Course selection and 1st week of lectures

Almost three weeks have passed since my last script. German lecture (torture) is happily behind, rolling all the responsibility of my lingual progress into my own hands, and finally lectures and sports have begun.

The final exam of German course was partially simplified which was very disappointing yet maybe necessary since I screwed up my text production and maybe grammar part also. The results come on 4th of November. At the moment I'm practicing my German daily at home with help of Quizlet.com and by reading old school books and watching some TV.

About course selection.  I made my final choices and mapping on Sunday evening, last day before semester start. It was rather time consuming since courses have to be checked from Modulehandbücher(pdf) one by one and exam dates (the list is in German and don't have course codes, so if you use English handbook as I did, it's some excess work to trace back the German course names from German handbook, so better list both names in first place or only German one) ensured from separate list. This is very important since many courses have their exams on the very same date and even in the case they are not, it's smart move to have some time between the exams to be able to prepare. I've heard some rumors that it's possible to ask for oral exam and it's individually decided by the responsible teacher. Maximum grade to get from oral exam is "pass". In addition, I had to discard maybe 50% of my initial seems-interesting-course-list due to overlap of lecture hours. What I ended up with, was 6 courses of which 2 are in German and of which one is intensive course lectured in end November. I also attended one interesting course in German as extra as I don't have any classes on Monday otherwise. It has overlapping exam date but I may yet ask for the oral exam. Here you don't register for courses, only for exams. I.e. one may just walk into interesting lectures and stay or leave.

My current course list seems like:

-Real Estate Economics and Sustainability Part 1: Basics and Valuation (german)
-Basics of Liberalized Energy Markets
-Supply Chain Management in der Automobilindustrie (german)
-Business and IT Service Management
-Management Accounting 2
-Entrepreneurship

So, something quite different from Finance or Economics, because I feel these have far more to offer for me: a great opportunity to broaden my business knowledge.

This far the lectures have been good. All the lecturers are capable, seemingly experienced speakers. German has been clear though very fast. I was able to understand maybe 50-70% of what lecturers said, but in addition both courses have good downloadable materials. And I also recorded the lectures with my phone if I find interest to listen to them again. The pace of lectures feels quite much faster than in Lappeenranta, where I quite often relied on self-studying to avoid death by boredom.

Volksfest in Cannstatter Wasen and some impressions

Finnish mafia represented by 4 members, backed up by my flatmate and her friends, were attending Cannstatter Wasen, the not so infamous sibling festival of Oktoberfest. Cannstatter is a suburb of Stuttgart and the fests are about 50-75% of the size of Oktoberfests, and with negligible amount of tourists! So get your Lederhosens or Drindl on and head out to experience something extraordinary and impressive!

There were some 10 beer tents in festival area each spacious enough for some 5-10 thousand people. Beer is served in 1 liter mugs to the table and costs 9 euro. A bit expensive but definitely worth it as the festival itself doesn't have any entrance fee or other extra burden. There are also some amusement park rides at the area, of which the biggest we greatly enjoyed after 3 mugs of potent beverage. The tents are mainly free entry from opening time of 11.00 on until 16.30 from which on you have to have a reservation to a table. We enjoyed our stay for about 4 hours and headed out for other greener pastures, unfortunately found impossible to discover.

 Minor parties and hangarounds keep on going almost every day if one asks around a bit, but nothing seriously worth mentioning in those. Typical enjoyable evenings with good company, music and beverages.

After 2 weeks of language course I'm a bit frustrated. We had the selection test to define our lingual capabilities and thereafter to divide us into meaningful groups, but yeah B1.1 actually undermines my German understanding quite a lot and classes have been sometimes extremely boring. But well on the other hand, I had very little interest to study German in a class now and harder course could have been rather troublesome. Anyway if one feels capable of doing more and has enthusiasm doing so, it's possible to swap for a harder course in the beginning. Other bothering thins is that we have 4 different teachers each teaching more or less different areas. Grammar teacher is clear role but the other 3's roles are at least to me rather indistinguishable and perhaps overlapping and at least not building into one meaningful goal letting the whole remain pretty confusing and frustrating. To sum up: some classes are very useful and interesting and some will bore you to brink of death. Note: Demand for challenge, it's worth it.

I took the big ball to myself and decided not to attend further language courses here after this one. I have my old German school books here with me and they cover quiet a wide area of situations, up till B2.2 or C1 level I think. Most important thing however is to interact with local people. The timetable of this intensive course is quite shackling classes lasting from 14.00 to 17.15 every workday not leaving too much possibilities to plan anything time taking during day times. There's now one week German remaining and then one free week before actual courses begin. We have some initial plan to rent a car and go touring around.

Oh yeah and about traffic! Bike is very nice mean to get around here, but one has to really pay attention. I've seen some pretty random maneuvers by car drivers and they quite rarely use blinkers! Also a bike drivers should really bother to wave hand signs when cornering or doing pretty much anything. I was almost rammed by another bike coming from behind about double the speed of mine when I was taking about 10 degrees very light left. Clearly his fault but yeah it would have definitely been worthwhile to check my rear wholly. Also it's better not to trust pointing down triangle or green lights!