher to help kids who needed it most. Now he feels like he's teaching privileged kids who would do well in life with or without him, and collecting a paycheck rather than making a difference. His situation is actually more complex than that, but it certainly makes me think.

In the past I have described Brian and myself as professional do-gooders, save the world types, idealists, bleeding hearts etc. That's a little exaggerated, or sarcastic, or maybe both. I don't want to make it sound like we deserve some kind of award. We don't hug trees or take in stray animals or spend our weekends working at food shelves. In fact we never really volunteered at all. Brian taught at an inner-city school and I worked at a nonprofit human services agency. We would get up and go to work and sometimes gripe about it like everyone else. There were days I sat in meetings and dealt with paperwork and staff problems. It was not always heroic or gratifying. It's just that Brian and I both chose work that ultimately had a positive impact in our community, or at least we felt like it did.

Now that we live in Germany, we mostly just take care of ourselves. Sure, there are kids at the school who need help with their lessons and need attention and maybe even need a role model. But they all come from well-to-do families and will generally be ok to handle adult life no matter what they learn in Geography class. And as for me, I am learning German and working on my masters program for my own needs and interests. I am doing subbing and consulting work to make some money and because I like it.

And I have decided that's ok. We are not developing nuclear weapons, advertising cigarettes, or chasing ambulances. Nothing we do has a negative impact on other people. We are just trying something different for a while.

Someday we'll be back to professionally saving the world. For now we understanding how people live in another culture in another place. Some of those people are rich international school students. Maybe we can learn something from knowing them too.

Teaching English, Re-learning German

For the next couple of weeks, I am pretending to be a primary school ESL teacher. I've got kids from first to fifth grade, but only in small groups. I had the fifth graders working on mad libs today, and the verbs they kept picking for their stories were all forms of "to poop". There's a first grade girl who keeps talking to me in Japanese, and I made a couple of third grade boys sit in opposite corners of the room and do their work facing the wall. It's been a good week, considering I don't really know what I'm doing.

Learning English as a kid is not so different from learning German as an adult. You learn by topics - family, transportation, work, school, foods, holidays, etc. You spell things wrong, try to answer in as few words as possible, ask why complex grammar rules make no sense, and say 'I don't know' a lot. The more these kids are in school, the more English they are exposed to. The more I am in this school, the more English I am exposed to and the less German I use.

I can definitely tell that I lost a little of my German language skill over the summer. I heard myself order food at a restaurant last night and it sounded pretty bad. I half believed that I'd do some studying on my own while we were in the U.S., but that never happened. I guess I am not the most dedicated student in school. The words are in my brain somewhere, it's just the grammar rules that I might need to learn again.

I have not given up; I've just gotten distracted for a while. My class starts again in a couple of weeks, and hopefully all of us will need some extra review. Helga and I are planning to meet again to practice conversation soon, and my German over cocktails group meets next week. So I should get back on track pretty soon. In the meantime, I might research all verb forms of  'to poop' in German. That's one I haven't learned yet.

The McCarthy Austerity Plan

I know I have not been up to my usual standards lately. I guess I've felt out of ideas or out of the groove or just out to lunch. Don't worry, though, there will be plenty of posts about mundane and quirky moments in my ex-pat life to come. There will not, however, be exciting tales of fabulous travels for at least a few months. That's not because I don't want to write about them; it's because we won't be going very far. Blame it on the McCarthy Austerity Plan.

You may recall me mentioning that when we got back from the U.S. there was a letter from the friendly tax office telling us that we owe them 718 euros.  We were expecting about 2000 euros in a refund, so this hurt. At the request of our good friend and loyal reader Nick Falk, and various other people who are interested in German taxation, I will write a whole separate post explaining why we owe the money and how taxes here work in general. For the moment, though, I'll just say that we found out there was no mistake and we really do have to pay Herr tax man what asks for. So if you add that to the extra money that we had to pay to change our plane tickets and return from the U.S. a week later than planned, it adds up to a lot of cash. I don't care which currency you use.

Hence we have established the McCarthy Austerity Plan, effective immediately. What does that mean? We traded our upcoming weekend in Barcelona for a weekend in Des Moines. That's not a trade that most world travelers would make. We, however, are not just any world travelers and needed to be at the funeral in Des Moines, so we made that choice. We kept looking for the Picasso Museum and Gaudi architecture, but somehow just found corn. Sadly, we won't get to hang out with our friend Erik in Spain but I did manage to reschedule the trip for February. Austerity measures should be lifted by then.

There was also supposed to be a trip to Regensburg, in Bavaria, to see the World Baseball Classic qualifying games and also drop in for a day of Oktoberfest in Munich. That won't be happening either. What other austerity measures have we imposed? Much of that is yet to be determined. We don't have a lot of other extravagant expenses to cut out, but it looks we will at least forget big vacations and embrace stay-cations for a while.

So, like our friends in Greece and Spain, we are tightening our belts in order to save the euro. Actually, the belts are already pretty tight due to all the eating and drinking we did in America.

Prepare yourself for plenty of posts about things I do around Hannover, because we'll be staying put for a while.

Schultuten

It's the first week of back at the international school in Hannover, and time for the little guys to get a Schultute. That literally means school bag. It's not a bag, though, it's actually a paper cone. On the first day of first grade, kids get cardboard cones from their parents that are decorated on the outside and filled with school supplies, candy, and toys inside. It's sort of like a back-to-school Christmas stocking.

I was subbing for primary ESL on the first day of school, so I got to witness the throng of big people coming into the classroom of little people, bringing huge paper cones. They look like this:


At an international school, there's no guarantee that the parents will all know they are supposed to get their kids a schultute. Since a little less than half of the students are German, it's possible there could be a huge whining disaster on the first day of school as the kids without cones to cry, feel unloved, and become emotionally scarred and in need of therapy until age 50.  In the meantime the kids with cones start could start waving them around and taunting the rest with their chocolates, Spiderman stickers, and Hello Kitty pencil sharpeners. To prevent this sort of chaos, the first grade teachers emailed all the parents in advance to tell them about the tradition and even bought some little schultuten for kids whose parents missed the memo. These of course did not have cool cartoon characters on them and were not big enough the kid to practically climb into, but they would probably prevent a riot or at least lasting psychological trauma.

Happy first day of school, kiddos. May your cones be full of surprises.

Back on the road

We went to Hamburg this weekend. I guess five nights in the same place was just more than we could handle.
The actual reason was that our friends Dizzy and Sonja were having a barbecue, it sounded like fun, and we had nothing better to do. So we went up to Hamburg yesterday and spent the night.

It feels good to have been here for a while already, and think about how clueless we were last year at this time. We know what time the trains leave to and from Hamburg. I can understand most of the announcements that the train conductor makes. I know which buttons to push on the Deutsche Bahn ticket machine, even when the text on the screen is in German. Just imagine how great it will be when I can read all the words!

The machine was our downfall today, though. From Dizzy and Sonja's apartment we needed to walk to the tram, get our ticket on the way, take the tram to the main station and then got on our train for Hannover. By the time we got out the door we had precisely 40 minutes to do that. Our 'I'm trying to catch a train' walk and fast packing was a total waste. We were foiled by the couple that was using the ticket machine when we got there. They were pushing buttons and discussing and flipping screens forward and backward... That's ok. Those machines can be confusing and they give you the ability to buy tickets to and from any city in Germany (and a couple of other countries) with any number of transfers in between.


If this was an American couple, their thought process would have gone something like this: Wow this is taking a long time and people are waiting behind us. I will tell them I am sorry for the delay and let them go first so that I can mess around with this machine and not worry that I'm holding them up. Or maybe I'm in the middle of booking a ticket but I will at least turn around to say I am sorry it's taking so long.'
The couple, however, was German. So their thought process (I imagine) went something like this: 'Wow this is taking a long time. People are waiting behind us but that is ok. It's my turn now and I will do what I need to do even if it takes a while. Once it's their turn they can take as long as they'd like.' Their thoughts were most likely thought in German but I don't know how to construct sentences that are as complex as those, so use your imagination.

So, even though we knew exactly which platform to go to, we missed the train to Hannover by 3 minutes and spent another hour hanging out at the Hamburg station. It wasn't a big deal, really. I suppose we could have blamed ourselves for not leaving the apartment ten minutes earlier. It's just more fun to blame other people. I guess just because I know when the train will leave doesn't mean I will get there on time.

Back in the saddle

You might think that title is a cute figurative way to describe our return to more or less normal life in Hannover after six weeks in the U.S.
But no, it's pretty much literal. I got back in the bike saddle yesterday after six weeks away, and I have to tell you that today I'm just a little bit sore. It's the bike's way of telling me it was lonely while I was gone. (Not so interesting aside: The bike seat is called a saddle but the thing that holds it up is called a seat post. Go figure)

It feels good to be back and in the place where I belong, at least for the time being.Jet lag is a funny thing. I went to sleep last night at 8:30, woke up at midnight, fell asleep again around 3, and now feel oddly refreshed. I will probably crash into noncoherent babble after lunch so I'd better write this now.

 Some interesting things we found in the mail upon our return:
1. A letter from the company that did a phone interview with me in June regarding a job teaching English. The purpose of the letter is to show that I have a possible job offer so that I can attempt to get my residence permit changed so that I can maybe work there. You might notice my subtle hesitation here... since the job would be as a freelancer rather than a real employee I think I probably won't be allowed to do it.  But I will bring the letter to the foreigner's office anyway to see if it's possible. That will be fun.
2. A letter from the tax office. It says we owe them 713 euros.  This is not cool. The letter is currently under review from our tax preparer/P.E. teacher friend who helped us do our German taxes in the first place. He told Brian not to get his hopes up that there's been a mistake. It's not that we don't have the money, but that I'd rather spend it on lavish travel than on taxes. We've already traded in our weekend in Barcelona for a weekend in Des Moines. Now we might have to trade in a fall break trip for a payoff to the German government. I don't begrudge paying taxes. I get that they are important. I just wish someone would take them away sooner and in smaller amounts. Being a grownup sucks sometimes.
3.  A request from the head of primary grades at the international school that I cover ESL classes (Americans call it ELL) for the next few weeks.  The reason that one of the two teachers is out is that she is returning from maternity leave and has to take her little one to day care. This doesn't make sense, right? The reason the kid goes there is so that mom can go to work. In Germany, however, when your child starts at a new day care place, the parent has to go too. For the first week or so it's all day, then half days, then a few hours, until the child is acclimated and happy. I guess this is a great thing for the kid, but not so great for the parent's employer. It's ok for me, though, because I know when I am working for the next three weeks.

I'm sure you will hear more from me about all of these items as they develop. That's enough for now, though.  I have to get my butt back in the saddle and ride to school.

The shoal

It's kind of like a slightly mundane but pleasant dream. Every day I wake up and I am still at Powers Lake, only no one is here except for me and Brian. We are not really supposed to be here but we are. There is no family gathering, no friends coming to stay, and no one who has just left. It's only us, the crickets, a faint smell of manure from somebody's lawn, and the hum of motorboats in the distance.

I mentioned in my last post that Brian and I have started canoeing out to the shoal. This is sort of our poor man's version of dropping the anchor of our big pontoon at the rock bar in the middle of the lake. It's a good system, though. We load up a red wagon with a little cooler, a few bricks to keep the canoe in place, a couple of beach chairs and some sunscreen. We put the canoe into the water and start to paddle.

I am not a good paddler. As someone who prefers to be good at everything this annoys me. I don't know if it's because I was never really taught how to paddle (how hard can it be?), because I lack upper body strength (I did recently win an arm wrestling contest, though), or because I lack hand-eye coordination. As Brian will report, I paddle erratically. My paddle is too shallow or too deep, too fast and then too slow right after that.

My canoe partner must help compensate pretty well because we eventually make it to the shoal and scare away the sea gulls who have been hanging out there. Then we set up our beach chairs and sit. That's about all. From far away it would look like we are sitting in the middle of the lake.

Other than shoal-sitting there has been some cleaning, some laundry, and a couple of chores around the house. Mostly though it's just quiet, and a little surreal. I think in a couple of weeks, I will miss the crickets.