Zweite Tag ins Muenchen

~Closer intimacy with life in Munich~

Today lessons started proper. Been classified into group 2, and…wow…I’m the only girl in the class! Amazing! Thanks to Wushu I guess I’m should be used to being either the few girls existing or the only girl (i.e. if I’m considered a girl to start with).

I realized compared to the guys in my class, I’m really lagging behind in German, especially in speech and listening. When our tutor, Frau Nagy, teaches, I’m like --- ‘Ich verstehe nur noch Bahnhof!’ (I don’t understand anything!). Felt really embarrassed and bad that I’ve to keep asking the unlucky guy who got partnered with me to translate what the tutor had said during pair discussions. Nevertheless I enjoyed the lesson as there were a lot of group and class discussions, i.e. lots of interaction, and role play. It’s really fun, and much more enjoyable than the German lessons back in NUS. Probably it’s because I’m not under the stressful environment where every mark counts.

Just a brief introduction to my class. We’ve 4 students coming from Norway, 1 from Turkey, 1 from France, 1 from Sweden, I from Venezuela, and lastly me from Singapore.

After the morning lessons from 9am to 12.30pm, we had an 11/2hrs break for lunch before the German Language and History lesson, which commences at 2pm and ends at 3.30pm. For today’s lessons, we had it outdoor where we sat on the grass in a circle and exchanged our impression of Germany before and after arrival in Munich, followed by a small quiz on the basic facts of Germany (realized there’s so much I don’t know of). The most delightful part of the lesson was the arrival of Jing Yi, another fellow Singaporean from NUS who’s majoring in architecture but doing her masters in Landscape for her exchange in TUM. Now, there’re 2 girls in group 2! I’m no longer alone!!! Woohoooo!!!

After lessons, I accompanied Jing Yi back to her dorm (she lives in the same block as I) and helped her to carry her luggage too (just as how Emily had helped me the previous day.). However, being still confused with my surroundings and with the subway system, we took the wrong train back. Sorted help from an elderly lady for directions. She was real nice as to miss her train just to tell us which train to board.

When we finally reached our dorm, we had to rush out again as we had to meet at Sendlinger Tor with our pre-study course mates for bowling.

Bowling was real fun! I was so ‘good’ at it that I kept striking ‘null’ pins! My points in my group was first from the back! Haha…Jing Yi, Dainiz, and the German tutor played much better though. In fact most of my pre-study course mates played really well!

After bowling, we went to the beer garden for dinner. As the name goes, in beer garden most drink beer (usually 0.5l Weissbier) and eat pretzel. Traditional food such as Schweinbraten (pork knuckle), Wurst (sausages), Kartoffelsalat (potato salad) etc are sold too. I ordered a set meal of Kartoffelsalat, Schweinbraten and Haehnchen (chicken) for about 8 euro. It was such a large serving that I could only finish half of it. Had I finished the whole plateful of food, I might just end up with meat poisoning! Overall, dinner was good!