Heute ist der Tag, der Tag des Konstanz Konferenz. Wir haben eine Presentation über die Energiewende in Minnesota und North Dakota präsentiert. Wir fuhren von Rheinfelden bis Konstanz für es. Es war einen Konferenz über Energie und der Welt. Es war auch die erste International Konferenz mit Leute von China, Indonesian, und Amerika (uns). Eine interessante Dinge ist dass die ganze Konferenz auf Deutsch war. Verschiedene Vorträge war über andere Erfindungen mit Energie. Ein Vortrag hättet einen Mann mit seiner Erfindung, ein Radladegerät.
It was really interesting to listen to other presentations in German because I could really only catch a few words and basic sentence structure. The overall message was pretty clear when they used their graphs and images on their presentations. But they had several other opportunities to practice my German just by listening.
Even before the presentation, I ended up meeting one of the professors in charge of the entire conference. He approached me and said something in German and I got so confused. I couldn’t compute anything he said. It was like he was trying to ask me my social security number and I didn’t know either to give it to him or just stare him down. I just scrambled together a few phrases and said, “tut mir lied? Ich spreche nicht gut Deutsch,” and then it just got awkward. He started speaking English and I just felt really bad about it. I want to try. I do! But sometimes I just clam up and forget everything I’ve learned since Frau Berger’s class in 8th grade. He was actually really nice about just talking English and complemented me on German, for some reason.
Either way, our presentation was the second one after we broke out from the main presentation/introduction. We were all kind of freaking out. My certain freak out had to do with introducing the presentation. We were obviously the foreigners and I believe some people showed up to our Vortrag just because of it. Because I was trying to ease them into our English presentation, completely different than the rest of them, I was going to introduce us using my German skills. “Wir begrüßen sie ganz hertzlich. Wir kommen von Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Ich heisse Nick….. Heute halten wir unsere Vortrag auf English.” Everyone seemed to light up seeing that I was speaking German. The guy that I previously talked to was sitting in the front row and was smiling the whole time. It made me relax a little bit, I guess.
It went perfectly. It was a great presentation and the people all were welcoming to the foreigners that were just going to show up for one day and leave. We spent the rest of the day just going back to our hotel and relaxing. We needed it. We traveled all through the morning and was stressed out about the conference all day.
We sat back and enjoyed our hotel room that had an amazing view of the Bodensee immediately blocked by the Hauptbahnhof and the statue that spins around and it kind of naked.
My camera is also still dead. I left the charger in Freiburg…. I’ll be back there on the 25th. Expect some pictures coming back on the 26th.