DSH

Yesterday morning, we all met bright and early at 8am to take the DSH, the German language proficiency exam. Think back to taking AP tests and the SATS...sitting in a giant auditorium with rows and rows of desks and adults standing at the front babbling directions to you. The test started at 9 and ended at 1:20. We began with a 90 minute section of Leseverstehen (Reading Comprehension) along with grammar exercises. The reading passage was called "Lob der Angst" (Praise of Fear) which many found quite humorous considering a lot of people have fear of taking tests. Then a quick Pause followed by a 40 minute listening comprehension called "Aufstieg der Frauen" (the Advancement of Women) followed finally by a 60 minute period where we were provided a chart and a couple questions and had to write a little essay about the chart. The chart was about the increasing numbers of German youth attending Hochschule...but it was honestly a dumb prompt. The question asked why it was important that more youths are attending higher and better schools. I mean, it's pretty obvious--go to school, get a good job, etc. The practice prompts we had in class had been much more interesting-- whether sending technology to Africa was better than sending food, or why so many people in school weren't married and what that meant in the world today. I thought this one was just dumb. ABER, es ist egal, weil die Pruefund fertig ist!

We get the results tomorrow afternoon, I believe. You can pass with a 1 (57%), 2 (seventy-something%), or a 3 (eighty-something%), and if you pass you have to take the oral part on Thursday afternoon, where you speak for 15-20 minutes about a random topic they tell you when you get there. For us, this test honestly doesn't matter because not many of us are trying to take classes actually at the university, but rather we're taking the classes specifically for foreigners. They're still in German, but just a bit simpler. I don't really care if I pass. It would be pretty cool if I did, but I also realllllly don't want to do the oral part of the test because I would just make a fool of myself because I would not be able to talk that long.

So we are now technically on our Spring Break! We have to be back Sunday April 10th and classes start on the 11th. On Sunday, we FINALLY got our act together for Amsterdam. We waited a bit too long to book our hostel there (oops...) so we're kind of staying in a crappy one not in the downtown area, but there will be five of us (Becca, Matt, Dan, Brock, and me) so I think if anything, we'll have some great stories! For the weekend, the hostels were very expensive so we're actually going to go to Duesseldorf and maybe Aachen and actually stay in Koeln on Friday night, and we got cheap train tickets to Amsterdam on Saturday. And then Istanbul Tuesday! Becca is currently trying to buy her ticket to go with me, so I may have a friend coming with, which I guess in the end would be better than going alone, despite all my romantic notions of a voyage of self-discovery haha.