Now for the second post from last week with what I actually did.
Monday was a fairly normal teaching day. It was the last time that I taught the evening class on Monday evening, as from now on they are preparing to take their exams. The exams are offered twice a year, and as this group are taking theirs this semester, I am no longer needed. After the class, a student asked for my e-mail address and if I was interested in being a 'Tandem partner' (we'd speak half an hour German, then half an hour English etc). As he was no longer technically my student, I agreed and we arranged to meet that weekend.
On Tuesday evening, I headed to a Mexican restaurant after the conversation class. We'd been once before, and it definitely didn't disappoint this time. I must admit that I'm not a huge fan of Austrian food; it's a bit too 'stodgy' for my liking, and I find the flavours quite bland. At the Mexican, I shared some nachos to start, and then had fajitas, which came in about 4 separate dishes and managed to take up the majority of the table. It was very good food though, and we were all very excited to enjoy some actual flavours and spices for a change.
After the meal, I headed straight to a 'Language-exchange meeting' with two other TAs Alice and Cecila. It is a meeting organised by Couchsurfers, but you don't actually have to be a couchsurfer to come along. It's just meant for people who like travelling, so that they can share their experiences, and, as in the name, it's a place for you to practice different languages as well. As we'd been expecting, there were quite a few who had gone just to practice their English. We were quite lucky, as we managed to get chatting to an Austrian, and so the three of us were happily speaking away in German all evening. He had done quite a bit of couchsurfing, so had some cool stories from that to listen to, but seemed equally interested in us telling him a bit about what we're doing here, and our impressions of Austria.
On Wednesday, I went to the lecture on trans cultural communication in the morning. The lecturer spent about 12 years in the Far East, and interjects the lecture with lots of interesting anecdotes. A lot of the slides are also accompanied by pictures of him with the locals in various places, which adds a nice personal touch to the lecture.That evening, I was teaching a lesson on stereotypes. We were talking about British stereotypes, and one of the older guys in the class made some very negative, almost offensive, suggestions. I'm not sure if this was his genuine opinion, or if he was saying it to provoke his fellow classmates, which he does occasionally in his position as eldest in the class. Either way, it was pretty awkward and I dealt with it by just not writing his suggestions up on the board (but in a subtle way...). Luckily, the next lesson was a lot more relaxed. It was a lesson on British humour, and we basically spent the whole lesson watching videos on Youtube.
On Thursday, I went to another uni lecture, the convo class, and evening school but there's not much else to report from that. As my last post was fairly long, I'll leave it there for this week and document my weekend in the next one.
In other news, in addition to my runs (I have now gone on two runs, so yes, they are plural), on the 1st December I started the '100 Day Burpee Challenge'. It's pretty simple - on the 1st day, you do 1 burpee, 2nd day 2 burpees and so until the 100th day, when you bust out 100 burpees. It's going okay at the moment, and hopefully this will continue over the Christmas period...
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