One whole year!
So this past week we celebrated our one year anniversary of moving here to Germany. We had eaten at a restaurant called Nudelhaus our first night here, so we returned there this week. I also made sure to take a picture of the family in front of the Gänseliesel, a fountain at the center of the downtown area.
At dinner we were asking our kids to reflect on the changes in the way they felt this time last year. My older son had been really worried about making friends, he had left behind a lot of good ones in the US, today he has plenty of friends. Every day he makes plans with a different friend, it's hard to keep track. He also has a new best friend --interestingly his best friend here is Jakob, the German form of James, and in the US James was his best friend- also my husbands best friend is James-strange right? He also had concerns about the language and of course now, he is almost on par with native speakers and is doing great in school.
My younger son couldn't really remember what he had thought, but we did remember a funny thing we learned the first night that we ate at Nudelhaus-that night he ordered his favourite pizza-peperoni. That was the night that we learned peperoni in German means pepperocini-he was not happy. Now we usually have to order salami pizza's for him because pepperoni salami (that is what they call pepperoni) is not very common.
As for me, I was very tired that night we arrived (overnight flight with 3 children doesn't allow much sleep) but I was probably hoping that we would do a lot of traveling and that I would be able to learn the language quickly. Well, we certainly have done a lot of traveling-I'm very happy with that in fact. I didn't want to regret not traveling- so we're using our time in Europe to the best of our ability. As I touched on in a previous post my assessment of my language skills varies by day. On the one hand, German is much harder than I thought it would be given that it is related to English. For example, even though English and German are in the same language family and French is different (Germanic vs Romantic language) I thought French was much easier when I studied it in school (sadly because I don't use my French often I am not fluent despite many years studying because I didn't practice enough). On the other hand, I can sit down at a one of my childs' friend's houses and have an hour long conversation with someone I don't know too well in German (I'm sure my grammar is not great and I use weird words-but I can get a point across and speak reasonably well). I'll be finishing up my A2 course at the beginning of July and studying over the summer with my husband to take a placement course and hopefully test into the B1 course for the winter semester at the university (which starts in October).
It was a nice night and on the way home we stopped to spend some time enjoying bubbles that someone was making right next to the Gänseliesel.
