It is nearing the end of my stay in Stuttgart and I can honestly say that I am not ready to go home yet. The experiences I have had so far have been incredible and I am enjoying the German culture more than I ever thought I would. There have been a few times when I have not understood what was being said to me and other times when it was impossible to not understand because of the unexpected amount of English being thrown at me by impatient shop keepers. I have noticed that the majority of Germans can speak English, at least enough to allow them to communicate an important sentence to an English speaking person. I find that it is actually quite hard to improve my speaking because as soon as I make a mistake in my sentence or pronounce something incorrectly, the other person converts to speaking English. In a way this is accommodating and comforting, especially when you are not sure how to say the things you need to say. However, when you do have a fair idea of what you need to say, but you make a basic mistake, it is quite frustrating when they start speaking English to you. After all, making mistakes is part of learning and I think it would be a bit easier to learn if there were more opportunities to practice speaking without the conversation always converting back to English. However, there have also been times when I have misunderstood a German person and been quite confused. For example, the use of “Wer” meaning “who”, and “Wo” meaning “where” confuses me quite often. I always mix up the meanings of these words because of the similar sounding English words. So there have been a few times where I have answered a question incorrectly and received a few funny looks. I think that I will just have to practice remembering the meanings of these words among others.
Besides the difficulties in speaking and understanding here I have had a great week last week. I have been on excursions to the Linden museum and Haus der Geschichte as part of the Cross Cultural Communication course. Both of these excursions were very interesting, especially the latter, as it taught me more about German history. In the last week I have also formed more friendships which I am not looking forward to leaving. I have really enjoyed the opportunity to meet people from places other than Perth and making friends is always fun. I have also had the chance to go to die Mineralbade, which were amazing. It was snowing when we went, so it was an awesome experience to swim in hot water outside while snow was falling on your face. I am definitely happy with my experience of Germany so far and I am reluctant to return home after being surrounded by so many wonderful places and people.
I think it's interesting to compare things like the hot spring stuff with like how Germans likely think our beaches are really amazing when we kind of aren't bothered about them, maybe its just a relativity thing, what's normal for us is cool for them and vice versa?
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