I've been incredibly busy over the last month. Here are a few updates.
All my classes have started. At IES, I'm taking a history class about Jews in Germany and a political science class about the EU and its history and institutions. Meanwhile, at Humboldt University, I'm taking a literature class on Tieck, a Romanticist, a linguistics lecture on text varieties, genre, and register, and a literature lecture on gender and sexuality in 12th century courtly poetry. In addition, I'm required to take German as a Foreign Language, which is at Humboldt's language center. Not to mention my online class at the Yiddish Book Center about Chaim Grade and my Yiddish class at Berlin's Jewish community/adult education center. Honestly, it's too much. I'm going to switch the courtly poetry class to an audit. It's far too interesting to drop entirely! Previously the linguistics class was an audit, but we managed to convince the professor to let me take it. I find the linguistics professor's lectures easier to understand than the poetry professor's. She's more animated and she either enunciates more or her pronunciation is just easier for me to hear.
I've been dragged in circles by Humboldt-- I can take this class, I can't take this class, keep going and see if they'll let you take this class, I can take this class if I take the two other companion classes, which I can't take, etc. I'm glad to have it 95% nailed down.
In the last few weeks I've connected with Grinnell alumni living in Berlin, attended the anniversary show of the musical Tanz der Vampire, rented a viola for the semester, baked a lot of bread, gotten a care package from my family, and hung out with a Grinnell friend doing a teaching Fulbright in northwestern Germany. I have plans to go to London in a couple of weeks to visit a friend from high school and see a couple of musicals. I've been invited to two different Halloween parties this week and I even have a costume.
I'm looking forward to seeing how the semester goes and I'll try to post more regularly!
Fantastic! Exhausting just to read about. I think of courtly poetry as pretty hetero, but there's a ton of homo erotic lit about the fraternity of knights and obeying the king and what it means to have mastery over an opponent. Bit I think of courtly poetry about going to the ends of the earth to satisfy my lady. Be interested in how that goes. And Chaim Grade and Tieck, of course.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget to rest.