Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

I'll keep that as my claim to not posting in three or so days. Seriously, though, I'm fairly busy doing stuff. So that's cool.

Saturday night we decided to head back to Waldhaus, the club I'd gone to on my first night here. I believe I called it Waldclub earlier, just to clarify. Unfortunately, it was really slow and boring, and Geli was tired so we left early.

Sunday we got up and Geli and I went to church. It's a fairly old structure and kind of reminds me of St. Francis. They have a big banner hung up advertising World Youth Day - Weltjugendtag. After church we walked over to the Residenzschloss, the largest of the three palaces in Ludwigsburg, with extensive gardens. We met Geli's mother, brother, and grandmother there, and went walking and had a small brunch. After this we picked up Jörg and went to Burger King. It's definately different from BKs in America. They offer not only french fries but "country potatoes" as well, and it's really only "fast food" by comparison to a sit down restaurant. Following this, we went to watch Manfred play in a tennis tournament. We arrived just as he was coming back in his thrid set from a 5-2, 15-40 deficit to win in a tiebreak. It was quite exciting. We went home and I set back to reading Jugend Ohne Gott, which I had stopped reading for a period because I was lazy.

Monday (today): back to school, and though I didn't have to go in until 9:30ish I went at 7:45 start time in order to write the final big standardized test with the rest of the class, this one in my best subject: Math. It was fairly easy, which is good since I didn't have a calculator. I hope they'll accept 3.14 for pi... actually, that's a lie. I really don't care much about the results of that test... there was one question which I guessed at a word, and guessed wrongly, thinking it was giving the height of a cone when really it gave the length along the diagonal edge. Furthermore, I was pretty stumped on one exponential growth question. But it's no big deal. The math test took up the first to hours of the school day. We then had GK, in which the teacher went over a big test the class had taken. Geli and Valerie told me how anal this guy was, pointing out the markings he made when he awarded or subtracted quarter points.
I case I haven't mentioned this, Valerie is Geli's best friend, and they do almost everything together, so I'm getting to know her pretty well. On Friday we're celebrating her 16th birthday, quite a big thing with girls over here, with a '60s themed party. It should be fun, but I'll need somethingt to wear...
Back to Monday. After GK we had Spanisch, i.e. reading time for me. Following this was Englisch, in which the teacher presented me that e-mail, you know, that one, in which there are a bunch of sentences using homonyms in English (we polish the Polish furniture). She had me read it. Fairly difficult. We all had a good laugh. I think I need to write an essay though. Darn. 150 words on some Isaac Asimov story.
That's one very impressive thing about the kids here. English is their third language and they're reading some Isaac Asimov stuff. Granted, its not his best stuff. It was a short story about robotic teachers. But I'd have to say that they are still a bit beyond the level that Deutsch 4 is operating at. It was only fifth hour, but it was the last; Geli has no sixth hour on Monday.
Coming home, we had Maultaschen, literally "mouth pockets," very delicious Swabian pasta filled with delicious stuff. Manfred also informed me that he'd arranged to move me out of Spanish and French and into 12th grade math, 11th grade physics, and 11th grade chemistry. Unlike us, their Naturwissenschaften (hard sciences) are spread out over years. However, they also have less of them. Geli's had one hour of physics a week since 8th grade. I had five hours of physics a week for only one year. It was still interesting to note that Manfred bumped me up into 11th grade physics when I haven't yet had a look at what they're doing in 10th. Ah well... worse comes to worse, I'll grin and bear it and (hopefully) learn something for my AP Physics class next year. At least it'll beat Französich und Spanisch.
Here's something: For those of you envying the schoolday ending at 12:15, I was back in at 2:00 for two hours of gym class. As I've mentioned before, the gym classes here are much broader in scope than those back in America. Another intersting note is that grading is not based on participation as it is back in the States. One must do more than show up dressed for class to receive an A. A lot more. And if you don't get an A in gym because, I don't know, you're out of shape, c'est la vie. That's not German, so I won't translate it. We began with a short run, then split into groups. My group got to run some more, for twelve minutes actually, around the gym. While running, I heard the gym teacher say "Drei Minuten" (three minutes), so I decided to load on a little extra fuel that I had. About four minutes later, I was beginning to doubt that that was exactly what he'd said. I started to exhaust, then heard him say, clearly, "Vier Minuten noch" (four minutes left). All in all, he marked me at 2700 m in 12 minutes, not bad for being a big fat American hamburger. After we got drinks, my group played baskteball. I was glad to be one of the few more-experienced ones in the group. And also being tall helped. We then switched with the other group and did what they had been doing: Kügelstoßen: shot put. Basically, here's how it goes: I've never put before in my life. I was lucky enough, though, to put my second shot about 7 meters or so, not bad. I did notice on his sheet, though, that with the smaller shot (4kg), a put of over 11m was required for an A. Significantly more than putting on shorts and a T-shirt... Luckily, I wasn't graded, specifically since the others have been doing this about a month.

Comments and Concerns:
Yes, I've plenty of deoderant. Usually apply it twice a day. No, I don't really ask them to talk German, largely since the few that speak English are quite bull-headed anyways. I do help, sure. I'm not really doing much besides tennis and gym class. I'm not even really sure that I'll do tennis, since Manfred told me that it could be somewhat difficult to integrate me with so little Verein experience, and for so short a time. I'm going there briefly, so we'll see about that.
Anonymous nerd-caller:
Mother.
Father.
Zoe.
Matt.
If not one of those, give me more clues, and I'll keep guessing.

Something German for y'all then... Although it's called Mineralwasser, the only "mineral" in it is CO2. Often also more aptly called Sprüdeln, "bubbles," Germans love to add carbonation to their water. It took me a bit to get used to it, and a strong downside is that it can't be well-refrigerated, so it's not really cold, but it's fine by me now.