Munich

Arrived safely in Munich, despite 4am start and a small amount of interference at the airport, by a tiny Nun who tried to push in front of me at the check-in queue (I stood my ground).

Vienna was unbelievably cold in the end, snowing for three days straight. I was a bit freaked out about flying to Munich, especially after hearing that an Austrian Airlines flight had crashed-landed en-route to Munich two days earlier (same flight time and everything. No one was injured). It was still dark as we were taxiing towards the runway (at 7:30am, mind). Then, all of a sudden, I saw all of these cranes on the tarmac (is that what it's called??). They were these funky hydraulic things (think 'Alien') with a guy sitting inside. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, then the captain informed us that the plane had to be de-iced before take off. It was like sitting under a giant car-wash, but instead of washing the plane in water, we were doused in this Matrix-esque, pink gack. It was all rather surreal. In the end, a guy got up onto the wing and skated around, presumably to check that all of the ice had been gacked to his satisfaction. The whole experience actually served in making me feel more comfortable flying in such hideous weather.

So now I'm in Munich. I'm staying in a private home (flat, actually) with a woman in her early fifties. She's quite nice; no interesting quirks to speak of. The surrounding area seems to be rather 'happening', although I haven't yet had much time to look around.

My course is five days a week, from 8:30am - 12:45. Not too bad, except that they give us two hours of homework a day (they actually write the amount of time each activity should take, so that it works out to exactly two hours), including for Saturdays. Sundays, apparently, is for God (that is seriously what the Professor said), so we don't need to do any HW.

Speaking of the Professor, she has corrected my Austrian accent a couple of times, even though I haven't been speaking in dialect (Ja Lilli, reg' dich auf), despite the fact that there are other people in class with full-on Japanese accents (for example). I think she took a dislike to me yesterday. When I first arrived, it took about 4 hours to do all of the registration stuff, and she happened to walk past after I'd been sitting outside one particular office for over an hour. She said something along the lines of, 'the lines aren't too long', and I, unable to keep my mouth shut, mentioned that I had been waiting for an hour. She got this kind of wild, wide-eyed thing happening, and I did some big-time back-peddling, it's not really that bad, happy, happy, joy etc.

As I walked along the corridor to my designated classroom this morning, I wondered whether fate would throw this woman my way, and lo - there she was. As it turns out, she's a very entertaining teacher; quite eccentric, which suits me fine. She did give me an, 'I know you' look as I walked in, though.

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