All posts by Andrej

Goodbye

Last Breakfast on a Friday. Goodbye. I will miss you all a little bit. James, I am coming to your wedding in Koeln. Nathalie, I will follow your acting career meticulously. Erik, this is not the end.

Like any other great adventure, this one came to an end almost by surprise. Just like that, after weeks that seemed so painfully endless, an end came out of nowhere. Counting down, 10, 9 … 3, 2, 1, Null! and the Language Pledge was over on a Thursday night filled with neat dresses and suits, good food and a teary eye here and there.

I have been taking all this time to process what happened last week but I still struggle. I remember the last exam on Wednesday and the unbelievable relief. I remember enjoying the Vermont sky one last time. I remember packing and empty dorms. I remember faces that shared 7 weeks of their lives with me, deep in the greenery of Vermont. I remember how unexpectedly I was emerged in a world of German and some more German to go with it.  I remember the oddity of the first conversation in English after the countdown; almost entirely different personalities; people I know and people I do not know so much about.

Wow we! I am in awe by the persistence and patience that everyone showed. I am so proud of us.

Friday we packed and kept our tears to ourselves for the most part. Said goodbyes and farewells which went back and forth between English and German. We wished for some more time. We parted ways with a strange aftertaste of German in our mouths.

Thank You everyone for being part of this experience. Thank you for all the times you were there for one another and for all the times you made Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. Thank you for inspiring to strive for more and to never forget how cool German is.

Also, Thank you to everyone who cared to read some of this posts. Hope you learn some German and be simply badass!

As they say in German, Auf Wiedersehen!

Andrej Blazhevski

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8 more days

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Nathalie and I at Eurotrash, it’s impossible to rotate the picture

Last week seemed a little bit shorter than usual. After three days of classes we attended a variety of very interesting workshops. Some were reading about German classical music, some discussing German art from during, between and after the World Wars and others were about philosophy, environment etc. I attended the Sustainability and Communication Strategies workshop.

It was certainly an eye-opening experience to see have a quick glance at this very specific niche of Sustainability and Environmental studies. With our instructor Gesa Lüdecke – a post-graduate student at University of Colorado Boulder – we talked about a slightly different take on Sustainability and Environmental awareness. Instead of focusing on big infrastructural projects, we focused on the personal perspectives that people often have and discussed how we can influence them. By the end of the workshop we created a sustainable strategy flyer and a poster for a potential campaign. It was absolutely cool! I also started really considering this specific branch and started entertaining the idea of continuing my post-grad education at her university in Germany – Leuphana University, Lüneberg.

For all of you interested environmental activists and German lovers, here is the link to the university’s website:

http://www.leuphana.de/en/home.html

Then on Saturday we had a Eurotrash party. I don’t really have a way to describe it, but yes it happened, we danced for three or four hours and the Eurotrash dose we got will last us for a while.

By the end of the weekend we all started slowing down a little bit and it is getting increasingly difficult to focus. Everyone is giving their last bit these days and really feeling the laziness, but surely powering through the overwhelming amount of tests and deadlines  and looking forward to the end. However, as much as we awaiting the end, there are also only 8 days left until we are all away for good and then who knows how long until we see each other again. I will miss this bunch and I will look forward to reunions over good Deutsch beer somewhere in Germany.

 

Yours,

Andrej Blazhevski

P.S. Forgive me for my poor English, please; it has gotten really sloppy over the last  six weeks.

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The Party attracted even students from other Language Schools
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Class was slow today, but the change of scenery was good

Happy Sunday

It has been almost two weeks since my last update and I am not sure how to go about all that has happened since. Last week went about as per usual with steady load of homework assignments and more serious in-class discussions. On Wednesday began the series of events organized in light of the big Centennial Celebration of the Language Schools at Middlebury. There were various panels and workshops that touched on multiple topics around the role of languages in society and globalization.

All that was great, but the best part was of course yet to come. Last Saturday, on the 18th, everyone from all of the language schools dressed up – or at least tried to – according to the 1915 Theme and gathered in a huge hall in the sport center. To be perfectly honest, that night was and probably will be my favorite night of this whole experience for many reason. First of all, everyone put great effort into respecting the theme and everyone looked quite outstanding. Second, there was a huge buffet of the most delicious cookies and desserts you could ever imagine in the middle of the room. Yes, I took advantage of that. And then the live music and the great energy that filled the room were the cherry on the top. We danced, we sang, we ate good food and we all looked good! It was wonderful!

Ah, and should I mention that this celebration was a Language-Pledge-free event. Talking in English and learning so much about so many people in ways that our German skills still tend to prevent us from was beyond comforting. More than ever, I also understood and learned to appreciate the unreal effort that all of these highly-intelligent individuals around me have put into learning German.

After week three came to an incredible end we started week four as any other. This past Wednesday we reached Hump Day of the summer school (Bergfest!!) and as we slowly started moving through the second half of this experience, I am already realizing how much I will miss this place.

Stay tuned for the really cool events that week five is all about. I am already excited to tell you all about it.

Oh and here are some photos and some good music to make up for the two weeks I have been absent. Enjoy!

 

Nathalie and I
Nathalie and I before the Centennial Celebration event
My dance partner Natalie and I did some quasi-photoshoot
My dance partner Natalie and I did some quasi-photoshoot
Centennial Fireworks!
Centennial Fireworks!

 

Sincerely yours,

Andrej Blazhevski

Hallo Nochmal!

Apologies for the Tuesday instead of Weekend post again. Weekends here are not really a thing, to be honest. As the workload and variety of activities is increasing in amount and difficulty, my weekend spare time is getting shorter. Fortunately though, I can steal an evening here and there to take a break and write an update.

As for last week, it was busy and fulfilling as usual. Less overwhelming, too. Things started to fall into place and I finally started getting control over my German word order (I think). Complex tenses and particularly complex sentences still remain a difficulty in spoken German, but there is a progress. The weekend before last, I had written a love poem, and I gave it a final edit last Friday. Sometimes I like to think of myself as a writer in English or Macedonian, but that is sometime. And then there is German. For my level of German the idea of writing an actual poem seemed a bit far-fetched and impossible, but one way or another I finished and edited it. Thinking about it throughout the week, in contrast to all of the beautifully crafted love poems we read in my Literature class,  I became all the more aware and, perhaps, humble about how much I still don’t know about the German language. There is so much vocabulary, so many rules (and exceptions to make it more interesting), idioms and expressions tightly intertwined with the cultural heritage of which one needs to be aware of in order to be able to develop a style in the language… Okay, I am getting unnecessarily philosophical here. What I am trying to say is there is always more to learn and baby steps are okay; and love poems with unbearable clichés and limited vocabulary are okay, too. In fact, I did not do too badly on my first poem in German.

A really cool thing that happened over this weekend was the concert organized by the Program for Singers that exists under the German Language School. In this program, there are a handful of students who besides being eager to learn the language, are exceptionally talented singers. They put up a wonderful show on Sunday night with amazing classical short pieces in German and looked quite surreal even from the front rows. You can see bellow a couple of pictures I stealthily tried to take.

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Speaking of music, I am quite the addict. A background music (to my life) is playing more often than not to the point that I sometimes struggle with complete silence. Abiding by the Language Pledge, I have not listened to a single song in English or Macedonian over the past 3 weeks. Instead, I have googled and “youtubed” during every study session so far and have discovered some amazing German songs. So, I have decided to put a fine finish to this and the following posts with my discoveries. To warn you beforehand, my taste in German music, as much as many other components of my “German identity” is still developing, so expect to hear intense Pop and Indie Alternative and everything in between (expect for Metal, sorry).

Now, I will let you enjoy this extraordinary song by Andreas Bourani – Auf Uns.

Have a great week!

Tschüss,

Andrej Blazhevski

Hallo an alle

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After 48 hours between uncomfortable plane seats, ten-hour-long layovers and watching my favorite Anime series, on a Friday, I arrived in the beautiful overwhelming greenery Vermont is and after another hour long ride I arrived at the campus of Middlebury College. Here, I joined a seven-week Language Program that supposedly immersed you 100% in the language of your desire from the ten offered altogether.  The first couple of days were like a summer camp with entire days to lay under Vermont’s sky, to eat Vermont’s creemees, tour the little there is of the Town of Middlebury and all the authentic expensive shops, and to handle the jetlag. Sunday afternoon, all students had to sign the infamous Language Pledge, which was a contract per se, binding us to speaking, reading, and writing only in the language the students are here to learn. You are also allowed to get in touch with the outer world every now and then, but, of course, you should keep it at a bare minimum and in the privacy of your own room  (For those of you scolding me: This is the only thing I am doing, other than talking to my family, that is breaking the rules. I promise!). So, I understood very well what that meant, but I couldn’t quite imagine it.

With signed pledge and with limited German-102 abilities, the next day was very difficult. Not only did the four-hour-long class conversations (on German Literature,Culture and Grammar) were baby-talk-like to impossible, but the table conversations in the cafeteria were dull and quite embarrassing. And in the times I was free, I struggled between my best friend that is the online dictionary, the loads of homework and things I left way back in blocks 3 and 4 of last year (sorry, Christiane). And some good German music, too!  Tuesday was similar to Monday, but a little bit better. Besides being honored by the first convocation of the new President of Middlebury College – Laurie L. Paton (Welcome, Ms. Paton!) – Wednesday was, as well.

With a couple of identity crisis in the newfound little empty German part of my brain along the way, every next day became better. Now on the eleventh day here, and at the end of the eight day since the Language pledge started, I talk to my professors, still poorly, but at least I talk. I obliviously make mistakes much like the ones I did in fifth grade learning English, but I really learn. I make jokes and laugh at my failures and I make friends in German. Perhaps, it took a couple of days to adjust to such a tempo (during the summer!), but I am seeing a steep and probably a tad bit frightening, but a learning curve that is going to make this summer great.

During the past eleven days a lot happened and even more so will happen in the next couple of weeks, but there is only little space and time to reflect on them. After all, I still have some homework to do. However, I will try to make it short(er than this!) and clear, and post something new every weekend. I will sometimes take a more analytical standpoint and talk about the learning environment, the social interactions, the attempts to be funny in another language etc. and how they altogether mold a new identity with a different train of thought, a different awareness for words, and even a different taste of music. Other times I will talk about things that have happened along the way, things that have caught my attention, identity crisis and weird things I tend to reflect on.

In the meantime, stay tuned for the coming reflections!

Yours sincerely,
Andrej Blazhevski