Rolling Out the Red (Black and Yellow) Carpet

Greetings various blog readers! This new blog will outline my experiences teaching German high school students our wonderful mother tongue. ; ) I wont actually start until tomorrow, so you'll get to hear about that in the coming weeks. Anyway, I flew into Cologne last Sunday and took a train to my host city Homburg, located in the tiny state of Saarland, which borders both France and Luxembourg. (Notice the red bulls eye on the map.) Homburg has about 42000 people,if you count the surrounding villages. Its pretty tiny compared to Freiburg. Though small, the location is a pretty good base for traveling to cities in central Germany, such as Mainz or Heidelberg, or even to France, which is only half an hour away by train.

The people here are very friendly and helpful...if you can understand them. Everyone here speaks the local dialect ''Saarlandisch.'' Most people are considerate and will switch to High German once they realize I'm a foreigner, so I haven't had too many problems so far. (Except for the church service yesterday. That was pretty difficult to understand.)

I live on the outskirts of town at the school where I'm teaching. The school is a private Catholic school, so it has boarding houses for nuns and priests. I have my own room in the building where the nuns live. Currently only one nun lives there, so they've rented out the extra rooms to various other people, including me. I have a medium sized living area, and a tiny bed and bathroom to myself. The entire building shares the kitchen.

The first week I was here, all the Fulbrighters were required to attend an orientation conference in Altenberg, a tiny village (population 10, I swear) outside of Cologne. This is why my computer access has been a bit limited. The conference pretty much provided all the information/documents I'll need to register at the resident and foreign citizens' office, so no paper work issues this time around! (I hope!).

My host teacher has been phenomenal with helping me get settled. He completely took care of my room arrangements, cooked dinner for me my first night, arranged for my future Internet provider, gave me a bicycle that used to belong to one of the nuns, and has pretty much handled any issue that has come my way. This has really helped with that sort of overwhelming culture shock feeling that tends to happen upon arrival. He has even given me the most flexible teaching schedule ever. Pretty much anytime I want to travel, I can have my schedule rearranged. Who could ask for a better job?

I have taken some pictures, which I'll post as soon as I get Internet access on my own computer.

Okay, that's all for now. Tschüss!