European Adventures: SeeLife and Stoplerstein

So it's been a pretty quiet week since I got back from Switzerland. I've been trying to get some work done both on my Deutsch and on my research. I met with the professor supervising me while I'm here, and he made some suggestions, so I may be taking a trip to Ludwigsburg, a city near Stuttgart, in July to visit the Deutsch-Französisch Institut. My newest language-learning strategies include regular viewing of American TV shows in German (the easiest to find are the Simpsons and Scrubs so far) and trying to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to learn new vocabulary. I'm not making sentences as fast as I'd like, so I think I'm going to add in studying verbs from my verb book every day, and finding a way to study prepositions.

After I got back from Switzerland, I went to get ice cream with Thorin and he showed me something really interesting that I want to share. Apparently several years ago in Germany an artist was commissioned for a project called the Stolperstein (literally means stumbling-stone in German). They are golden stones that are placed in front of buildings where deported Jews lived or worked prior to deportation. They list the person's name, date of birth, camps deported to, and then date of death and/or liberation, where applicable. There are several scattered around Konstanz, Thorin showed me a few, and apparently they are now in every German city. I included a link to the Wikipedia article on them here if anyone is interested in reading more, and my pics of two of them are at the bottom of this entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein

I also went to SeeLife with Ulf, my language partner! SeeLife is the aquarium in Konstanz. It was small but still really fun to see! It was really well put-together, the exhibits were nicely done. For some reason the fish were SUPER active and excited, I swear the penguins were showing off for the little kids. Then we went to Cafe Aran for ice cream, after looking around a bookstore in Lago (the mall). Apparently my German pronunciation is good! yay! except for that darn -ch sound, I can't quite seem to get it right. And I said my longest German sentence to date trying to explain that my mother was proud of me for traveling alone! Grammatically correct sentence, no, but hey, I'm just happy to be stringing seven or eight words together.

Today is a holiday in Germany, Ascension Day, and EVERYTHING is closed. I'm assuming Ascension Day as in post-Easter ascension, but I'm not a very observant Catholic, so I went for Turkish food! Thorin and I went to a little place near the harbor. I had yufka with meat--it was kind of like a burrito? but it was yummy! Then we walked around the city, which was crowded because everyone was off today, and climbed the Munstertur and walked around some more. It was much nicer to climb the Munstertur on a clear day.