What is Foreign Exchange to Me?

"A year of of my life. My life in a year."

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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Languages, Life, and Living It Up

Five and a half months ago before I came to Germany, I was blond. Maybe not platinum blond, but definitely blond. And it wasn’t because I dyed my hair, or put tons of lemon juice in it… no, I was a natural blond. Now whenever I Snapshot_20120120look at my hair, I feel like I dyed it middle-to-light brown simply because I haven't had a sufficient amount of sunlight in months. I think I’m on a vitamin deficiency because I’m used to living in a place where it’s sunny year round. Needless to say all the blondes who live in Germany year round are definitely ‘true blondes.’

Friday evening I went to Leo’s with Konnie and Felix where we watched youtubeP1201012 videos/ movies, played cards and did handstands because the ceiling in Leo’s room is low. I learned a lot of new vocabulary from the random games we played, and we all made a lot of language fails, both in English and in German. My personal favorite was when Felix said, “We should all puke on Angie! No wait… wrong word, we should all sleep on Angie!”

Saturday evening my host-brother and I went to a going away party for a girl from Argentina. We left at 8 at night, and diP1221016dn’t get back until 8 am the next morning with absolutely no sleep in-between and I remembered why I don’t go to parties. It was really strange because there were adults at the party the whole time, but not to supervise but rather to serve alcohol. Maybe it’s just me but when I think ‘house-party’ (or rather ‘rented-room party’ in this case) I don’t imagine adults being there. Especially because a lot of the kids were underage… just a huge difference between the cultures I guess.   

Monday evening after Johannes and I went climbing, we decided to go to Burger King. After ordering our meal, Johannes accidentally said “Thanks” instead of “Danke” so in the middle of the meal the server came up and talked to us and he became convinced that I am from Germany and Johannes is from England… which really doesn’t make sense because if anything Johannes has a German accent and I don’t. If nothing else, we definitely had an interesting conversation about the politics of German school systems with him though. 

Angie: I should seriously just keep a toothbrush at my exchange student friend’s house because whenever I go visit her for the weekend, I always forget it.

Leo: Defiantly! Just one question, why do you always need sun glasses…? 

I have a very bad habit of mixing up the German words toothbrush (Zahnbürste) and sun glasses (Sonnenbrille)… Smile 

Last week I talked about how both English and German sound ‘right’ because I speak both languages (more or less) fluently. Every since I came to Germany, it has made me curious about what English sounds like for somebody who does not understand it, then I found this video:

“Skwerl”–Short Film in Fake English

Today I was skyping with an exchange student friend of mine also in Germany about a Portuguese song called “As Se Eu Te Pego” that I heard on the radio this morning (why I heard a Portuguese song in Germany is beyond me). We hear this song at every exchange student gathering and I like the song, but seeing as I don’t speak Portuguese, I don’t understand the lyrics and didn’t know the name of the song. I tried to google search it for 15 minutes earlier today, but didn’t know any of the real worlds in the song (only what the Portuguese sounds like to my English/German ears), so I asked my friend, “Do you know the name of the Portuguese song that sounds like ‘I slit your bagel’?” and he knew exactly what I was talking about, but didn’t know the name of the song either so he posted a Facebook status with our conversation, and low and behold one of his friends also new exactly what I meant and posted the link for the song. Please, try and tell me this does not sound like “I slit your bagel” when you don’t speak Portuguese!

Finally, this week I have also started watching Spongebob and the Fairy Odd Parents. It’s really strange to watch shows I grew up with in German.

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Days in Germany