Ich bin hier!!

Well on a very rainy, very English, Tuesday afternoon Uwe and I got on a plane at Birmingham International.  We arrived in Stuttgart a cuplr of hours later and even though it is nearly October it was over 20 degrees at 8pm and hotter than the entire summer in England this year!

Uwe's parents picked us up from the airport and we went back to dinner at their house, where his mother had prepared my favourite Swabian dish of Maultaschen with Kartoffelnsalat accompianied by copious amounts of local white wine.   I was sufficiently tipsy enough to even speak some very bad German, about the above weather situation - no I don't need a passport for someone to tell my nationality - which everyone was suitably impressed with, or at least they seemed to be through my wine goggles.

View from outside the Bürgeramt

Yesterday we headed to the Bürgeramt to register my residency here.  The only bit I understood was really when she asked Uwe if I understood German, lol.  So far so good, but it still doesn't seem quite real yet.

Time for a small update...

Well it is just under 5 weeks until I move and I have made a start on things, I have been furiously been copying CDs to my PC so that I can sell my collection at the car boot, I really hadn't realised how big my collection was! I estimate it at about 400, so even if I sell them all for 25p each that would be a nice sum.  I still need to sort through my books and I have a mountain of shredding that needs to be done, I could probably keep a hamster in a home for 3 years =P

In other news I got my result for U211 and I managed a Pass 2, which is brilliant for someone that had thoughts of giving up right at the start, so I am feeling quite proud of myself for even making it to the end let alone getting such a good grade, and I wasn't that far off a distinction!  My new course books have arrived for E301: The Art of English which is all about the creativity in the English we use everyday as well as in the more traditional literary sense. The assignment booklet won't be available until the beginning of September but I have looked at last years and they don't look so scary, fingers crossed for this year too then :)

Also a letter turned up yesterday from the Council and my German evening class tutor has nominated me for an Adult Continuing Education learner award! No idea what that actually is but I get to go to an awards ceremony about 10 days before I leave, how exciting!!

Anyways that is it for now, I may write again before I leave but if I remain quiet I hope you'll forgive me :)

The First Goodbye

On Thursday evening as it would have been our normal evening for a German class most of us got together for our usual end of term curry.  The food and conversation were flowing freely and Rosa our teacher managed to charm the waiters into giving her one of the gorgeous wine glasses they had.  At the end of the meal a fuss was made over my leaving, which was quite sad as we have been together learning for about 2 years and these were some of the first people I had social interaction with after my breakdown and they have helped me grow so much.  Oddly the class is pretty much all men apart from Mum and me, I say oddly because I have done quite a number of evening classes over the years and women have always made up the majority.  I'm not sure if that is related but they have also been the best people I have taken classes with, which is why I extended an invitation for them to look me up if they happen to find themselves in Stuttgart and was even more pleased when they immediately started planning a class trip to see me some time next year lol.

I got a lot of hugs goodbye and felt very special... unlike my Mum who spent all of Friday being sick which she is attributing directly to the food she ate =P