Happy New Year!!

This entry is really not intended to inform the reader about my journeys, unless they are interested in time travel. I thought it would, however, make sense to mark the transition into the new year with some sort of entry dedicated to the subject.

I would also like to continue the preface by saying that the reader will find no new year's resolutions in here. First of all, I'm not sure I base my approach to life on resolutions. Secondly, I find it silly to either wait with the implementation some resolutions till the new year arrives or else frantically come up with resolutions the week before New Years in order to have them. In short, there will be no resolutions in this post.

Instead I will try to sum up year 2011 in a couple of words and then share some thoughts about the year to come.

2011
Winter:
This past winter featured the usual combination of homework, snow, colds and fencing. I did have my car on campus for the first time, however, and that was a series of new adventures: getting stuck in the snow, driving friends around to practices and parties. And this winter, for the first time in years, I actually played in the snow, went sliding down hills etc. That was cool.

Spring:
Apart from the usual studying, spring can be characterized as the time I got addicted to a computer game, World of Tanks, namely. This rarely happens to me, but when it does, I become a lost cause. I am really glad going abroad took me away from The Game, I don't think I would have had the willpower to end the addiction myself.

Summer:
The World of Tanks addiction continues, but now luckily it is curbed by two jobs, reading and friends. My jobs were actually interesting: at OIT I helped give presentations to freshmen, at the UMass linguistics department I got to model child language acquisition with python (the work is far from done, but here is what progress has been made so far).

Friends really made this summer bearable, I would want to thank all of them for sticking around Amherst and initiating great nights of movies, breaking into pools and ponds, not to mention the regular parties and jumping off of cliffs/rope swinging (during the day). Unless I stay in UMass for grad school (highly unlikely), I think this might be the last summer I get this kind of combination of cool work and fun.

I also liked this summer also because it was bittersweet. I was saying good-bye to friends for a year and some of them were having their own issues and the combination somehow motivated me to go out and do more things than I would have done otherwise.

Fall:
If I were to talk about this fall, I suspect I would be repeating much of what has already been written in this blog, so I will limit myself to a couple of general statements. I have definitely improved my German, even if just a bit. I have reconnected with some old friends and made some new ones. I've survived without cats for perhaps the longest stretch of time, if one counts the preceding summer as well.


On this note I say farewell to 2011 with all of its work, troubles and joys. Off we go into 2012...


2012
I generally don't pay much attention to the future, with the exception of some fairly obscure career plan that I have lurking somewhere in my head. That being said, I realized as I was writing this entry, that the year 2012 seems to be a promising one, though with a hint of finality to it.

For one thing, I will still be in Germany for over half of the year, perhaps not only Germany. Then, for better or for worse, my stay abroad will end. After that I will seamlessly transition into the graduate school application craze and all the beauties associated with choosing my further path in life. In the middle of this craze the year (and, according to some, the world!) will end.

This brings me to an issue, much discussed in the media in an eschatological light, of  2012 being the last year in this century when the number of the day, month, and year can be the same. Some say this is why the world will end on the 12th of December of that year (some say it won't), but I am sad about this year for another reason. I will simply miss the days when all the numbers in the date are the same.

I never believed in any nonsense about making wishes on those days or any of that. I just liked to write down the date in my notebook and think: "How nice, all the numbers are the same!"  That's it, a small detail that would make a potentially hopelessly boring day a bit more bearable. 2012 is the last year in this century when I can have this luxury. As I am not very likely to make it to the 2100s in a condition suitable for appreciating number patterns, for all intents and purposes 2012 is in fact the last year in my life that can bring the joy of identical date numbers. There is something final about that and this is what makes the 2011-to-2012 transition a somewhat sad one.

Vocab

This might come as a surprise to some people, but the actual purpose of my year abroad is to learn German. This purpose is somewhat hard to trace in this blog so far and I think that if one was to base one's opinion only on reading my entries, one might think all I ever do is wander around cities and towns, try food of varying quality and find ways to mess up the logistics of my travel with differing degrees of creativity and success.

Well, this entry is addressing this misconception and I hope it does so well.

Below is a list of words and expressions that I have learned (well enough to write them all down in a post). Please note that quite a few things in this list, especially expressions, are definitely slang. I am well aware of the limits of their acceptable usage, but nevertheless count them as valuable acquisitions that widen my knowledge of German as a whole.
All entries are given with an English translation on the right of and a note of acknowledgement below the German expression.

der innere Schweinehund -- inner lazy person.
Thank you Rosie.

Kein Thema! -- No problem! (also Kein Ding! Kein Problem! Kein Stress!... the germans must love this expression).
Thanks to my roommate, Claire.


der Kater -- along with the traditional meaning of "male (tom)cat", this word also means "hangover"
Thanks to my other roommate, Janis, for using an idiosyncratic version of the word (Katerchen, aka minor hangover) and thus introducing me to the more conventional version.

Chill, mal, Alter! -- Relax, man/dude/bro! (literal translation of Alter is more like "old man")
Thanks to the next door neighbors Tillman and Andre along with countless other people who use the word "Alter" every day.


Wie läuft's? -- yet another slang expression to ask how someone is doing.
Thanks to Lukas Kawerau for using it for the first time in front of me.


Haudegen, Lehen(swesen), Ross, Fahne, Festung -- All very useful and current vocab from my medieval history class (the geeks among you can plug these words into Leo and see what they mean).

genau die Geschichte -- precisely (more colloquial version of the ubiquitous "genau")
Thanks to an anonymous worker at the Rechnenzentrum


Maultaschen -- A local version of dumplings, with minced pork and spinach inside. They, along with pasta, potatoes, onions and cheap bread constitute most of my diet :)

P.S.
I will be editing this post and adding more stuff as the year progresses.