Voll Cool, baby!

My current situation for the next couple weeks is as a guest at the home of Harald and Claudia Funck, who have a strawberry farm in Eastern Germany. I spend most of my days trying to pitch in help wherever I can around the house and farm, in exchange for room and board, and the opportunity to speak a little German. That is, a lot of German. My German is improving in leaps and bounds, especially with the help of the three kids. It took them a little while to understand how it was possible that I could speak to them, but I didn't always understand them, and I just sounded so funny. They now take their jobs as my German teachers very seriously.

I spent much of today with 7-year-old David at the Freizeitpark Plohn, a theme park that has been around since the DDR era. This park rocks. It's got animatronic dinosaurs, self-service soft service ice cream machines (I had a Waldmeister flavor ice cream, David held out for chocolate, which was in another part of the park), a Wild West area, and a story book land that tells the classic German fairy tales through creepy dioramas with moving parts.

David confided to many of the workers and other kids around that it was my first time at Plohn, and that, although I know some words in German, it was his job to teach me more words. The words I learned today were grueselig (ghoulish/ghostly), Achterbahn (rollercoaster), Schien (tracks), Rutsche (slide), and Volcan (volcano). David also took it upon himself to narrate each of the sites we saw, and made sure that I got to ride all of the rides at the park, just to make sure I got a really good introduction to the place. David's sole grasp of English language, on the other hand, seems to be his tendency to add the word "baby" (with the requisite sassy attitude) unexpectedly at the end of some of his sentences. "Let's ride the roller coaster, baby!" David can't count the number of times we rode his favorite spinning cow ride today, and I can't count the number of times today I just burst into laughter at his antics.

...I have had a little bit of a difficult time finding my bearings here, knowing where I fit into the family, and also struggling to relate to and interact with people in a language that still leaves me tongue-tied and awkward most of the time. But things are looking up.

Besides, it only took one ride on the roller coaster with a 7-year-old to restore my belief in life's excitement and awesomeness.