My Goal, And It's A Modest One...

A series of brisk evenings to break up what's been a brief, hot, sticky summer have descended upon us here in Nuremberg, which shares the same latitude as Vancouver, Canada. A long wet fall followed by a downright chilly (though largely snow-free) winter will happen in the fullness of time. So it's time to devote a little thought as to cold weather projects.

Knowing full well that I can't play competitive full-contact sports with my dodgy back (old snowboard injury) and creeping advancement of age, I've decided to do a work-around to stay close to my beloved adopted game of Australian Rules Football, and recently received materials to be an accredited Umpire (aka referee; old skool attired Aussie Rules ump pictured above signaling a 6-point goal, not the size of the fish that got away). Aussie Rules has its own 6-team club league here in Germany, and I've already made inquiries to the more local teams to see if they'll need a ref for next season (answer: Hells Yeah!), so I have that going for me. The rules book is a bear though: including supplemental material, it weighs in at over 110 pages, and has to be known backwards-and-forwards. Should make for a gripping read this winter.

I've given up on learning any more German-- beyond my painfully limited baby talk and merely so-so broad/general reading comprehension, this language has not exactly opened up its secrets to me. Whatever I do manage to pick up from here forward will be through osmosis and observation, but any more formal instruction seems pointless, frankly. So what does a person with shattered confidence in their language learning abilities do? Teach themselves Esperanto of course! This constructed language (flag above) pulls the best bits of Romance (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian), German and Slavic languages, blends them together, keeps the rules eminently logical and simple (example: all nouns end in "o"; all adjectives end in "a"), and is actually fairly comprehensible to Romance language-speakers who haven't even seen or heard it previously-- meaning an Esperanto speaker can get their point across throughout most of western Europe without knowing the native language themselves. I'm still slogging through the book, but progress is being made.

The goal by next summer: To be the best Esperanto-speaking Aussie Rules Umpire in all of central Bavaria. I think I can achieve that. I really can.