VHS not Beta

My efforts to communicate in German without cracking people up or having them immediately switch to English have reached an all time high as I attended all of my classes this week at the Münchner Volkshochschule.  The Volkshochschule (VHS) is like a community college, and the classes couldn't be cheaper. I get about fifteen hours of classes a week for eight weeks for around two hundred Euro.  It's a steal, probably about a tenth of the hourly rate at a private company.

I have a really great teacher. She is easy to understand, motivated, and superhumanly patient. We have one know-it-all girl who has lived her for over three years who was shouting out the right answer when anyone made a mistake, and the teacher really gave her the smackdown and told her to quit being rude to her classmates. Awesome. She even held my interest while discussing the structure of the German government which includes a lot of scary words like Verfassungsorgane, Bundesversammlung, Bundesverfassungsgericht, and a bunch of other words that start with Bundes. 

I'm the only native English speaker in my class of sixteen which alone gives me a lot of German practice as I ask people about living in Brazil, India, Spain, Poland, Russia, Vietnam, Croatia etc. Some people even have neat half circles over letters in their names. It's a really interesting experience even though it hurts my head sometimes. I'm in level three, and it seems like many of the people are pretty fluent and are working more on grammar. I'm a really halting speaker as it takes my brain a long time to search for words, but everyone is really patient with me, and I learn a ton of new things each day.  

I don't have class on Friday though so I'm going to let my brain recover and shop for the new, sweet babies I can't wait to meet. My stunning hussies just had their new babies: Julie and Nathan had a baby boy and named him Paul, and Kerry and Reg had a little girl and named her Ella. And Rachel is due super soon, and Bird is officially having a girl. Eliana and Ryan are having a girl, Greg and Zu are having a boy, and Karolyn and John should know anytime... And today is Ellis's birthday, so I'm definitely shopping for pink.