Photo Feature

For those of you who aren't keen on using the Myspace photo feature, I have uploaded quite a few pictures of my adventures onto Picassa, and I think you can all view whatever I've posted if you go to http://picasaweb.google.com/suzanne.akerman I'll be adding more if you want to keep checking, but it probably won't be updated as frequently as my blogs (which, I realize, have not been all that frequent). Another quick blog should be coming up shortly. Thanks loyal blog fans!

I am more excited than you are

As I sat down to begin writing this quick blog, classical piano music drifted down to my apartment from the floor above. Previously, the only noises I have heard from my upstairs neighbors have been occasional bad pop music, Rock Band, and sometimes a distictive high pitched laugh. This is live piano music, played expertly. My question, which I know none of you can answer, is A)has there always been a piano up there and for 10 months no one chose to play it, despite being an accomplished musician, or B) did they get a piano up five flights of stairs today without me noticing? In any case, it's far superior to the time I was woken up at 1:30am to Backstreet Boys karaoke sung very poorly.

Since Jared left I have returned to my old routines of teaching and zookeeping and taking walks and reading in parks. The public library here has a strange collection of English books where you can read mostly only very popular contemporary authors like John Grisham and Tom Clancy, or very revered authors like Ernest Hemingway and Shakespeare. I have been burning through the collection fairly quickly, but I'm sure they have enough to keep me going for another four months. I have a small collection of books that I don't think I will be able to bring back to America with me and I am considering donating these to plump up the library's variety a little. Aunt Sittrea, just think, YOUR old copies of Love in the Time of Cholera and Cold Mountain might end up being checked out and read by hundreds of Germans practicing their English! So far, my German isn't good enough to read anything of note; the last book I read in German (it was a chapter book!) was a story which translates to Four Crazy Chickens. You can imagine the ridiculousness.

The most exciting thing that has happened to me in the past couple of weeks is probably incredibly boring to most of you. We have had a Eurasian buzzard (that's a hawk, not a vulture, for you non-zookeepers) in our care for a while with the intent of turning him into a presentation bird. He was found unable to fly in a nearby park and the veterinarian had to amputate the end of his left wing; however, the bird was so calm (calm is relative--he was relaxed for a wild-born bird of prey) that they decided to keep him.

Convincing a buzzard that has lived in the wild to stand on your hand is not an easy task. Even convincing a buzzard that has lived in the wild to tolerate a human presence in his enclosure is not an easy task. My exciting moments would look extremely boring if anyone recorded them. I spent a long time sitting still in the enclosure and inching toward the bird until he decided I was innocuous. Then I spent many hours wearing the thick leather glove while sitting next to the bird. The highlight reel of this would include footage of me moving my gloved left hand out and touching the bird's talons and then moving it back again.

Finally, last week I got the buzzard, who has been dubbed Merlin, to stand on my glove. It is difficult to describe how thrilled I was to my readership, because if you have never held a bird on your fist, I can't quite convey the way your heart thunders the first time you do it, and on the other hand, the rest of my readers handle birds every day and quite possibly have done so just minutes before reading this blog. The moment was tense for both the bird and me, since we had built a trust thus far--I never did anything unpredictable to Merlin and he never did anything unpredictable in return. If it is possible for a hawk to look puzzled, when I picked him up, this one did. After about five minutes where neither of us moved, a truck suddenly squealed its tires on the adjascent road, and both Merlin and I jumped out of our skins like children watching a scary movie.

We're still a long way from using Merlin in presentations, but actually lifting him off of the perch was a huge step and I felt the surge of adrenaline you get after accomplishing something big. Of course, there was no one there to share in it with me, and again, it was hard to explain to anyone else. "Shannon! Guess what? Today I got the bird to stand on my HAND! Isn't that amazing?" "But...you've held lots of birds before." "I KNOW, but this was the first time this bird has been on anyone's hand ever! Trust me, it's exciting!" It was.

Our shows this season are coming to a close, and since school has started again, our visitor numbers are dropping back donw. This also means that we've added some new children to the kindergarten. Since these children haven't had a year of English input from me like the others, they mostly have no idea what I'm saying. Ever. They stare at me blankly and sometimes respond with a loud, "WAS?!" which is German for "WHAT?!" But it reminds me that this is the point that all of the other children started at, and I am pleased with their progress. One child I have worked with from the beginning was accepted into a prestigious international school in Berlin after demonstrating English skills usually only seen in children two years older.

Perhaps I will attempt to do something interesting in the upcoming weeks to make for better blog fodder. Then you won't have to read about things like how I ate ice cream for dinner one day last week or how it rained while I was at a BBQ with the zookeeper trainees. I guess even life abroad can be mundane sometimes.

Scenes from Summer

I know I have once again been negligent in my blogging, and believe me, Blog-fans, I hear your pleas for more. The month of July began uneventfully, since no one celebrates American Independence Day here. I considered going to a bar up the street called "The Fan--American Sport Bar" (Yes, "sport" is singular in the title) to have a beer in honor of the 4th, but in the end I curled up on my loveseat and watched several episodes of The Office instead. The next week marked the start of 19 straight days of work, an unfortunate but unavoidable scheduling situation. Not all of the days were spent performing my usual tasks. One day I led a tour through the zoo for a children's birthday party. I conducted this in German, but was sure to explain to the 5-year-olds that English was my first language and it was okay to ask questions if they didn't understand me.


Another three days were consumed by a conference hosted by the University of Magdeburg. The zoo kindergarten is part of an EU-wide research project studying language acquisition, so representatives from Belgium, Sweden, England and many places in Germany gathered to compile data and discuss our results. I will take a moment to brag a little about our program at the zoo kindergarten here, because some of our children are speaking English at levels usually only reached by students who have been in immersion schools for three years. Their grammar is far from perfect, and many times they still respond to me in German when it's easier, but with the more advanced children, I no longer have to modify my speech or use any gestures to help them understand when I speak. They are capable of producing streams of sentences like, "Can we take our shoes out (off)? Sand is too much. Me too hot. Please?" Even the youngest children, who have just turned three, are producing English words occasionally (although I will admit there is one child whose most frequent English word is "NO!")



One of the German linguists, Anja, was heading to Yale the next week to give a lecture on bilingual kindergartens, but despite the fact that Americans use the term "kindergarten" the programs are very different in the two countries. Anja wanted to avoid confusion with this issue by learning as much as possible about American kindergarten in order to understand what her audience would be thinking when they heard the word in her lecture, so we had a long chat over dinner one evening. Fortunately for me, since Anja was a linguist, her English is perfect and I didn't have to try to explain anything in German.

At the end of my 19 days of work, I finally got my reward. On the 20th day I woke up early, packed a bag and took a train to Berlin to meet Jared at the airport, where I nervously paced around, peeking into the baggage claim room through the glass windows, trying to catch a glimpse of him to convince myself he was really there. Eventually I saw the top of his spikey brown hair and breathed a sigh of relief. He was really here!

We dropped off our bags at the hotel in Berlin and started ourcity round-about, leisurely attempting to hit the major sights without packing too much into a weekend. In the middle of our search for Checkpoint Charlie from Potsdammer Platz, we got caught in a torrential downpour of the clothes-drenching, hair-flattening, makeup-ruining variety. We ducked into a cafe to dry off, watch the storm and wait it out. When the rain eased a little we ventured to Alexander Platz and attempted to go to Legoland, but it was closed so we visited the giant German TV tower and the Sony Center, and drank a beer sitting in the middle of a square just because in Germany it's permitted. The sky opened up again as the sun was going down and we sloshed back toward the hotel, on the way discovering a tiny Indian restaurant run by an African woman nearly next door to our hotel. The food she prepared was made from scratch, right in front of us, and was so good we returned the next night as well.

The next day we started out with a glazed strawberry custard pastry for breakfast and then headed toward KaDeWe, the immense upscale department store (KaDeWe is an abbreviation, but I don't know for what). Though the day was relatively warm, we stepped inside the shopping center just in time to avoid another flash flood. We marveled at the prices of items for a bit in the clothing and toys departments and then visited the top floor, which was reserved entirely for gourmet foods from baked feta cheese and olive appetizers, to fruit tort desserts. Since we did not need anything and certainly could not have afforded it anyway, we continued our walking tour of Berlin when the rain let up again. We walk toward the Brandenburg gate, through the maze of the Jewish monument. This memorial is really sort of a maze of concrete that you can see over the top of and can't easily get lost in, but it is so extensive that you might get tired of walking toward the other side down the huge gray corridors.


The next day we checked out of the hotel and put our bags in a locker at the train station while we visited the Berlin Zoo, including Knut the famous polar bear. Before boarding the train back to Magdeburg we grabbed a quick bite at a stand called "Asia Box," selling what appeared to be yakisoba noodles. I have discovered that because traditional German food is not spicy, sometimes even the types of foods that would be heavily seasoned in the U.S. taste bland to me here, as was the case with Asia Box.

Back at work after my long weekend I had to muster my enthusiasm, since I knew Jared was sitting around the apartment or wandering Magdeburg, and I would rather be doing so with him than doing my job. But the acquisition of a new buzzard (type of hawk, not a vulture, as commonly thought) made it easier to be excited and I spent a lot of time acclimating the bird to its new surroundings. When I worked in the kindergarten in the afternoons (until now I have only been working mornings there, but for my job at the zoo we shuffled things a little and sometimes my days are flipped around now with zoo time in the AM and kid time in the PM.) Jared would come to the kindergarten to keep me company, because afternoons are mostly "free play" where the children choose activities and mostly romp around with me in the yard.

In August I finally got a whole week off to spend with Jared and to relax after a couple of hectic months. First we took a small train (we joked it was the "short train," like the slang "short bus"...) to the Harz mountains in central Germany. We chose a tiny town called Thale, pronounced Tah-lay, with a population of about 12,000 residents and a great view. Our hotel was more along the lines of what Americans would think of as a bed n' breakfast, with only nine total rooms for guests. However, the bottom floor boasted a full restaurant and bar and our spacious room was bright and welcoming, entirely decked out in light green, from the bed frames to the wardrobe.


The most notable attraction in Thale is called Hexentanzplatz, which translates to "the place where witches dance." It is a high peak with a plateau where you could imagine witches once danced, and there are statues of imps and ghouls decorating the mythical spot. We took a gondola ride to the top and thought about hiking all the way back down, but instead hiked to a lookout tower to enjoy the view. You don't have to spend your time in the wilderness at Hexentanzplatz though; there are also a couple of restaurants, souvenir stands, and even an open-air theater where the tales of the witches and goblins are reenacted.

After our hike we ate a sausage from a stand, bought some gummi candy from another and rode on a contraption like a bobsled that zips you through the forest. The weather was cloudy during our trip, but not cold, and we spent almost all of our time outside. If we weren't on a hike, we were reading on a secluded park bench, or relaxing in a beer garden. We ate some fantastic meals, like fillet of pork in creamy pepper sauce at a Greek restaurant where throughout your meal they brought a total of three complimentary shots of ouzo PER person, and also a strange meal where, as a garnish in my bowl of pea soup, I recieved an entire sausage.

Back in Magdeburg again, Jared and I spent our last few days together relaxing (I'm still not sure I'm recovered from my 19 straight days of work followed by running around town with my visitor). We checked out movies from the library where the entire collection consists of English-language movies dubbed in German anyway, so all we have to do is switch the language track. When I watch movies alone I attempt to watch in German, but since Jared had so far mostly only learned to count and say "Guten Tag," that didn't seem fair.

One day we rented bikes from a shop in the market square and rode up the beautiful Elbe river one day and back down the next. We spent an enormous amount of our time eating. We tried sushi (I had not yet tried it in Germany) and Chinese food, as well as Czech food and a lot of ice cream. I hope that most of this was offset by the fact that when we weren't eating, we were usually walking, either through one of Magdeburg's many gorgeous parks, or to one of the city's well-known sights, like its monastery, cathedral, or the medieval city wall.

Another task that was not so exciting or relaxing was preparting Sophie, my fuzzy companion, to return to the U.S. with Jared. I decided this would be best because of the mess involved with traveling during the holidays, which is when I will be coming back to the U.S. In addition to the inevitable flight delays and cancelations etc. of flying in December, there is also the problem of my apartment, which I need to give up the keys to several days in advance of my departure. It is not worrisome for me to sleep in a youth hostel for a couple of nights, but they don't take pets, and I felt it would be less stressful to send Sophie home earlier rather than board her or have her stay at Shannon's for a few days. Additionally, in the event that I made a mistake in the paperwork, at least I would still be in Germany to come pick her up if the airline rejected her, whereas if I were leaving the country for good and made a mistake, there would be no way to keep her with me. In any case, we took her to a handsome German vet with an insincere smile, who actually turned out to be extremely helpful.

Earlier today I took Jared and Sophie to the train station and sent them on their way to Berlin to catch their flight home. When the train pulled away from the platform and I walked the three sad blocks home. Not only was Jared gone, but Sophie too, making the apartment seem very empty. I keep expecting to see her jumping up on the bed or running in from catching bugs on the balcony. And of course I miss Jared too.