Schwaebisch Hall—November 11, 2010
It’s the end of my first week of an Intensive German Language course at the Goethe Institute in Schwaebisch Hall, Germany. Those years of college language courses creep back into consciousness. Grammar flows onto the page, but still I stand in the vegetable section of the local Kaufland grocery store buying pistachios and apples and go blank when a colleague greets me with “Wie gehts!”
All my travels in Europe earlier this year made me crave a closeness with the German culture that I hadn’t felt since my humanities and music study in college. What all this will mean for the story I am writing I can not say right now, but I trust that it will be revealed when I need to know.