Die Spiesekarte, bitte.

Last Sunday I finally managed to squish everything I'd need for the following 3 months into my (extremely weight limited) suitcase and dumped it in the car. We were off to the small town of Llangollen, in North Wales. Not exactly the most exciting place in the world, I'm sure you're thinking. Well no, it isn't. But it is where ECTARC(the European Centre for Training and Regional Cooperation) is based.

The reason I'm living in Berlin for the next three months is because of a program organised by ECTARC, called the Leonardo programme. It is designed as a work placement scheme, so that young graduates from/living in Wales get a chance to increase their  skills in an area relevant to their future careers and hopefully end up with jobs at the end of it(or some great CV bolstering at the very least). You learn a European language for some weeks, then are put in a work placement for around about 2 months. It sounded like an amazing experience for me, so I applied and now here I am. People go to Bordeaux, Florence, Seville or Berlin and from the sounds of it, have the time of their lives. 

So now hopefully it makes more sense that I(well, my dad) was making the 3 hour long drive to North Wales.  I was in Llangollen for a week of intensive German learning and meeting those who do the programme with me. We all have separate work placements and live separately across the city(!) but do all language classes together, so we all get pretty close. Llangollen was a very pretty town and great for those who love the outdoors. Anyone who knows me knows I'm not. Llangollen also has very little in the way of nightlife, apart from 18 pubs...

Our week there was quite intense in terms of language learning. I found the grammar somewhat difficult to grasp, as the idea of a table being a 'him' or a bottle being a 'her' made no sense to me.  I have managed to remember the article for 'the menu'-it is 'Die Spiesekarte', hence the title of this post.

During the week, I managed to watch two films in German, with subtitles and loved both of them. "The Lives of Others" is very intense, but brilliantly done. It follows the life of one of the Stasi in the DDR. "Goodbye Lenin" is another great film we saw.  I would thoroughly recommend them to anyone interested in learning about a pre 1989 divided Germany.

Hopefully now I've arrived, my language learning will improve...more on that later.

xx