Sprachkurs

I love the fact that I have not had a proper conversation in English in well over a week. Even better is the fact I have not met another Brit in almost a month. I've heard them, drunkenly staggering back from Oktoberfest in costumes, some even wearing Kilts, but I didn't bother talking to them.

I thought about this as I began my language course at the Munich Volkshochschule, or Community College, on Monday. I've been through the set up before, i.e take a sterile teaching room, a CD/Cassette recorder, a teacher (normally a woman with short hair in her late fifties with a name like Ursula or Birgit), a ridiculously expensive textbook with a punchy name like 'Schwerpunkt','Zeitgeist', or 'Sehnsucht', mix together and enjoy! I mean that; I love to see the different people you get together wanting to learn a new language. This time I am the youngest person there, and the class includes (among others) an Au Pair from the Ukraine, an Engineer from Argentina and a fifty eight year old Italian women who seems to be here simply because she loves Munich!

Every one of these courses also seems to involve at least five handouts per session of newspaper articles about language problems. I remember seeing the same problem at GCSE and A Level, except instead of endless youth initiatives to recycle Aluminium cans you get endless descriptions of multi cultural literary prizes.

As I say, I love every minute of it. By the time we finish, I'm so Germanised I can't bear to go home, so I take a walk through the city back to Marianplatz or Sendlinger Tor and get the train back to Dachau from there. Munich is beginning to grow on me, now it has been cleared of drunks in Lederhosen.