Travel Schmavel

My Visited Countries

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So 17 days until I fly home in for Christmas. But in other news, I found this website where you can put in the countries you've visited and it puts it on a map of the world. Mine is really skewed though. I've been to Moscow and St. Petersburg, so therefore Russia is filled in, but it's a massive country and I've really only seen very little. I guess I don't feel the need to try and go to as many countries or see as many places, but rather just go where I find interesting. I mean, I definitely would like to try and go to a lot of countries, but there's more to it than just going to as many as possible. Although this map does point out that I haven't come anywhere near the Southern Hemisphere.

Things here are going well. Emily and I went to the Weihnachtsmarkt in Erbach on Saturday. It was really cute, really fun too. Saturday night I was also able to talk to my parents, and sisters Nancy and Rebecca, so that was really great!

In teaching on Monday and today I taught the 12th graders about gun control in the United States. It was pretty interesting. I didn't really know very much about it, so I had to do a lot of research. I tried to be balanced and show both sides of the issues. I was really impressed with how open minded the kids were about the issue.

Too warm for December...

50 degrees. That's the high for today. It's December 2nd and the high is 50? Over the next ten days the lowest high is 43. Although it's nice that it is sunny today, it draws away from the Advent/Christmas season. Emily and I are headed to the Weihnachtsmarkt in Erbach today. Neither one of us has been there, but we saw a sign for the Markt, and it looks cool. (But it would probably look cooler with snow.) I guess I'll just have to hope it will be cold and snowy when I'm home for Christmas (less than 3 weeks).

Last night Emily and I went to the Weihnachstmarkt at my school. All the different class bake or make things to sell. All the proceeds are donated to charity. It was really neat. The school was decorated, and there were kids and parents all over. I saw a number of my students, so that was fun.

Yesterday my sister Rebecca and my nephew Robert both celebrated their birthdays. I always remember when Rebecca and I were little, I would get a present on her birthday as well. We both always got wrapped advent calenders.

Handball instead of class...

Ok, so I showed up this afternoon to teach my usual Wednesday afternoon 9th grade bilingual history class and was greeted by a few of my students in the hallway. They asked if they could all watch their friends play handball instead of having class (their class is 7th period which is an extra class - students are only required to be there through 6th). I told them I couldn't make this decision, and they would have to find Monika. Unfortunately, we couldn't find her, so we asked another teacher, Herr Koettel, who gave us the ok. So, I went with the kids to the gym where I watched my first handball game. It's a great game! It's like a mixture of soccer (same idea of scoring - get the ball in the net), basketball (use your hands, they also dribble, and similar defensive strategies like zone and man to man), and hockey (similar penalties, players can be taken out of the game for a period of time). It's a really exciting game to watch and looks like fun to play. I missed the game that Gross-Bieberau played in, but watched Gross Zimmern play Babenhausen.

Another quick, interesting story: On Monday, one of the 5th graders still had a question when class ended, so I went up to talk to him. He asked me about how the US justifies the totale Verschendung der Papier (total waste of paper) that is dollar bills. I found it funny, I mean of all the wasteful things the US does, I don't really think dollar bills is the worst!

Thanksgiving Picture

Here's a picture of the Waldsee second half people who were at Thanksgiving (thanks to manfred)!