A little anecdote...

As you could read in my previous post, I spent some days in Germany last month. Here's a little anecdote that happened to us.
One of the things I try when I visit a foreign country is to address locals in their own language. Germany was not an exception, and I was eager to practice my basic skills in Deutsch (I took German lessons at university, just for 4 months, and since then I’m self-taught). Unfortunately, I guess I still have to polish either my grammar skills or pronunciation (or both) quite a lot. We were having breakfast at the hotel and we wanted to have some warm milk. So, I called the waitress and told her: “Wir möchten heisses Milch trinken, bitte.” Apparently my pronunciation was awful because she brought as warm coffee. As my partner was laughing (at me), I called her again and tried to explain that we didn’t want warm coffee, but warm milk. OK, she seemed to have understood, but she brought us cold milk. I felt a little bit embarrassed about calling the waitress again because the room was crowded and she seemed overworked. Fortunately, the woman who was sitting by us had heard our previous conversations and volunteered to call her again and clarify the misunderstanding. Oh, we finally had warm milk!!! However I’m still doubting whether my sentence was right or not…

My trip to Germany, part I

Last month my boyfriend and I spent a week in Germany. We visited both Berlin and Munich. As it was our first time there, there were trillions of places we wanted to see. I will try to summarize our trip in the following posts. Please, give all the credit of the pictures to my boyfriend. I want to say that our experience was really good, even if it rained almost every day, and I also had the chance to practise a little bit of German!

Day 1: East Berlin
We reached Berlin at about 4p.m. so that day we still had some hours to stroll. We decided to visit the eastern side of Berlin following this fabulous guide. Our first stop was Alexanderplatz, a large open square surrounded by several notable structures such as the Fernsehturm (TV Tower). It is also a public transport hub and in the following days, it would become the starting point of our journeys. Just by Alexanderplatz, Marienkirche(Kirche==Church, Marienkirche==St Mary's church), which is believed to date from the 13th century. And if you look around, you will see one of my favourite buildings in Berlin, the Rotes Rathaus (Rot==red, Rathaus==Town Hall), which is the Town Hall of Berlin, built in the 19th century. In front of it, the Neptunbrunnen (Brunnen==fountain). You can see both of them in the picture. Following towards the River Spree, the Marx-Engels-Forum, a public park named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, with a statue of both of them in the middle.
After that we went towards the Nikolaiviertel, where we visited several buildings: the Nikolaikirche(Nichola's church), the Knoblauchhaus(aka. the Garlic House, Knoblauch==garlic, Haus==house), home in the 19th century of architect Eduard Knoblauch. (By the way, the light pink colour of the house reminds of the one of the garlic... I'm not sure but I think that must be intentionally done...). Just by them, the Ephraim Palais; the Altes Stadthaus, former town hall of Berlin (alt==old) and the Palais Schwerin/Münze.
After that we strolled towards Klosterstrasse to visit the Parochialkirche (17th century); the Palais Podewils and the Franziskaner Klosterkirche (see pic) from 13th century and which is in ruins.
It was getting dark so we visited 3 last spots: the Stadtgericht(the Court), the restaurant Zur Letzten Instant, which is said to be the oldest tavern in Berlin; and finally the Berliner Stadtmauer, a lesser known wall in Berlin from the 13th century.

That's all for today. I guess it's time to go back to job. Software agents need me.

Online learning resources: OpenCourseWare

Yesterday I read in the newspaper that the university where I used to study at (and where now I work at as a researcher) is going to join the OpenCourseWare Consortium. This Consortium is made up of institutions that share educational content through the net. So if as in my case you love to learn about new things, I'd like to recommend you, my dear readers that i'll have some day, to visit their website. Although I haven't been much through them, I think I specially like the courses provided here by the MIT because it seems to have plenty of foreign language resources (and as you know, I'm mad about languages). So, enjoy it. Next day, my trip to Germany, part I.