Cultural Perception and Albertinum

I thought I'd take a break from munching on my pickles to post another blog!  We're heading off to Weimar tomorrow at 7:30 for our Cultural Excursion, and then I'm going directly from there to Hamburg, so I need to go to bed early tonight!

Today was Culture Course (blah.)  I had written up a bunch of stuff for our homework and Tagebuch (diary), but the professor didn't even collect them, he just wanted us to talk about it.  Guess I won't have to do as much for next week!  We also did this exercise where we had to look at a picture and describe what we saw.  The first was a family eating dinner, but of course he told us that "family" was our interpretation, and not what we actually saw.  I said I saw them eating Kartoffelbrei (mashed potatoes) because the bowl had something white in it, and he was like, "How do you know that?"  

"Because Germans love potatoes!"

"And how do you know that?"

"Because I'm German, and I love potatoes!" lol.  Probably not the best reasoning, but I love throwing stereotypes at him just to be funny.  That class can get so boring.  Of course I didn't write only what I saw, I made up an entire story about how the mother had died in the family and the uncle was there to care for the children, two of whom were twins.  The oldest wanted to be a cosmonaut when he grew up (I assumed they were in 80's Germany because the curtains were paisley.)  Apparently that was not what the assignment asked for though...

   

Our next class assignment is to stand in a place for 10 minutes and "objectively" observe everything we see and hear.  Then we have to write our Interpretations and Impressions and present it to the class.  At least I don't have to worry about smell! haha

We read some articles in class too, so we could discuss them.  This part is pretty difficult for me because I can't read something in a foreign language without looking up pretty much every single word I don't know.  Maybe that's a habit I picked up from reading in English?  Sometimes I can deduce the meaning from the content, but I still want to look it up just to be sure.  Doing all this makes me take about twice as long as everyone else to read the article, and I'm usually not done until we're already halfway through discussing it.  Herr Zeuner asks us afterwards if there were any words we need explained, but I have so many that I don't want to take up the rest of the class's time.  I wish he would give us more time to read the articles, or let us know ahead of time what they'll be.  Maybe it's my OCD or just being a Linguist, but I can't let myself read past a word without knowing it's exact definition. 

After Culture Course, we had our little city excursion with the two Deutsch teachers.  We went to the Albertinum, an art gallery in downtown Dresden.  It had a ton of statues which was cool.  They were pretty much all naked too. :-)  For Deutsch class we have to pick a statue or a painting to present on in class.  I think I'll pick this wax statue I saw of two bearded giants wearing hiking clothes.  

The paintings were also really nice.  They went from Renaissance to Modern.  Some interesting things I saw were: a giant painting of only a gray square, Degas' ballerina paintings and sculpture, nude people who do all sorts of things outside and never seem to get burnt, Wanderer translated as "Rambler," and more paintings of squares on top of squares (except this time in different colors!)  There was also this huge, grotesque painting called Der Krieg (The War) painted from 1929-1932.    It showed a lot of body mutilation, soldiers in gas masks, and cities being destroyed.  Underneath the painting was a smaller one with what looked like an old man and a boy lying in a box under the ground with rats.  I couldn't tell if they were hiding or already dead.  It was the most powerful painting at the gallery, and I wasn't surprised to see an old woman sitting in front of it and crying softly.  She'd probably lived through at least WWII and seen Dresden destroyed.  I can't even imagine what that must have been like.  Every American today has the privilege of being able to say that we've never seen a war on our home soil.  Unfortunately we tend to take that for granted.

Anyways, I need to finish my homework and get ready for Weimar and Hamburg tomorrow! Tschuss!