Moin Moin aus Hamburg

I'm here!! The year abroad is well and truly begun... eeeeeeee! I flew out a week ago yesterday, and life has been an absolute blur ever since. I'm going to try and keep up to date on the blog, not least so that I can look back when I go home at the end of the year and remember just how it feels to be new in a new country. Eek!
Hamburg is great, it feels so friendly because it's broken into districts, you wouldn't know you're living in Germany's second city. My house is lovely, I'm living in 2 rooms in the converted cellar of an 'einzelhaus'- meaning detached house, pretty normal for the UK but far less so for Germany. I live with 3 girls, a trainee teacher (S for the purposes of the blog), a trainee occupational therapist (C) and a landscape architect (U). I've been gradually beautifying my room, slowly as cash is thin on the ground until my erasmus form arrives and my deposit from Austria is paid back into my bank account. I need to nag my flatmate about new lights (most of them are broken) and a wardrobe, but I have a bed a desk and 2 chests of drawers which is good. I got a bedside table and bedlinen at Ikea the other day plus 3 plants which have made it feel a lot more like home.
I had to travel down to Cologne to have a 3 day training course in a Monastry last Sunday, I travelled with my friend Rich from Uni who's also an assistant (125 euro gone, like that! on the train tickets.) We met up with a couple of other assistants who are working in Cologne, and ended up in a bar with Germany's oldest pnuematic steam orchestra (for orchestra read accordian and tuba player made of wood with pumpy cheeks). You should hear that belting out 'Sex Bomb' by tom jones (it was one of the very few things on the song card I'd ever heard of).
The training course itself was OK, incredibly intensive, with the worst imaginable glutenfree food (one day all i got was cornflakes for brekkie, potatoes for lunch and rice for tea. its like anti-atkins) with copious amounts of overly detailed lectures on health insurance and the vagueries of the German school systems (all 16 of them!!) It was really good to get to know the other assistants though, that part was really fun, theres around 30 of us in Hamburg which should make for some fun nights out. That said, it'd be really easy to slip straight into that social circle so I'm trying to make myself get to know my flatmates which is tough because one of them talks even faster than me in dialect!!
Germans are so blimmin organised. I had to go register my address at the 'bezirksamt'- like a district office, where I was given a really complex form and a deli-counter esque tag and told to wait my turn. Then having got past the beauracratic hurdle of my complete lack of prior address within Germany, I paid into a reverse cash machine (it took my money (6 euro) instead of paying it out) and was officially angemeldet (registered) with a jazzy piece of white a4 to prove it! Closely followed by buying a german mobile for 15 euro which i'm pretty sure doesn't work. Followed by drinks at the alster pavilion (wikipedia it, i can't be bothered) with the other assistants, it was a pretty cool day all in all.
Which leads me onto today's fun and games. Got up at 5.30 am to go to an icelandic horse tournament as part of some duty-induced flatmate bonding. My horse Vocab has increased 200% at least!! Did you know icelandic horses have the most gaits of any horse? me either. But after 3 1/2 hours of watching, it transpires that they can 'toelt' sa well as walk, trot, canter and gallop. Anyway, once the flatmate who was participating was knocked out (she came 17th in case you're wondering...) and C and I were well and truly frozen to our cores, but bonding quite well, we got to go to the second bit of the day- Kartoffelfest; think Oktoberfest, but for potatoes. Surprisingly a great afternoon, lots of chips plus beautiful scenery, loads of tiny german children doing wholesome farmy activities, baby piglets allover the place and a nice bio farm shop with a glutenfree section which I would have patronised if it were not for the chronic lack of money! Then back to the tournament in time for the pairs fancy dress competition (2 horses, 2 people dressed as a pair, so bride and groom or princess and pea, tied together with toilet paper which can't break) before home for communal veggie stew and rice. (with more sheeps milk schnapps)
Look at me and my wholesome Germanic life. I don't think I've ever had so many new experiences in one day, roll on starting school on Monday! I want to go to church tomorrow, but I'm dead on my feet so am catching up on some much needed sleep!!
much love
xxx

Gin, Germany and Educational Theory...

So I'm curled up in a big comfy armchair, drinking a gin and tonic and continuing my (admittedly still pretty self-centred) musings. I know I'm blogging a fair amount about me at the moment, but a) its summer so nothing hugely interesting is happening and b) I'm kind of enjoying sitting down and taking a good, long hard look at myself. It's been too long since I last did it.
First things first, I have a house in Hamburg and am flying out on Friday which is pretty exciting. Hopefully I'll settle in and meet people pretty fast, I'm going to be blogging my goings on on here rather than on my travel blog as I don't think it counts as travel if you have a job, a housing contract and flatmates (with goats).
Secondly, I'm pretty much over my "I'm going to live in a hole and join a convent because it's easier' stage, and am taking my first tentative baby steps towards acknowledging that I am capable of liking other people and that that isn't a bad thing, or going to end in tears immediately. Admittedly there have been a couple of pretty unpleasant encounters with guys in the past couple of months, the last one being pretty recent, but this leads me to the 'educational theory' part of the post.
If you've ever done psychology or education, you'll have come across the educational theories of Piaget and Vygotsky. Basically they sat down and considered what drives people to learn, and one of the things that they realised was actually discomfort is a huge factor, for example the discomfort of shuffling around on your bottom is what drives you to copy mummy and daddy and get up and walk. This actually ties into my ideas of christian ideas of suffering in an odd way, and it's driven back home again some thought processes I was having when I was ill at a lesser level, that suffering in the short term can actually lead to greater happiness or fulfilment in the long term.
Which is why I'm telling myself that even the bad experiences, dishonesty and abuses of trust that have happened over the past couple of months have been positive- I've had good friends around me to pick me up and keep me going, and I've become a lot more savvy and less naieve as a result.
I think I'm just on such a steep learning curve with the breakup, knee, granny and move abroad that much as I appreciate how that discomfort is making me grow, I'm a bit fed up and would like to be comfy and not growing, just for a while.

Promise a blog not about me will hit soon! Might even hit the last 2 chapters of God on Mute.

S xx