BMW Winter Sports Day

One of the fringe benefits of Annika's current position within BMW is that she is included in any staff wide social functions that BMW may choose to hold.  The first of the year was today and was the BMW Winter Sports Day.  So once again Annika and I left our apartment early in the morning dressed in our ski gear, snow boards under our arms ready to hit the pistes.  Unfortunately for us the U bahn didn't exactly run to our schedule, so we had to arrive a bit earlier than we would have preferred and wait on the bus for 20 minutes before departing.  On arrival at the meeting place we were informed that the departure time had been set back by 30 minutes and that Annika had not been included on the distribution list for this slumber conducive piece of information.  Luckily they had forgotten to include the bus company as well so we, at least, got to sit and wait in a nice warm bus.

We finally got rolling and headed out to the German Alps destination Schliersee.  BMW had hired a whole ski area but the Alps have not received that much snow this year and this particular area didn't have snow cannons (the ability to produce artificial snow) so it all looked a bit too green.  Kein problem.  The fall back plan was to use the public pistes which had snow cannon. 

It was quite strange boarding on almost exclusively artificial snow.  It was quite hard packed and fast, yet still offered enough grip to hold edges really well.  We did three runs, testing each of the main pistes, choosing to avoid the T bars, before stopping for teuere heisse Schokolade (incidentally I now know that if Schokolade was maskulin instead of feminin, which it isn't because it ends in "e", it would be heisser Schokolade unless it was akkusitiv then it would be heissen schokolade.  What a simple logical language German is.)

Annika contemplating her declining English vocabulary

Note the snaky lake just beside Annika cheek

For a while now I have suspected that since returning to her home country, Annika's English vocabulary has stared to decline.  This was confirmed for me today when Annika, querying a recently taken photo, asked if I had included the long snaky lake.  There was a pause.  "You mean the river?"  A moment of embarrassed silence ensued.

When being interviewed for a job it is important not to start an argument with the interviewer.

I had another interview today and it didn't go well.  A bit of a pity really as the company sounded like it would be a good fit.  Anyway it all went pair shaped when one of the interviewers told me that my drilling back ground excluded me from working for an Engineering company.  I pointed out to him that I didn't actually have a background in drilling.  He countered, insisting that I did.  I patiently explained that I didn't and, of the two of us, my money was on myself as actually being the authority on what my previous experience was.  We agreed to disagree and he then stated that I was not suitable for the position because I had not worked for an Engineering company and all my experience was based with operators. Once again I pointed out that the majority of the companies that I had worked for were in fact Engineering Companies and that only 3 years of my experience was with operators.  He suggested that perhaps I could work for their construction division, 8 weeks on, 2 weeks off in Kazakhstan.  I put forward the proposition that there were two chances of this happening but refused to elaborate on what the second one was.   One of us parted as friends.

They are going to pass my CV on to their upstream division to see if they are interested.  I won't be holding my breath.

Ich lerne Deutsch

Three weeks down in the German course and I am still not fluent.  Maybe I expect too much.

Not really.  The time has raced by and I do think that I am starting to pick things up.  However I am being hampered by a career spent training my brain to deal with countless safety inductions.  I am now such a finely tuned safety induction machine that I can sit through a 3 hour company safety induction and immediately regurgitate all the salient points there of, in an assessment of understanding. (You can't call them tests or examinations as these words infer that there is some significance to comprehending the safety induction, there by placing the individual under pressure to perform.  Pressure leads to stress, stress leads to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads to the dark side.)  30 seconds after completing the aforementioned assessment I would have trouble recalling whether the life boats are situated under the flare or adjacent to the PLQ or if you really are allowed to smoke cigars in the well bay area.  Whilst this skill has allowed me to attend numerous safety inductions successfully, admittedly with the downside of becoming a danger to myself and my colleagues, it is now becoming a liability to me learning German.  My problem is that I can quite successfully read something or listen to something and then regurgitate it but I do so without real comprehension.  So up until now I have appeared to be quite clever, gaining a gold star in verb conjugation and an elephant stamp in definite article association.

Unfortunately the party is now over.  In today's lesson the teacher insisted that we start bringing together all of the stuff that we had learnt so far, with the aim of creating original sentences.  This is where it became apparent that my two closest competitors in the race to learn German, make no mistake it is a race, were a fair bit more advanced than myself.  What is worse one of them is American.  She actually told me she had trouble understanding me once and I wasn't quick enough to reply that it was probably because I was speaking English.  I always come up with a witty quip 2 years after the event.  Today I wrote my first letter in German.  We were given a number of subjects/items that we had to include but the rest was up to us.  Some of the things I remember are, Potato Museum (don't laugh it exists), the Minibar being empty, playing foot ball at 7pm, the TV not working and the hotel room being small.  I addressed the letter to Annika and am particularly proud of the fact that I managed to say that Paul "the Finger" Dalton came over to visit, so of course, the minibar is now empty.

Schmetterling

Today's cultural experience with the language school was a visit to the Munich Botanical Gardens, in particular the butterfly house.  It was quite surreal to be standing in the green house amongst the cacti looking out at the snow covered gardens beyond the glass.  We were allowed in for free because we were a "school group".

The rare hairy penis plant of Peru

The gardens were very good and I always admire the amount of effort that is required to recreate the required environment for these different plants.  There was a fern room, a dessert room, a tropical room and, of course the butterfly room.  This last was the high light of the visit.  The number of different species and the quantity of each was amazing.  There is something very peaceful and wondrous about having large brightly coloured insects flapping around you.

Schnee

Das Fixie.  Die Backerei

It snowed last night so everything is once more covered in a blanket of white.  I rode my bike to die Bakerei this morning, it is less painful for me than walking.  Riding through the fresh snow was entertaining, never really knowing if I was going to be lying in the snow at any moment.  I still have my road slicks on the fixie and they don't inspire confidence in the snow.

Das Fixie.  Die Wohnung

I have just returned from riding around through the park.  I had gone out to drop off the recycling but I enjoyed riding through the snow so much that I stayed out and rode aimlessly through the park.  I was rewarded by seeing the woodpecker (unfortunately I didn't take a camera) close up instead of high in the trees and spent my time enjoying the light snow falling on my face and practising propping on my bike.  Propping is a skill that I have always wanted to master.  Propping is when you can balance the bike whilst stopped without putting either foot on the ground.  Whilst trying to master this life skill I discovered that I could spin the back wheel on the ice if I tried to accelerate hard.  This led to me practising this quite a bit, much to the consternation of the other people using the park.  Ultimately I discovered that I could do quite good fixed wheel skids on the ice as well so this led to whole lot more practising, also to the consternation of the other people using the park.  I wished Annika was there to enjoy it with me.

Der Sprachkurs

As you know I am learning German.  The course is an intensive course and uses an immersion method which means that the lessons and course book are all in German.  The only other languages spoken are those of the respective students to each other and to the teacher if he/she speaks that particular language and can be cajoled into conversing in it.  This may sound counter intuitive but when you think about it, it makes sense.  If I think about my friends baby daughter who is just learning to speak, she and her parents don't have a common point of reference to start from.  She can't ask her parents how to conjugate a particular verb or ask them to translate nouns, instead she is immersed in English as her parents through repetition and association begin to teach her our language.  The same principle applies to my German classes to some degree.  Sure I am taught German grammar in a prescriptive way but I am picking up other stuff without formal teaching.  Nobody taught the class what the German words were for page or chapter or home work but through association you can't help but pick it up.  The same applies to a lot of other words.

I am one of the very few in my circle of friends that hasn't learnt another language.  The majority know of what I now speak and it will be old hat for them but for the one remaining monoliguist I will now wax lyrically about the joys of another language.

Take the definite article.  In English there is only one and it is "the".  In Deutsch there are six.  "Der, die, das, des, dem, den"  How and when to use them is determined by some not so simple rules which involve sex of the noun and whether the sentence is nominative, accusative or dative.

The indefinite aritcle.   In English there are two and they are "a" & "an".  In Deutsch there are five.  "Ein, eine, einer, einem einen"  Once again how and when to use them is determined by some not so simple rules which involve sex of the noun and whether the sentence is nominative, accusative or dative.

Then there are the nouns. Nouns in German, like French and Italian, are either masculine, feminine or neutral.  Unfortunately there is not a European standard for nouns and what might be masculine in French is feminine in German. There are no rules to determine the sex of a noun despite what people may say.  The only hard and fast rule is found in the Alec Birbeck guide to noun determination.  Alec correctly states that if you put "chen" on the end of every noun (e.g. Stuhl becomes Stuhlchen) then everything becomes das.  Das Brotchen, das Computerchen etc.  You may sound like a demented three year old but at least you are grammatically correct.

The next anomaly with German is that you have to learn to speak like Yoda.

"Teach you German I will."

"Learn to conjugate verbs you will."

"Strong in grammatically correct sentence structure you will become."

Besucher aus Stuttgart

Note the dejected look on Emelia's face and the supercilious look on mine.

We had guests staying with us over the weekend.  Markus and Andrea, with their baby daughter Emelia, drove down from Stuttgart to spend the night.  I really enjoy their company and have since I first met them.  I am an Engineer, Markus is an Engineer so nothing more needs to be said really.  In the future the world won't be ruled by apes, it will be ruled by Engineers and it will be a better place.

Emelia is 16 months old so I welcomed the opportunity to speak German with someone at about my level.  I spent the weekend paying out on her because of her poor vocabulary and woeful verb conjugation and just generally feeling superior to her.  It was a pretty low act but these days I have to take the opportunities when they come.  We had a very lazy and relaxing weekend choosing not to do much other than play with Amelia, chat and go for the occasional walk.  It started to snow on Sunday afternoon, just light small crystals.

The first sign of spring