My Life in Pictures

So, enough people have asked me for pictures that I finally got around to taking my camera out.  I'm putting all of these plus more on my facebook, but you guys can have the highlights.

 I don't know what this is, but it goes past my window every morning:

Talking lampposts shaped like old people:

Typical houses and things:

The french gardens:

The castle.  Moat more aesthetic than defensive, and no crocodiles to speak of.  Lame castle.

The synagogue, built in 17something.  When the Germans went through their Jew-hating phase, they burned down most of the synagogues, but they were practical enough to realize that torching a building solidly connected to the one next to it is a bad idea, especially when the entire block is made out of wood.  So this was spared, and I'm glad, because it's a lovely piece of architecture.

A fountain I found attractive.

The church!  You can pay to go in the steeple but I'm waiting for someone to visit me so we can all go together.

My family and I spent yesterday and today hopping around the area, checking out a couple outdoor art exhibitions that had been set up for the weekend.  The best one was today, in a tiny tiny tiny little village church, so little, it has probably never held more than twenty people.  The "art" consisted of all of us sitting in pitch blackness, while a dour-faced woman walked around turning a stationary flashlight on various inanimate objects while pop music overlayed on recorded conversations between teenagers overlayed on car sounds played in the background.  So now I can say, I have stared intently at a cherub carving while listening to Michael Jackson.  By the end of it, I couldn't hold back my giggles, but I was apparently the only one who found the entire concept both hilarious and not actually art.

Also, I drove the family around a little bit today.  It was both awesome and terrifying.

On language learning:  Objectively, I know my language skills must be improving because I pretty much only speak German, unless I'm dealing with the child.  But it's hard to be objective when everyone around you talks really fast and mumbles.  So I was feeling pretty down about my crappy american self, when my host mom started chatting with me, in English, because the charge was nearby.  I cursed my accent.  I cursed my stupid monolingual brain that was incapable of learning languages.  I cursed my college German courses that did not prepare me for this.  And then I eventually realized that the child was gone, and the conversation had switched to German a solid twenty minutes ago, and I hadn't noticed.  Then I thought: this is cool.