Erfolg

The program I'm at is pretty nice. It has a lovely building on a cobblestoned street with pastel-colored walls covered in old-timey bookshelves, editions of Goethe and Schilling and Heine um so weite. It has a cheerful blond secretary and a pipe-smoking wisecracking professor in chief. It's a place designed to ease the transition from America to Germany, basically; today they served us pizza and pop. Weird, calzone pizza, and healthy, all-natural pop, but still.

In addition to providing junk food, the program offers easier courses taught at a slower pace, in case you don't make it past the exam that the massive Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat requires all foreign students score a certain amount on in order to take classes in German there. It's really not a bad thing if you don't make it -- some of the courses at the Junior Year Munich program are pretty cool. I, for one, am taking Nazi Germany, as is nearly everyone else. (The sign-up sheet flew around the room, ripped from hand to hand.)

I was prepared to take pretty much all of my classes at JYM. My German speaking voice is creaky to inadequate, and I make all kinds of miniscule annoying grammar mistakes while writing. But somehow, last week, I passed the exam. I am apparently a B2, fully prepared for learning auf Deutsch. So now the pipe-smoking kindly professor has said that I should probably take, in addition to my two classes at little cute JYM, three classes at the big scary brother-and-sister-Scholl-killing LMU, you know, just because I can. Gulp.

So I'm picking them now (late). They all have ridiculously long names, like "Ubersetzungsorientierte Analyse literarischer Texte", which means only "Translation-oriented Literary Text Analysis", but sounds much more intimidating in German. I'm frankly a little scared.

But on the bright side, due to the way credits work out at UMM, I can take one class in English, a selection which I've already spent the whole evening deliberating over. Due to my native superiority ... okay, birth in America... I'm already ahead. Plus, the classes have cool names like "Apokalypsen!!" and "Gender in American Fiction".

I'm excited to have one class where I will rock the world's face off, opposed to the rest of the time, in which I will mumble and stumble over words and make the grammatical mistakes of a four-year-old.

I'm in fact so excited to maximize my awesomeness potential that I'm even considering re-taking "Virginia Woolf", in which, having just read the books last semester, I will look like a fucking literary genius....

Okay, not really, especially because my alternative choice is called "Superheroes!".

Seriously. What a country!