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.