Our last week of classes consisted of lots of grammar exercises and more songs in the classroom. They were all very helpful in my personal refresher course in the language. On Tuesday (6/19), we all went out to a beer garden called Feierling to grab a couple of beers and socialize before heading to the movies to watch "Ziemlich Beste Freunde" (roughly translated, Rather Good/Best Friends--kinda loses the meaning in translation). Our professor, Manfred, came along with us on this evening. We had a great time laughing and sharing conversation at Feierling.
After the beer garden, we headed over to the movie theater to watch our movie. The movie is about a man who applies to be a personal assistant to another man who is completely paralyzed from the neck, down. Through this assistant job, the man learns to be compassionate and at the same time, teaches the other man to "loosen up" (horrible way of putting that since the guy is already paralyzed), and learn to appreciate life and take risks when it comes to people he loves. That's a rough description because the movie was originally in French but then was dubbed over in German and the speech was extremely fast for me, so I didn't understand everything that went on in the story but that was the main idea...at least what I got out of it. :) It was hard for me since the actors' mouths were moving in French and then I had to listen to the German. When listening to a foreign language, I read people's lips a lot and it helps me understand more but since the mouths were moving to French words, that was extremely difficult to do, obviously. So I had to rely on my comprehension and listening. It was an excellent exercise.
The rest of the week, we had the afternoons free to make any last minute excursions before the 2 week course was over. On the Friday afternoon, a friend and I decided to make a quick trip to Basel, Switzerland to take pictures and see what sights there were to see. There's a funny story that goes with this little journey...
Ririn and I went to the Freiburg train station to buy our ticket and had a lady help us get the best deal. We bought the ticket and the lady then said that we probably will miss the next train but that we could catch the next one in an hour. Well, we looked at the time table and saw that we still had a chance to make the train if we hurried. We ran to the track, saw the train and jumped on and sat down. The train took off and about 15-20 minutes later, the ticket controller came through to check/scan tickets. We handed him our ticket and he looked at it and...suddenly, we were in trouble. He said (in German, of course), "Ooooh, this is the wrong train. This is the Inter-City Express (ICE) and not the Regional train...the one you're supposed to be on is the Regional. You each have to pay 25 € (symbol for Euro) for a total of 50 €." We had gotten onto the wrong train without even noticing. :( So, our little "cheap" journey turned out to be a total of about 38 € for each of us, when it should've only cost us each only about 12,50 €. We learned our lesson. Look before you leap.
Basel train station
Münsterplatz
Monk Kloster
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