Explorations in Kempten

Theresa and I after visiting the CamboMare (Spa, or Freibad)

My first day in Kempten alone! :)
Watching Bayern play Bukarest in Fußball on Wednesday (Bayern, of course, won)
Kempten main street, I walk it everyday to school!

The Kempten Forum, or mall . . . biggest in the county!

The Kempten Library (Bibliothek)

Behind St. Lawrence on the streets of Kempten

Going to the Büchters church last Sunday (Roman Catholic, like almost everyone in Bayern)

The St. Lawrence Church in Kempten (largest & oldest, with a cross from the Middle Ages :)

So I am finally able to navigate the city! A very good thing given my utterly extreme lack of navigational skills. I mean really . . . me? find my way around a foreign city in Germany? ha. I got lost in Zups.

So life has been good in Kempten, my first Rotary meeting was on Thursday where I gave a presentation that could have gone better given my improvisation German skills, but overall it wasnt entirely bad either. Friday brought about a night out with the girls in my class, visiting "Kunstler", the teenager hangout/bar/cafe and wandering around Kempten.

School gets better every day, but French is still in a complete lack of understanding. Chemistry today "totally schooled" Chemistry at home, given the demonstration that when you poured some (luminol ? ) substance into this other substance it glowed bright neon green and blue, then turned purple. I didnt really understand what we were supposed to be learning of course. . . but it was very cool. Latin class, given that I probably wont be able to go in a smaller class, may allow me to "student teach" in another English class. I am very excited about that because in Latin you recieve a lot of homework . . . and I would be entirely lost. Math, I moderately understand which was a very pleasant surprise. I should say I understand what were talking about and I know I did it last year . . . but I dont really understand how they come about their answers and why. Who knows. Germans are so entirely precise however. I got in trouble in my Physics class the other day when I drew a graph that wasnt entirely straight given I did not draw it with a ruler. Each student uses like 4 different colored pens to write their notes, and all pen, never pencil. If the mess up (which is basically never) the use white out. They also write everything on graph paper so it can be super duper precise. Utterly amazing. They spend half the time switching between pens than they do actually listening . . . and yet, they are entirely smart. Really. All of them know 4 different language fairly sufficiently, first year college at least, and latin nearly "fluent" (since you dont speak it) by the 11th grade. History is really the thing that amazes me though . . . they recall dates and time periods like know other. They knew before I did when the American Civil War was. Yikes. The classes arent entirely without negativity however, some of the teachers didnt know I was an exchange student at first and made a few negative American comments. Luckily, or maybe unluckily depending on how you look at it, I didnt entirely understand them. German jokes are also very, very difficult to understand. One teacher asked if I was from Peru . . . ? There is another student from Bolivia in the Carl-von-Linde-Gymnasium, but none from Peru. It gets better everyday, and my class is entirely super nice. Tomorrow each class spends the day hiking, so that should be quite fun.