easter sunshine images

really hard to upload images hence a month later... 

Open air Dj set in our local park on Easter sunday 

Stacey and I enjoy Baklava

Circle of friends! Right to left - Jeremy, Thanos, Viktoria, Anne and Johanna

Starting Uni

 

 

The fourth week of uni has just come to an end and with it I think I’ve actually finalised the classes I’m going to commit to. Hence now that I’ve finished assembling my fabulous study plan I thought I’d fill everyone in.

Semester actually started on 2^nd of April, when we had two days of orientation with about 1000 other exchange students. And no, I’m not exaggerating the numbers (!) – most of the other students were on an ERASMUS – European centred – exchange program – which meant us kiddies from outside Europe were the minority.

Everyone was separated into their main faculties and in those groups given a little tour around the relevant spaces, i.e. the relevant library (yes they have many, many libraries at Free University) bookstores and classrooms and importantly the best places to obtain good cheap food (emphasis on good will become clear soon) and HOW to obtain that food. (Emphasis on ‘how’ explained now)

There are many different cafes offering different varieties of food throughout the uni, the best of which I’ve only just begun to remember how to find. So the first step in HOW to obtain food is FINDING the café you are looking for.

Step 1: For example: The ‘Sportler café’ is in the middle street of building Silberlaube, which from memory is street K. Once you find street K, you need to head in the direction of street 24, which crosses over K at a right angle. Then you need to find a staircase close by, climb to the second level and walk up and down until you see their little hand painted sign.

Step 2: Deciding and paying for your food. Sportler Café is relatively easy. There are people behind the counter but they mostly just stand around or pretend to wipe down benches. Why is this so? Oh because it’s self serve! Right thanks for telling me, – maybe you should put up a sign?? ! so you reach over the other people waiting to be served, grab your goodies and dig around in the ‘pay tray’ to find your change.

Buying food at ‘the Mensa’ is a different story. This is the enormous main cafeteria where you can buy everything from button machine coffee and chai to gourmet cakes and vegan risotto. The catch with this place is you can’t pay with cash. You HAVE to pay with a ‘Mensa card’ which you need to constantly load money on to at the very few ‘load money on to your Mensa card here machines’ But gross inconvenience aside if you elbow your way through the crowd to get a good look at the food on offer each day you can usually find something nice on the menu. The have a never ending supply of yummy dark bread rolls filled with salad and everything is VERY cheap.

If you didn’t know before, you’ve probably realised now that I have a slight obsession with food – or am slightly, kind of, chronically fussy. ANYWAY – am quite satisfied with the food on offer here at uni. End tangent.

 

 

Main point – my fabulous subjects.

 

At FU I’m enrolled at a German literature student and so my subjects choices are separated into three areas: New German literature, Old German literature and Linguistics. I decided against studying the old guys and went with subjects in NGL and linguistics, mainly because although the literature component to my German studies major at home has been quite broad, we’ve focused on texts from the last three centuries hence I stayed with the trend.

The first year level class I’m doing is ‘Introduction to Text Analysis’. For this we have a ‘Vorlesung’ – Lecture and ‘Basis Seminar’ – self explanatory, just pronounced with a German accent. I’m still waiting for the introduction to happen. It seems a lot of knowledge over texts is assumed, but I have found it really interesting and helpful so far. We spent a whole week on Hermeneutics, mainly because the Germans basically OWN all the literature theory about it and are quite proud of the academic achievement, but I was grateful as it cleared things up for me quite well.

The ‘Aufbauniveau’ – 2^nd/3^rd year classes, I’m doing are Linguistics: Theories in language development and Politics: Sexuality, Religion and Politics in the Middle East.

The linguistics subject is really great. The class is a good size and very active thanks to our Austrian tutor (great Austrian accent!) who constantly gives us strange grammar exercises and pushes everyone to decide what’s grammatically wrong with a sentence. That aspect is a bit tough for me – given German is my second language! But I still really enjoy the classes and have made some good friends in them already.

My politics subject is a different story. Our lecturer is a very passionate Egyptian women who seems to make up the class as we go, throwing in random pieces of trivia and demanding we all read hundreds of pages of text for each week. The class is huge, it’s supposed to be a seminar with about 30-35 people but there are at least 80. Because of the relaxed atmosphere it’s really fun and we spend most of the time discussing issues to do with differences between Arabian states and European states which I find really interesting.

 

Subjects I tolerate:

 

My language course is slightly less than thrilling. We have a big class with a huge range of abilities in German so it can go appallingly slowly or way too fast for any of us to understand which of the thousand worksheets we’re currently working on. It doesn’t help that it’s 4 hours long either!

 

I was enrolled in (or still am technically) in an exchange student subject relating to literature about the Berlin wall, but it’s way too slow for me. Our lecturer is very lovely but slightly patronising in the way she relates to us, mainly I think because of her perception that as German is our second language, she thinks we might be slightly demented. Not kidding – I couldn’t stand it! Not going anymore but have to unenroll somehow. Hhmmm