Saturday, February 16, 2008

Spaß = Fun

The picture above is the four of us in my WG--we had a Valentine's cocktail party on Thursday, which was a lot of fun.

Other highlights of the week:

Monday night I went to a lecture about the Wirtschaftswunder, the "Economic Miracle" of Postwar Germany, the transformation from rubble to a successful economy. The speaker concentrated her research on the top managers in Germany's biggest companies, who made money during the war (weapons, etc) and after a few years in jail continued in post-war Germany. Interesting topic. We often don't think of what a business war is.

Wednesday night I went to a lecture on Turkey and Germany. It was so information-packed I don't even know how to condense it here... One current issue is the headscarf ban being relaxed (did you know headscarves are banned at universities in Turkey? I didn't...). If you haven't read about this, look into some of the BBC Articles.

Also, the prime minister of Turkey spoke in Cologne earlier this month and made a comment which has drawn huge criticism: (read more)

“Assimilation is a crime against humanity. I may think differently from Merkel on this matter but I explicitly declare that nobody can dictate to the Turkish community to assimilate”

In school this week I did some really fun lessons on the Grammys. I played the five songs nominated for Record of the Year, did some vocab with them and they voted on their favorite. If you have any awesome ideas for me for this week, pass them along...


1 comment:

  1. Hey Kathryn,

    Have you played Taboo with your students? Mine LOVE it! Seriously, German go crazy for Taboo and it's good vocab....

    ReplyDelete