A lazy Saturday

For lunch, my roommate Li Hon and I decided to get the Döner Kebaps we've both been craving all week. We went to Arslan's Kebap, right across the street from the Goethe-Institut. Originally Turkish, Döner is a German takeaway staple. It's lamb meat, onions, lettuce, red cabbage (see the German influence? Food culture is so fascinating), and white sauce on a thick, toasted pita. And it tastes so good!

Döner Kebap

Because it was such a nice day (first shorts day since I've arrived: 70 F and sunny), we brought homework with us and went to Schwäbisch Hall's outdoor beer garten, on a park right on the river.

Li Hon with her Döner in the Biergarten

My homework was to read the weekend edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a well-known paper out of Munich, and use the reading strategies we've been talking about in class. Unlike my previous German classes, where it seemed like the goal was to work towards the day when you would be fluent, this class is all about strategies to survive in German culture RIGHT NOW. Concretely, that means reminding us of elementary school reading strategies like making a list of questions we hope the text will answer, recreating an outline of the text, and using context clues to figure out the meaning of new words.

As my teacher loves to say, we're the equivalent of German ten-year-olds in terms of vocabulary, and we need to accept that we're going to read and speak like ten-year-olds, because we can't go around the world with a dictionary in hand. Being told that I need to accept my limited conversational capacity, and work within it, rather than trying to use a dictionary to speak with the same high-falutin' style I do in English, was a little hard to hear. But I think it makes a lot of sense. And I love that I can just read German blog posts and newspaper articles without taking lots of time leafing through a dictionary. Reading the newspaper today was also an interesting look into German culture: immigrant incorporation (always a controversial subject), small rural beers making a comeback -- especially among young urbanites -- a la PBR, and the growing tendency to bury people in the forest instead of in a cemetery.

Locally brewed beer and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The perfect way to spend an afternoon.