Exit Life Through Window

This is giving me a strange sense of deja-vu writing this... guess where I am guys?!? I'm in the Humboldt's PC-Pool! Yes, I am on a flying visit to Berlin to try and persuade my lecturers here to give me my marks back from Berlin, and I realised that my Humboldt login still works, so I'm browsing the net until I have to go get my flight. Sorry for the long disappearance from LJ-Land - I have no internet in my new flat right now so I won't be around much until it gets installed. The new flat is amazing though, and there will be pictures soon!

It's been really great being back in Berlin, although it's made me even more aware of how much more at home I feel here than in London right now. I went out with the tour guides last night and I feel so happy around them. They're a really friendly, open, accepting bunch of people and it makes them a really nice group to spend time with. I miss that a lot, as well as just the general atmosphere of Berlin in comparison to London. I was walking through Monbijou Park yesterday and just felt totally like I'd never left Berlin in the first place.

I have a new plan for post-degree now, because I realised I wanted to come back to Berlin. So the plan is to graduate, finish out my rental period on my flat working in London (I'm now a London tour guide, btw! I passed my test tour on Sunday, hurrah!) and then move back to Berlin for about 6 months to do the tour guiding thing, earn a load of money, and then go travelling for a couple of months. I want to go to the States, NZ and Australia, and then come back through Asia and maybe Eastern Europe. I shall see how it goes with the cash. After the travelling I want to move to France for a year and after that, who knows? But I think that's a pretty good sounding plan :D My sister is really up for moving to Berlin with me which could be pretty fun as well.

I also can't remember if I posted about this before, but I'm directing a play this year too, in April. We finally decided which one! It's going to be 'Forever Godard' by Igor Bauersima... hopefully it's going to be the best play the German soc has ever seen... fingers crossed, at least! We're going to fit music and dance and a tonne of film as well (of course, since it's named after Jean-Luc Godard) into it... I have been mentally (and sometimes really) squeeing every time I think about it, hehe. So exciting!

Anyway, I thought I'd update about my life right now. I actually have a whole essay, practically, about my thoughts on my year abroad ready to post, but it's on my laptop at home so that might have to wait til I get the net. Also, I'm buying a PC just so I can play the Sims,pretty much... I feel like such a geek!

On that note... have a good week everyone, comment and update me on exciting things going on for you all because I won't have much time to check my f-list over the next week or so, and I will be back in full force soon!!

Woohoo! Essays are done, just translating them now. Finally, the torment is reaching it's end.

Also, Apparently the president of my SU has been suspended for racist comments at an NUS national meeting... I'm taking the whole thing with a pinch of salt, to be honest, mainly because many of the 'facts' seem to come from hearsay and the Daily Mail, but still. Way to make King's look good, people! *sigh*

( A todo list as a reminder to myself )

I just had a bit of a paradigm shift in mood. And I realised that my final year at uni is going to be amazing. I have the world laid out for me. I've already got a gig lined up, I know where I can get more. I'm going to direct an amazing play which will go down in German Society history, at least for the shock factor! (We want to do Justine del Corte's Sex, hehe... I know, I know, I am a small child) As soon as I get back to England (or maybe even before) I'm going to go on an incredible song-writing binge. And even if the essays I'm writing right now get shitty marks, I can still get a first at the end of my degree. Sometimes I still appreciate being able to deal with complicated formulas: I just put all my marks and some fairly pessimistic predictions for what I'm going to get for the rest of my degree into the formula they use for calculating your final grade, and it came out as about 73%. Which is a first! So yay. Not that I'm going to slack, but it makes me feel a bit happier in any case. So hooray for that.

I'm feeling pretty happy right now.

Oh dear... I'm supposed to be doing a presentation on Hauff's Die Errettung Fatmes tomorrow, and there is absolutely no secondary literature on it at all, so far as I can tell. And so far all I can say about it is that it's a fairytale, I can give a biography of Hauff, and I can confirm that none of the characters were real people and that it's not directly based on a story from Arabian Nights. This is going to be painful... The seminar's to do with Orientalism in German literature, and I can contrast the text to the Reiseberichte texts we were doing before, but so could anybody with half a brain so I'm not sure that's even worth doing... Ergh, I never have a clue what I'm supposed to say in these things! I was going to talk to the lecturer about it after last weeks class, but she didn't turn up last week so I've been left up the creek without a paddle, so to speak. I don't suppose anyone of my flist who speaks German happens to have studied Hauff in depth at all and can enlighten me as to what's so important about this story?

Funny story:

In order to do language courses at the language learning centre at the Humboldt, you have to do an online test. It lasts 30 mins and consists of 5 paragraphs where the second half of every second word is taken away. You have to fill the gaps, and you get a mark out of one hundred at the end, and that says what level classes you can do.

So, I want to take some classes for French, German and Spanish next semester, because it's way cheaper than at King's so I might as well! I did the French test first, and got 77/100, which pleasantly surprised me because that puts me at a similar level to my German 6 months ago, which is good because I've barely spoken French for over two years. So all well and good there. Then I did the Spanish one, and got 37/100, which is fine because my Spanish is awful. Then I did the German one...

Now, by this time I'd already spent an hour doing this, and I was feeling fairly blasé about the German test because I've already done it twice, and I got over 80 both times, and I've been speaking German for 6 months pretty much all day every day... so I did the test fairly quickly, didn't bother checking it over too hard, and clicked on the 'mark test' button after 10 out of the 30 mins.

I got 70/100.... which puts me in a lower level class than for French!!

Oops.

It's not really a problem because I've already done one German course there at the level I should be at, so all I need to do is take my certificate from then and show it to them (and say 'listen to me talking German to you. I should be in the high level class', as well) but it was kind of embarrassing... oh well.

(And I am slightly tipsy right now, hence the marvellous excuse to use my new icon, hee)