Die Schule's out

Today was our final German class.

We'd signed up for an intensive language course, which it certainly was, though it had the concurrent and inevitable 'free gift' of being an intensive socialisation process too.

The things we've learned about each other through daily exposure every weekday for the past month. Seemingly innocuous at first, in retrospect, it's quite incredible what our little exchanges in broken, unconjugated, ungrammatical and incoherent Deutsch have revealed about each person: our schedules, backgrounds, where we live, what we buy at the supermarket, etc.

A hodgepodge of photos from today's very relaxed session:




Manjit and Nicolas with 'der Ball' ...







... Daniel and Ramon during the number-guessing game ...





... Lino rising to the occasion as game moderator and scribe ...





... Daniel (the Younger) and Elma holding up the Young Persons' Front ...

... und Alles zusammen ...

Coming to terms at the start of term

German class started on Monday. It runs daily from 9.00am-12.50pm till end-August. And yes, that's the sound of my brain frying in the background. Ooh the heartwarming sizzle of gray matter. Leave off the salt, please.

My main motives for learning Deutsch (a.k.a why I show up every morning with homework done) are:

(i) to have a proper, un-aided conversation with Ste's Uncle Hansueli this Christmas. I think he's rather sick of hearing my jokes via proxy (or rather, Ste is sick of being the proxy) and I'm even putting some advance prep into it so none of the brilliant nuances get mired in translation.

(ii) to pressure Ste into bringing me for a karaoke session in Zuerich (my favourite hits at the moment are Herbert Groenemeyer's Ein Stueck vom Himmel and Du bist Die, plus Silbermond's Das Beste, all of which I've been struggling to croon to on YouTube (with lyrics palmed off the Net of course).

And now that we're at the end of the first week of Deutschkurs, I can add a third:

(iii) to figure out how it's statistically possible that nearly half the class is so unbelievably and embarrassingly good-looking (and I mean Calvin Klein photo ad model quality) while the rest of us mooch about like faceless extras on the set. As I look across the classroom at the beautiful and ebullient young 'uns, I'm floored by how much older I am ... than I actually feel.