2008-01-25 Food Friday

Yesterday I found a new switch in the kitchen. Carefully conducted experiments wouldn't reveal its use to me; no light went on or off and the fridge and the oven still worked after I fiddled with it. This morning I learned it was for the water boiler. How I found out? I took a shower. Aaaah! Taking a cold shower sounds so simple. Just overcome your inner temptations, and everything will be fine. Well guess what... it won't! It's not getting any easier once you're wet with cold water. Definitely not.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. That's the theory, anyway.
Nevertheless, once I was done (oh yes, it took much less time than usually, too!), I felt good. Very good. I'm definitely going to do it again soon. Maybe.

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Today was Food Friday at Jade. If you work there, bring your family at 4:30pm, and there will be free food for all. A good opportunity to get to know everyone. If you're good with names, that is.
Every day I work there I find a new reason why it was a great idea to come to New Zealand in general and to Jade in particular.


My new best friend, the 'Reheat Pizza' button.

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I have a thing for books. Always had. Always will. If only they were not so expensive to transport! So now that I've settled in, it was about time I got a library card. Like everything else in New Zealand, it wasn't very hard to get. Of course, I couldn't leave the library without taking home a single book, could I? So I borrowed the comic version of Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! and one that was written by John Marsden. It's called Everything I Know About Writing. I've been blogging for almost one year now (gee, where did the time go?), but words still don't come easy to me. It's not just the language -- blogging in German would be almost as hard -- it's writing in general. Like where to start, and how to put my thoughts in words. Maybe I can learn something from this book.
In chapter one, the author gives a brief summary of his first experiences with the English language. In the last paragraph, he writes "It is a useful exercise to write a personal history of your involvement with the English language". Sure, why not?

My first encounter with the English language was when I was about nine years old. (I was born and raised in Germany, so English is a foreign language to me. That's not what John Marsden had in mind, but I'll stick to it anyway.) We had this new girl in our grade, who came back to Germany after living in South America for a couple of years. Of course, she spoke English. We made her teach us simple English expressions like "you are a pig" and other things that would enhance the vocabulary of a grade school kid.
It wasn't until 5th grade that English became a school subject. In hindsight, I must say that I was blessed with an excellent teacher. At the time, however, it was somewhat exhausting. After a few weeks of learning the basics, Mr. Marschall would only listen to sentences spoken in English. We learned the hard way how to explain things that we didn't know the word for, and that vocabulary is not half as important as the ability to ask for a word. And most of all, we had additional Geography lessons held in English. We learned about irrigation in the Gambia, the difference between spring tide and neap tide, and where the stuff that cars are made of actually comes from.
Mr. Marschall was our teacher for six years. Things went all downhill from there. Our next teacher, who I'm not going to name here, took over for the last 3 years. I'm not going to waste my time blogging about her.

That's pretty much it. I could go on and write about my time at the university (where English was the only way to gain access to the really interesting high-end stuff), my first job (where everything was documented in English, even though it was in Germany), online available movies, or how I met my girlfriend. But all this is filed under Recent Events, so it would miss the subject.