Hi, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, meine Damen und Herren,
die 4. Anna-Episode auf Todo Aleman ist da. Feel free to read it in English oder auf Deutsch.
Byee.
A.
Showing posts with label Todo-Aleman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Todo-Aleman. Show all posts
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Latest news
Oh Em Gee, I interviewed the mayor of Erfurt yesterday, Andreas Bausewein, at the Finale der Spirit of Football Strassenfussballmeisterschaft zur Lange Nacht des Sports im Rahmen der Arena der Zukunft, or Street Soccer Finale in English. Sven introduced me as "unsere internationale Reporterin." I'd love to show you the video when it's ready. Hilarious.
On Thursday, Marcus from Todo Aleman came to town and interviewed me briefly about the differences between eastern and western Germany from the perspective of an American exchange student, for a film to be shown to American highschoolers considering studying in Germany. Apparently, every year they make such a film with a different topic (music, sports, etc.) and this year, as it is 20 years after German reunification, well, the topic is German reunification. Will share that film here too, if I get my hands on it.
Erich sent me a nonsensical email ("delirious and no makey sensey means two times the fun to read-y for yous mistah"). I think that boy gets an average of two hours' sleep per night. He lives in Potsdam but works in Berlin, only coming home between the hours of 1 and 8 a.m., when his ghastly host family is asleep.
Two more days until Berlin.
19 days until Dresden.
38 days until NYC.
??? days until home in California.
I ♥ M.D.
On Thursday, Marcus from Todo Aleman came to town and interviewed me briefly about the differences between eastern and western Germany from the perspective of an American exchange student, for a film to be shown to American highschoolers considering studying in Germany. Apparently, every year they make such a film with a different topic (music, sports, etc.) and this year, as it is 20 years after German reunification, well, the topic is German reunification. Will share that film here too, if I get my hands on it.
Erich sent me a nonsensical email ("delirious and no makey sensey means two times the fun to read-y for yous mistah"). I think that boy gets an average of two hours' sleep per night. He lives in Potsdam but works in Berlin, only coming home between the hours of 1 and 8 a.m., when his ghastly host family is asleep.
19 days until Dresden.
38 days until NYC.
??? days until home in California.
I ♥ M.D.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Exquisitely Uncomfortable
Today I played reporter at Spirit of Football's street football tournament. I had actually been looking forward to this opportunity as a way to get out of the house and out of English, but the result today was simply awful. My loosely defined assignment was to interview the participants, aged 14-17, and the organizers of the event. The result, I am afraid, will be published on Spirit of Football's website and on Todo Aleman.
The interviewing itself wasn't so bad. Accompanied by a cameraman from the Thüringer Allgemeine, I had a few short conversations which, in hindsight, went all right. But then came the part when I had to talk directly to the camera, and that was when I choked.
The video clip was intended for the Goethe Institute's trilingual youth-oriented website Todo Aleman, and I needed to film a short opening scene in which I introduced the event, mentioning Todo Aleman as partial sponsors. But somehow, I couldn't get any words out.
The camera man said, "Rolling."
I stared into the camera.
The camera man: "Rolling."
"Ladies and gentlemen, football fans, our friends at Todo Aleman, welcome to this year's first Spirit of Football street football tournament! I'm Anna, reporting live from Nordpark in Erfurt and...um..."
(Long pause.)
The camera man: "Rolling."
"...and we have nice weather....(long pause) okay I really don't know what else to say. Can I do it again?"
Camera man: "All right, that was good. This time finish your sentence."
Me: "Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends at Todo Aleman, dear football fans and sports enthusiasts, welcome to this year's first Spirit of Football street football tournament! I'm Anna, reporting live from Nordpark in Erfurt, where 5 teams (here I struggled with the plural of "team" in German) have gathered to um...play football and um...yeah! Enjoy!"
Ugh. Terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad. I started well, but, as often happens to me, couldn't find a graceful way to land the plane, instead defaulting to the crash and burn method.
I am, in a sick way, almost proud of my awful performance.
The interviewing itself wasn't so bad. Accompanied by a cameraman from the Thüringer Allgemeine, I had a few short conversations which, in hindsight, went all right. But then came the part when I had to talk directly to the camera, and that was when I choked.
The video clip was intended for the Goethe Institute's trilingual youth-oriented website Todo Aleman, and I needed to film a short opening scene in which I introduced the event, mentioning Todo Aleman as partial sponsors. But somehow, I couldn't get any words out.
The camera man said, "Rolling."
I stared into the camera.
The camera man: "Rolling."
"Ladies and gentlemen, football fans, our friends at Todo Aleman, welcome to this year's first Spirit of Football street football tournament! I'm Anna, reporting live from Nordpark in Erfurt and...um..."
(Long pause.)
The camera man: "Rolling."
"...and we have nice weather....(long pause) okay I really don't know what else to say. Can I do it again?"
Camera man: "All right, that was good. This time finish your sentence."
Me: "Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends at Todo Aleman, dear football fans and sports enthusiasts, welcome to this year's first Spirit of Football street football tournament! I'm Anna, reporting live from Nordpark in Erfurt, where 5 teams (here I struggled with the plural of "team" in German) have gathered to um...play football and um...yeah! Enjoy!"
Ugh. Terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad. I started well, but, as often happens to me, couldn't find a graceful way to land the plane, instead defaulting to the crash and burn method.
I am, in a sick way, almost proud of my awful performance.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
First Todo Aleman article
My cherished 4 readers,
My first travel article was published on Todo Aleman today! It describes my work in Switzerland as a teenager at the Ecole d'Humanite, and also what attracts people in the States to German.
Read on. Or else.
Anna
My first travel article was published on Todo Aleman today! It describes my work in Switzerland as a teenager at the Ecole d'Humanite, and also what attracts people in the States to German.
Read on. Or else.
Anna
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
"Work"
So, work's been treating me well. Everyone is prejudiced because I do my work for my internship at home. That seems to make it non-work. Everyone does air-quotes when they ask me if I worked today. Like, Anna, hast du heute viel "gearbeitet?"
Just after I began my internship with Spirit of Football (background info on that posted here), I became a little bit irrelevant because the two sites I was going to blog for, FourFourTwo and Todo-Aleman, both didn't need me anymore. What happened with the first one was that someone from a company called Substance PR who has one of Spirit of Football's partners as a client also pitched a blog to FourFourTwo on the same exact topic. And FourFourTwo went, "Well, Anna's doing that already, you should talk to her." And the guy from Substance sent me his work and I realized he actually knew things about football/soccer, and was using soccer words and quoting people I hadn't heard of, so I wrote him and said, "Look, just take it! You do it!" It's probably better for Spirit of Football to have someone who is interested in the sport write their blog for a sports site, I reasoned.
And I still had a regular writing assignment with the website Todo-Aleman, the trilingual project of the Goethe-Institut. I was to take over Andrew's blog there about The Ball's journey through Africa. However, after I sent my first post to them, they wrote back saying they didn't need me to write for them anymore and they would just link to Andrew's blog, theball.tv. I phoned them up and asked why, and Marcus from Todo-Aleman explained that with budget cuts it was necessary to cut down on the amount of staff who receives and edits work. It was cheaper to link to a site which would essentially say the same thing.
Then we got to talking and Marcus asked where I was even from anyway, and I said the States- California to be exact (exaggerated compliments were payed to my German, as is custom). Turns out Marcus has lived and worked in California. And he knows San Luis Obispo, my home town! It's pretty there, he said. I agreed. Then he asked what I was doing in Erfurt. I unloaded the unwieldy title Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals. (Every time I say that I feel like I'm pulling a tuba out of a clarinet case and dropping it on the breakfast table!). He was familiar with the program. I explained a bit more about how I'd come to learn German and get interested in German culture, and he said that was the sort of thing they were interested in promoting at Todo-Aleman. (The site can be viewed in English, German or Spanish, and its target audience is young people in North and Latin America.) Then he asked me if I wouldn't mind writing a 5-part series about living abroad, starting with 2005 when I lived in the Swiss Alps. I agreed. It's really a more fitting subject for me to be writing about anyway.
The first episode, which I wrote in English, is being translated into German and Spanish and will be published on the site soon. Hopefully. I'll let you guys know. My three (3) loyal followers.
I was happy to get some sort of writing work, even if it was not related to my internship. However, I have also been doing things which are related to my internship! I've also been writing press release after press release, reporting on the progress of The Ball's pilgrimage to Johannesburg. The goal is the World Cup and there are, if I am correct, just 93 days left to go.
Recently I wrote to the British embassies in all of the African countries where The Ball will be passing through and requested that their Ambassador or High Commissioner meet with the Spirit of Footballers, perhaps attending an event with their partner, Special Olympics Africa. Some embassies haven't written me back, while others have been really keen. The High Commissioner in Zambia seemed really friendly and wrote a nice email about the power of sport to connect people from all different backgrounds. I should quote her on that.
Aside from my internship and random writing assignments, I am still working at the Erfurter Sprachschule, where I teach English. So far no one has noticed that I am not a teacher. Shh.
This evening I went to Übersee with Douglas and he brought an important fact to my attention: Unterrichtsstunden (instruction hours) are only 45 minutes long. Not 60. This entire time I have been adding them up as whole hours, meaning my 90 minute courses go down as an hour and a half, not two hours. I have been working there since November and I didn't know this. Fortunately I asked to be paid at the end of the courses, which meant I only added up my hours and gave them to my boss yesterday.
I just sent him a teensy little email, saying, "Oops-didn't know about the Unterrichtsstunden."
Off to dreamland. Sleep tight, Erfurt.
Just after I began my internship with Spirit of Football (background info on that posted here), I became a little bit irrelevant because the two sites I was going to blog for, FourFourTwo and Todo-Aleman, both didn't need me anymore. What happened with the first one was that someone from a company called Substance PR who has one of Spirit of Football's partners as a client also pitched a blog to FourFourTwo on the same exact topic. And FourFourTwo went, "Well, Anna's doing that already, you should talk to her." And the guy from Substance sent me his work and I realized he actually knew things about football/soccer, and was using soccer words and quoting people I hadn't heard of, so I wrote him and said, "Look, just take it! You do it!" It's probably better for Spirit of Football to have someone who is interested in the sport write their blog for a sports site, I reasoned.
And I still had a regular writing assignment with the website Todo-Aleman, the trilingual project of the Goethe-Institut. I was to take over Andrew's blog there about The Ball's journey through Africa. However, after I sent my first post to them, they wrote back saying they didn't need me to write for them anymore and they would just link to Andrew's blog, theball.tv. I phoned them up and asked why, and Marcus from Todo-Aleman explained that with budget cuts it was necessary to cut down on the amount of staff who receives and edits work. It was cheaper to link to a site which would essentially say the same thing.
Then we got to talking and Marcus asked where I was even from anyway, and I said the States- California to be exact (exaggerated compliments were payed to my German, as is custom). Turns out Marcus has lived and worked in California. And he knows San Luis Obispo, my home town! It's pretty there, he said. I agreed. Then he asked what I was doing in Erfurt. I unloaded the unwieldy title Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals. (Every time I say that I feel like I'm pulling a tuba out of a clarinet case and dropping it on the breakfast table!). He was familiar with the program. I explained a bit more about how I'd come to learn German and get interested in German culture, and he said that was the sort of thing they were interested in promoting at Todo-Aleman. (The site can be viewed in English, German or Spanish, and its target audience is young people in North and Latin America.) Then he asked me if I wouldn't mind writing a 5-part series about living abroad, starting with 2005 when I lived in the Swiss Alps. I agreed. It's really a more fitting subject for me to be writing about anyway.
The first episode, which I wrote in English, is being translated into German and Spanish and will be published on the site soon. Hopefully. I'll let you guys know. My three (3) loyal followers.
I was happy to get some sort of writing work, even if it was not related to my internship. However, I have also been doing things which are related to my internship! I've also been writing press release after press release, reporting on the progress of The Ball's pilgrimage to Johannesburg. The goal is the World Cup and there are, if I am correct, just 93 days left to go.
Recently I wrote to the British embassies in all of the African countries where The Ball will be passing through and requested that their Ambassador or High Commissioner meet with the Spirit of Footballers, perhaps attending an event with their partner, Special Olympics Africa. Some embassies haven't written me back, while others have been really keen. The High Commissioner in Zambia seemed really friendly and wrote a nice email about the power of sport to connect people from all different backgrounds. I should quote her on that.
Aside from my internship and random writing assignments, I am still working at the Erfurter Sprachschule, where I teach English. So far no one has noticed that I am not a teacher. Shh.
This evening I went to Übersee with Douglas and he brought an important fact to my attention: Unterrichtsstunden (instruction hours) are only 45 minutes long. Not 60. This entire time I have been adding them up as whole hours, meaning my 90 minute courses go down as an hour and a half, not two hours. I have been working there since November and I didn't know this. Fortunately I asked to be paid at the end of the courses, which meant I only added up my hours and gave them to my boss yesterday.
I just sent him a teensy little email, saying, "Oops-didn't know about the Unterrichtsstunden."
Off to dreamland. Sleep tight, Erfurt.
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