Week #4 in Germany

This week I started my conversation groups. Some of them were quite inspiring, others will surely get better with time, but overall it was great to be teaching. I was also quite amused to hear colleagues tell me that my conversation topic, the American Dream, had come up in class, and my group members were eager to discuss what they had learned about it from me :). It's nice to get positive feedback and to feel like I actually got through to them!


Life here is slowly picking up. Yesterday I was able to go out with a lot of colleagues, and I made tentative plans with some and exchanged contact info with others. It will be nice to at least have a friend base, even though any love life doesn't look so promising. All the attractive men seem to be gay or taken, and all the attractive women seem to be straight or taken. I apparently can't win for losing. And there's always the fear of going out in a small town when you're a teacher, because there's a chance of unknowingly hitting on a student :(. That would just be a disaster waiting to happen...


Something I've noticed whenever I'm in Europe is how open people are when it comes to approaching you. I was raised to not talk to strangers, and my feminist leanings have taught me to ignore strange men, but today I disregarded that and met an interesting person. He came up and started talking to me, and although I was a bit cold at first, I decided that the only way to make friends would be to open up to strangers. We ended up spending a few hours together, and although it was a bit awkward at times, it was overall an enjoyable afternoon. I realized today that always assuming people have ulterior motives creates a negative and distrusting environment in which it is impossible to make connections. You can't always expect the worst out of people, because that will only display the worst in yourself. In the future I plan on embracing new people as much as I embrace new experiences. After all, you can learn a lot with the eyes of a stranger, but only if you open your own eyes first.