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)

OK, enough of the mopiness, sorry about that! Tis a tad ridiculous and probably a result of letting out of stress from end of exams and boredom from everyone else still being busy with them. Let's move on.

In fact, I think that naming tomorrow 'New Start Friday' may be a good idea. No more moping, no more arguing with Trev, not more lying around in/on my bed all day and being lazy.

On a side point, if I applied to an MA at Oxford, just to see if I could get in, would that be silly? Because the reason I didn't apply to do my BA there was because I didn't want to end up doing just German, I wanted to do joint German/Music (for full explanations, see my posts from the second half of 2005). And ever since actually starting uni and ending up doing 'just German' (which I've been perfectly happy with), I've always felt kind of... well, like I wish I'd applied, because now I'll never know if I would have been successful or not. And whilst most of me is fed up with being a student, there is a part of me that would love to have both KCL and Oxford on my CV (ie, my Grandad's and my Dad's unis.) I don't know. My brain just keeps coming back to the idea, is all, and they do a masters in European Film that looks really interesting... It's just, when I don't really have an interest in becoming an academic, is there any point in spending all that money on a (fairly pointless really in terms of jobs) humanities masters? On the other hand, if I DID decide later in life that I wanted to do a PhD (which seems to also be a family thing) then I would need a masters, probably... so would it be better to do it now? And there's just something about Oxford that really makes me want to do it.

I guess I could move to France for a year and THEN do a masters.

More to the point, is this a horribly pretentious post? Heh. It kind of goes against what I wrote the other day... oh well.

Oh, I'm so fed up with the lack of organisation at the Humboldt!! Or at least, the lack of communication. I've just now found the website where you're supposed to register for the end of module exams. Yes, the exams I did on Friday. The exams I only knew you had to register at all for two weeks before hand, and was given the impression that registering was just so that you would get the marks back, nothing urgent. Aaaaaagh.

Oh well, at least I'll know what to do next semester. I just hope I actually get my credits from this semester, because otherwise I'm screwed. Well, and will be making the biggest fuss possible, but that is a) stressful and b) not the point.

Just got my results for my second year, don't really know whether to feel happy or disappointed! I got three firsts (for post 1945 fiction, realist fiction and poetry), two high 2:1s (for German for academic purposes and my music module !!), two average 2:1s (for cinema and medieval) and a 2:2 for language. The firsts were in all the subjects I was banking on, which is good, and I was pleasantly surprised by the 69 for my music module - that's only one mark off a first, even though my essay was the most appalling piece of crap I've ever written! I was hoping to have dragged my marks up a bit for cinema and medieval, because I felt I did quite well in the exams and I thought with cinema I might have managed to push it up to a high 2:1, but obviously it wasn't enough. The exam was only worth 40% though so I suppose that was a bit of a tall order! The 2:2 for language isn't as bad as it sounds - 59, which is only one mark off a 2:1, so it's not awful, and to be honest I didn't really do very well in the aural (ie, I made it up as I went along).

The funniest thing is that I worked out the average for the whole year, and it comes to 67.5 - exactly the same as last year, I believe! Oh no, wait, I've just checked - last year I averaged 67.25, so I have improved! I think at this rate I am heading for a 2:1 overall, not a first, unless I can really pull a big ratio of firsts out of the bag next year and in my fourth year. Oh well, I'll do my best.

So, I have mixed thoughts about my year abroad. I'm obviously excited - I get to go and live in Berlin for a year! I get to (hopefully) actually get fluent in the language I've been learning for so long! But at the same time I'm worried about it, for several reasons. In order to get to live in Berlin, I have to go study at the Humboldt for a year. Now, from the outside, that really doesn't look like a hardship, I know - it's one of the best unis in Germany, ffs! It's just that I really want to get a first, and I'm scared that I'm going to cack that up by not understanding enough next year to get good marks, and writing really awful essays because my German is crap. It's really scary. Now, I know I don't have to use all my marks, but still, it's worrying. Also, I'm a bit scared about living on my own/finding a flatmate in Berlin, cos I don't really know how the whole renting thing works out there, and I don't know if I'll be able to share with anyone from King's, because I'm sure they already have other plans.

To be honest, I think the main thing that's scaring me is that I don't really know what to expect, at all. And I don't like that at all. I'm the sort of person who likes to plan, I suppose.

I've actually taken the radical step of friends-locking this entry. Not because I particularly CARE, but I just can't be bothered to reply to the random comments from people I don't know which I seem to have been getting recently. Anyways. I'm having a crappy day. I seem to have been having a crisis a day this week, but all have been fairly trivial.. I suppose today has been, too, really. I've been planning on renting a flat this summer with Trev. We'd gone through a variety of plan changes, but finally it seemed we had agreed. I said I'd ask my parents to give me a certain amount towards the rent to make it easier for me and Trev... well, more for Trev, if I'm being honest. I though about doing it but finally decided it would be alright when my Dad said he'd donate some money towards our holiday if we had problems finding somewhere cheap. Since I didn't take him up on that, I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask about the flat. I explained to him that it would mean me and Trev would be able to pay less each per week (as opposed to just me)... no problem. He said he'd give us what amounted to 40 quid a week - not that much for him, but enough for us to get somewhere which actually had room to breathe. Great. I'd been holding my breath about the whole thing due to the aforementioned changes of plan, but now I finally thought I could get excited. I thanked my Dad profusely and told the good news to Trev. This was Thursday.

Today I talk to my Mum on the phone. I mention I'm coming home on Saturday to deliver my sister's 18th birthday present. My Dad had neglected to tell her. I assumed that meant he hadn't told her about the money, either, so I did, being a honest daughter. She is entirely unhappy about subsidising Trev. I get grumpy. We have a few more minutes of conversation and then say goodbye. But the thing is, I wasn't grumpy at her, persay. See, I just hadn't seen it like that - I just saw it as making things easier for me and Trev, because my parents wouldn't be paying anything towards my upkeep otherwise, where they would have been had I been at home. But being slightly upset at my mother's reaction, and worried about this new way of looking at things, I talk to Trev. Turns out he's not happy, either - he doesn't want to be subsidised by my parents particularly, cos he hates taking money off people, but especially not if my Mum's not happy with it. Now I'M not happy with it either, because I've obviously been ignoring everybody else's feelings rather selfishly for my own happiness. So Trev points out how he could get a job at Hampstead on campus and pay only 5 pounds a night for accomodation, and I could do the same thing. Trouble is, it's weekend work and 3 days during the week, which means I wouldn't get a day off for the whole summer cos I already work 3 weeknights at the bar which I'm going to carry on. Gah. Still. After much stressing and ranting and crying all afternoon I've come to a decision. We'll both apply for jobs at Hampstead. If we both get them, we'll live here. That'll be fine, we're already used to it, even if it's not what we'd planned. If one of us doesn't, we'll look for other jobs - probably telesales - which I KNOW I've almost certainly got a job waiting for me in, and Trev could easily get a job in. And we'll rent a flat. And if that means him paying 60 quid a week rent because that's all he can afford, and me paying 80+, I don't mind. Because I'd much prefer to be with him than live on my own.

Oh, the joys of being an adult... but not quite... and deciding just how dependant to still be on Mummy and Daddy. And feeling guilty about it. I guess this means I'm paying all my rent next year too, because I don't want to be at ALL dependant any more. I'm glad they paid this year, but I can't claim to be an independant adult whilst still sponging.

Poo. I wish I was 8. I guess my icon is particularly appropriate now.

EDIT: Was friendlocked. But actually I don't agree with friends locking stuff. If I'm going to put it on the internet I should go the whole hog. If not I should write it in my personal diary. So welcome, public.