Gauss Hausfrau

So, my roommate and her fiance have started up this cultural center called the Gauss Haus. It's the sort of place that does free English/Spanish/Klingon lessons, historical city center tours, and book clubs for people who only read books by 18th century French authors. Being a native English speaker, I was one of the first people they asked to help out there. I thought, I've got a lot of time on my hands. Surely I can teach English to some people one hour a week or something ....

Or something is right! I'm up to my neck in culture here, people! I teach two hours of English conversation a week to a group of about eleven people; I go to the Cafe Litteraire on Fridays and listen to poetry in languages I don't always understand; I even do English translation during the occasional Sunday tour of Braunschweig as it relates to the life of Carl Friedrich Gauss. This last one is something I'm particularly proud of, as I've never done verbal translation on the fly like that before. It's not just telling a waiter what my friend wants in German. It's explaining whole detail-rich lectures as word-for-word as possible without a dictionary and without prior knowledge of what's going to be said. Do you know what that makes me? That makes me awesome. Well, that and much more confident in my German than I was when I got here. But it also makes me awesome.