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

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.

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 18^th, 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!

Sincerely yours,

Andrej Blazhevski

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.

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