Technische Universitat Dortmund Campus und Classes

After a week of German class in Dortmund, I can kind of get by in restaurants. I can speak a few broken sentences, and a few key phrases. I think as we go into the advanced class, we'll learn a lot more about sentence construction so I don't sound so illiterate. The vocab for German isn't too difficult, since so many German words translate directly into English, but the endings, the articles (a, an, the), and the pronouns have 500 different endings. I'm excited for the advanced class, and hopefully being able to be conversational with people around Germany.

Instead of having the previously predicted 8 hours of class per day, we only sit through four hours of German class from 8:00 to 12:00, and are free for the afternoon to buy groceries, explore Dortmund, take afternoon trips, and go to the park to kick around the soccer ball or throw the frisbee.

I would assume things will change once our actual classes start, but the environment has been very laid back so far, even with the intensive German all the time. The commute to school is short. A 5 minute subway ride (called the U-Bahn here), a 10 minute train ride (called the S-Bahn), and a 1 minute mono-rail ride (called the H-Bahn) takes me pretty much to the doorstep of my class. In all it takes about a half hour to get there, but it doesn’t seem long because you walk so much on public transport.

The school is awesome, with a dining hall far classier than anything I’ve ever seen at Penn. The food is good, although they like to eat a lot of salami sandwiches and schnitzel. And it has the H-Bahn, a monorail that has 3 different branches that run across campus. It stops at each station about once every 5 minutes, and it takes you over the huge forest in between the north and south campuses. The forest is some wildlife preserve that exists between campuses and when you travel above it on the H-Bahn it looks really woodsy. The campus is almost the complete opposite of Penn, where it’s almost completely rural with a hint of being next to a city, since there are 2 main roads that run through it. I’ll have to take pictures of the H-Bahn and the forest over the next couple days and post them to give a feel for what the campus is like.