Feeling Multicultural

I am now safely back in Germany after a very pleasant Christmas and New Year in England. Coming back to Germany was a lot easier than I thought it would be to be honest and it’s made me wonder if I’m now truly multicultural.

I realised how much England fails at this when I landed back at Stansted before Christmas and saw that nearly all the signs were only in English. It infuriated me a little after having been in a country where on trains the safety messages and signs by the door are in German, French and English and in airports there is an English translation for nearly everything. It’s not like I don’t understand English, far from it of course, but I know what it’s like to land in a foreign country for the first time and not understand things. (I think it’s something I’ll feel all the more keenly when I go to Russia but we’ll have to see how multicultural they feel in a few months time.)It’s not exactly pleasant and I think it just made me a little bit sad to realise that this country seems to be isolating itself despite what you hear about celebrating multiculturalism. I think if we truly were celebrating it all our airports would have better signs and so would our trains.

Anyway, slight complaints out of the way, I really am pleased to have very simply slotted myself back into life here. I only got back yesterday but it could have been a week ago. I simply got in unpacked, checked in online, went to bed and then got up and went straight back in to work at the schools. I’ve even been successfully food shopping. Also to add an extra culture to my current multicultural feeling, I now have Russian character stickers on my keyboard so that I can type in Cyrillic properly when I want to. It’s a good feeling.

It seems I’ve actually managed to give an on time update as well, excellent. Next post will probably be when something exciting happens. Perhaps when we have Fairytale night at the EvaSchulze and I have to play the Miller’s daughter/Queen in the 11th Grade production of Rumpelstiltskin. Yes, it looks like I’m going to be on stage, oh dear...