Annamossweebela

I've been meaning to post this for ages. There really are heartwarming or hilarious aspects of my job. Really. It's just that the insane ones tend to overshadow them. I have a new nursery school down in Southeast Berlin with really little children. Like, I think the parents are cheating and some of these kids are two and a half-little. So I'm there, doing my little intro-class with all the parents there and I'm teaching the kids how to introduce themselves. This entails going around in a circle and me saying several thousand times "My name is Mia--Ich bin die Mia--What's your name--wie heisst du?" and then prompting them "Myyy naaaame issss--wie heisst du?--" So becaues these kids are so young, this is taking a while. I finally get to this charming little girl. Really cute as a button. And I go through my whole little schpiel and she answers "Myyyy naaame isss Annamossweebela". Of course, I'm looking at this child like she's speaking in tongues, because this makes no sense in either English or German. My first thought is "perhaps she's Russian"--in any event, I ask her again what her name is, and she says "Annamossweebela" again. At this point, the nursery-school teacher jumps in and says "Anna". So I write her name down. The next kid says his name is "Doctor Haxe"--not that I have any idea what that's supposed to be a reference to, but the parents are amused and someone jumps in and tells me that this child is Paul. After this little info-class is over, I give the parents the little speech about how our program is set up and what they can expect and our philosophy and everything, and after I'm done, during the Q&A, a mother approaches me. She turns out to be the mother of little Annamossweebela and she was terribly apologetic--it turns out they call the little girl "Anna-mouse"--not only does she think this is her real name, but like many small children, she pronounces her first and last names as one gigantic word, making the end result an utterly unintelligible chaos. I didn't get a similar explanation for Doctor Haxe, but I'm keeping an ear out.

The other week, in another one of my schools, a smart, cute little six-year-old busted out with "Miiiiaaaaa, what's your real job?" I laughed a little and answered "Elias, this is my real job." His reply: "Oh. You can't make very much money, then." I've got to say, I was impressed with his shrewdness.
I've had the recent pleasure of doing Easter-themed classes and one of my favorite mistakes the kids make is referring to the Easter Bunny as "Mister Bunny". I never noticed before, but the two sound incredibly similar. The poor kids know that "Mister" is English, so it makes sense to them, and most of the time they can't understand why I'm correcting them.

Let's see...what else is amusing about my job?

H'm.

I can't think of anything.

The most important thing is that Easter Vacation started today, which means I'm now only working half time. It's like the psychotic part of my job just...falls away. Or at least one psychotic part. We were planning on going up to Rostock/Gross Schwiesow for the Easter holidays, but apparently the plan has changed, so we're going back to the mountains with Angie and the Grandparents. I'm okay with both plans, really. Hopefully the weather will be better. During the 50th anniversary (the last time we were there) it pissed rain the entire time. And since there's so much beautiful nature there, it was a real shame.

However.

Enough about beautiful nature. We're going to Kai's for dinner, and I've got to change up.

tschao.