Adventures in Internal Combustion and Vexillology

Admittedly, the rate of adventure has certainly gone down since I have returned from Berlin.  The first week of our second-month course has gone smoothly and I feel pretty much settled back in Schwäbisch Hall.  After Berlin, it seems like someone has dialed down the speed of time in Schwäbs.  February means the start of our second course at the Goethe Institut, which in turn means a new teacher and a higher degree of difficulty (in theory).  So far, the difference between the B1.1 level and the B1.2 level seems to be little if not a reversal.  While our first course was very much a rigorous course with daily grammar lessons and nightly homework, so far this week, the second course has been almost entirely speaking-based with only one small grammar lesson (it was participles - nothing huge).  I'm glad to have all the extra speaking practice, but I also wish we could have more writing and grammar practice as well.  Perhaps that will pick up as the course goes on...

 

In other news, my friends and I went on an excursion on Thursday to a nearby field on top of a nearby hill that is part of a nearby farm.  It was delightfully Sound of Music-esque and definitely solicited some singing from yours truly.  The area surrounding Schwäbisch Hall is pretty much all rural, hilly, and with a smattering of woods here and there.  It makes for really rather epic hiking and exploring opportunities, which I imagine I will be taking more advantage of as the weather gets nicer and as I have already done most of the activities the school offers during the week.

 

 

Rachel standing on the horizon of our Sound of Music hill.

 

However, perhaps the most exciting thing to happen in the last 6 days was our second trip to Stuttgart and THE MERCEDES-BENZ MUSEUM!  It was a steal; for 6 euro, our train rides and museum trip were taken care of.  The museum is very futuristic  architecturally and you ride a lift (an elevator for you non-Europeans, HAHAHA) to the very top of the building where you work your way back down to the main floor through more than a hundred years of automotive history.  I specifically thought of my cousin Cole when we got down to the 2nd floor and got to ride in the race-car simulator... I recognized Monte Carlo from playing some Playstation game with him and Uncle Eric and Grandma and Grandpa's house.

 

 

The first car with its own chassis (second motorized carriage), invented by Karl Benz after Gottlieb Daimler's adapted horse-drawn carriage, the front wheel of which can be seen on the left.

 

We wound our way through the floors using special audio devices that could detect what room you were in and what display you were looking at.  It was both fascinating and amusing to have an Austrian guy in my ear pronouncing "tubes" as "tübes" and "super-charged" as "super-sharged."  Amongst the many cars on display, we saw the first motorized carriage; a 1902 Mercedes Simplex 40 PS, the first to carry the Mercedes name; the first ever built 300 SLR (1955), which I may or may not have sneakily touched; a gull-wing version of the same car; and the SUV they used to film The Lost World; oh yeah... and the Popemobile.  It was unbelievably cool.  I want a Mercedes.
 

A 300 SL hardtop circa the 1950's.

 
Stephen Spielberg probably touched this car.

And what with virtually no homework and very little of Schwäbisch Hall left unexplored, I've been left to my own devices for self-amusement.  I've spent a good portion portion of my free time this week diving into the world of vexillology which I sort of tripped into originally after staring at the Austrian flag I have hanging over my desk.  I've become quite obsessed with flags in the past few days to the point that I'm running out of world flags the histories of which I have not read (at least major countries' flags).  I've also stumbled on the North American Vexillological Association's (NAVA) website, where I have discovered that they keep a database of members' personal flags.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to join and I've worked on Photoshop all week perfecting a flag design I came up with in high school.  I've also been reading Harry Potter auf Deutsch, which has proved to be another instance where my past mania has been an asset... whenever I run across a word or sentence I don't understand, I can usually think of the exact sentence in Englisch and make the necessary connections myself.  I guess listening to Jim Dale read Harry Potter approximately 3.5 million times in high school is finally paying off.  If all of this sounds fun to you, you're probably nuts.
 

The current version of my personal flag.