... it is accomplished, as someone rather famous once said. What is accomplished? Today was the last day of my intensive German course, and it has been quite a lot of fun, although very challenging. Every person in the course spoke at least two languages already, and most spoke three or four, so we seemed to me to move quite quickly from no German to having conversations about many different things. I feel that I did very well on the final exam, and it's been very good to step outside of the regular routine and take up a new challenge.
We had a good variety of students, with one person each from Brussels, Flanders, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, Spain, Ireland, the Phillipines and Canada. Careers included scuba diving instructor/guide, banker, pianist, journalist, consultant, manager, medical student, network architect, and opera singer, so as you can imagine we learned lots of interesting things spending over three hours a day together talking zusammen (together).
We are eager to try to maintain what we have learned and continue developing our German. Unfortunately there is no intensive course on offer this spring, but a few of us have proposed that we continue in a semi-private lesson with our first teacher for the next two months or so, and I think I need to take a trip to Germany and spend a little time there with my friends there so that I can lock some of this in.
Malcolm has his Beatles concert this evening at the Maison Haute with his music classmates. He has been receiving a lot of encouragement from his flute teacher and also has been applying himself diligently in rehearsing for his choral performance tonight. I'm happy that he thinks music is fun, and enjoys the rehearsing and teamwork aspects of performance. Duncan has been improving at Rugby; I had a nice chat with Daffyd, his coach, on Wednesday. It's funny how sometimes you'll be chatting along a mile a minute with someone whose french is really good, then something twigs, and you ask, "are you Anglophone?" This happened last night, I had no idea Daffyd was Welsh. Duncan is learning the game and has started to understand more clearly his objectives at different times in the play. I'm glad he's getting exercise; Maggie swims or does Pilates three or four times a week, so I am really the only one who doesn't get much regular exercise these days, so I plan to start getting back to my regular swimming schedule again.
Maggie's doing well, although I'm sure she'll be glad to see the weekend arrive. We have the usual this weekend, with Duncan's rugby in the morning Saturday and St. Andrew's on Sunday morning. Saturday afternoon we're going to have some German neighbors in for a visit; their daughter Lisbeth is in the same grade as Malcolm (and Fritz is Duncan's friend) and we're going to have a little drink and compare notes about secondary schools...
Oh yes, I thought you might enjoy this little clip of a German class. It doesn't represent what our class was like, really, but I can relate with the students depicted here... well you can see for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lliHC7QSiG8&NR=1&feature=fvwp
Schönes Wochenende!
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