It started snowing on Christmas eve and it kept snowing all through January and February. Now after nearly two months of snow. It is melting. As the snow slowly fades, the grass underneath is green as it was the day it started to snow. As though it was preserved and just waiting to see the sun again. I feel like that grass. Just buried in something cold, annoying, and beautiful.
I haven't written in three months. So much has happened in this time. Every month here feels like it last about three months. Once the month is over it feels like everything that happened during it happened so long ago. Still it goes by too fast.
Christmas in Germany was beautiful. The glowing Christmas markets filled with people, arts, food, and the ever popular Glühwine (a warm spiced wine). The house and tree were filled with Candles. At night they were the only thing you needed to light. I had so many different cookies with the same delicious hot chocolate. All the cookies were home made by my host grand mother (who happens to live next door).
On Christmas eve we went to the Berliner Dome for Mass. It is probably one of the most beautiful churches I've ever been in. Then we came home, ate a marvelous dinner including duck and potato salad (how german), drank way too much wine and opened all of our presents. I was the first to go to bed at 2 am. The next few days were followed with a trip to Potsdam to see the New York Gospel choir, several big feasts with relatives, playing lots of Uno, and my very first opera (which i experienced with Julia, Ammar, and Bilal).
New Years was spent in a very nice part of the city at my host Cousin's apartment with Ammar, Julia, Bilal, Hector, Austin, and my cousin Robert. We ate, we drank, I made an amazing flourless chocolate torte, and we experienced the craziness of New Years in Germany. There were so many fire works that no matter where you turned the sky was lighting up in green, red, blue, purple, and orange.
Outside Robby's apartment. There was smoke in the air from all the fireworks.
In the beginning of January, I started a new internship at a school. I now work with fourth graders. I spend the first half of my day observing classes and helping the kids or teachers when they need it. The second half of my day is after school care, in which I play games with the kids for about 3 hours until 4 o'clock.
I enjoy my this internship a lot more than I did the last one. The theatre just had no work for me, except to run errands and hand out flyers. I wasn't learning any German in the theatre either and I felt as though I was hardly socializing because I was always out with the flyers. But working in the school has helped my german tremendously. The kids are very nice (with the exception of one or two) and they really seem to like me. Every now and then I teach them about where I came from or play games with them in English to help them learn. The other day I described disney stories/princesses in English and they had to guess which story or princess it was. I will gladly be staying in this internship until may.
I helped some of the boys build a snow man one day. The 4.1 is the class they are in. The fourth grade is split into 4.1 and 4.2.
Now I know this post is getting pretty long, but I only have one more thing to talk about. Since I wasn't in Louisiana, I wasn't able to celebrate Mardi Gras. The funny thing is other cultures celebrate something just like Mardi Gras. They have it in Italy and Germany as well. Except here and in Italy it's called Karneval.
So, for one week I went to Cologne to experience it. Cologne is like New Orleans for Mardi Gras and a city very close called Düsseldorf is like Baton Rouge for Mardi Gras. My friends and I spent a majority of our time in these two cities. Everyone was dressed up and drinking. Just having a good time. It was very similar to Mardi Gras except no king cake and no plastic beads. They threw a lot more candy and random things like rubber duckies and powdered soup at the parades. Oh and no one was flashing for things as far as I could tell. Thank God.
