Crying Babies, Debussy, and a Lollipop

I realize it is necessary to make a qualification about my last post.  Though I may have gotten the wrong impression about the coldness of German beer from my German professor, he was most definitely right about its usefulness in lubricating the foreign language speaking process.  His theory was roughly this: one beer or so increases your language skill because it eases your feeling of awkwardness when speaking a foreign language, but after that, successive drinks only serve to help your speaking decline.  He actually made a graph out of it.  I can't really speak to how bad language must get, but after some beer, I have most definitely found myself more willing to speak German openly.

 

Moving on... This past weekend was surely a busy one.  On Friday, my friends and I started out with some Italian food, that, surprisingly, was not nearly as good as Italian food in New Jersey, though I am without a doubt closer to Italy than I have ever been before.  After that, we saw I Am Legend auf Deutsch and I was happy to learn that it still got me misty-eyed in a Ol' Yeller kinda way even when it was in another language.  Following this, we went to the Goethe Pub, which is just what it sounds like: a pub that the Goethe Institut has for students.  The event was the weekly "Goethe Party," the idea of which is to bring students together to talk in German in a less formal environment, have fun, and, of course, do what the Germans to best, drink beer.  The aforementioned beer-language corollary was definitely in effect (more so for some than others).  Being someone who is not quick to socialize, I was pleasantly surprised at how good of a time I had and how much easier it was for me to talk with new people from other countries outside of class.

 

On Saturday we went to Stuttgart with a group from the institute.  The city was really neat, though we mostly just saw the strip and the inside of a Chinese food place (ordering food in German in a Chinese restaurant is very much an interesting endeavor).  After that it was three hours in the Stuttgart StadtTheater for a ballet performance.  The summary of this was... the first act was a traditional ballet and therefore boring (thought the music was Debussy , which was cool), but the second act was a strange avant-garde adaptation of Don Quixote, complete with random electronic sounds, violin screeches, and babies crying... plus they wore colored outfits.  Exciting!

 

Me, outside the new castle in Stuttgart.

 

Sunday we went to the nearby town of Ellwagen to see an annual Catholic carnival/parade.  Apart from an opportunity to see every different kind of wacky costume and mask ever conceived, it was also a really good time to test out my advancement in speaking German.  An older woman and an older man from Schwäbisch Hall ("Schwäbs," as we've taken to calling it) acted as something like tour guides for us, and I had the pleasure of having an extended conversation the the older man; he was extremely nice and we talked for a good while about the differences between America and Germany and of all the places that he had travelled.  I wish I could remember his name.

  

One of the many, many, crazy costumes.

 

In any case, the carnival was absolutely amazing and entertaining, especially since we were standing next to a tiny little German kid that couldn't have been more than three years old and dressed up as a gorilla, and he attracted all the various and colorful characters in the parade over nearby us.  Along with dressing up, it is also customary for those in the parade to throw candy to children in the crowd; costumes and candy - sounds like a familiar holiday.  I seemed to attract a lot of attention too, since I was standing somewhat off of the sidewalk in order to take better pictures.  At one point a guy in a gorilla-esque costume stole my hat and pretended to walk away with it.  Better than that, I had another monster-person-costumed-thing tell me in German to open my mouth (I don't know why I complied) and promptly had a lollipop stuck in my mouth.  Only in Germany.