I went to my second lesson of the German course tonight. Part of today's homework assignment was to write a letter of complaint to a travel organization. I spent quite some time on it this weekend and it was a great exercise. It had been many years since I wrote a German text!

I sent my homework assignment by e-mail yesterday, and in the morning I received the result by e-mail. There were still quite some mistakes in it, but it wasn't as bad as I had thought.

In the course tonight we spoke again about prepositions. First of all, you have to learn when to use which preposition (zu, in, nach, an...). Second, you have to find out which case should be used with the selected preposition. With some prepositions it's easy, for example zu and von always have the 3rd case, the Dativ.

However, the prepositions we looked at these lessons are a bit more complicated. They're called the Wechselpräpositionen. In general the rule is: Wo? implies Dativ, Wohin? implies Akkusativ, but there are some exceptions. The verb 'to float' (schweben), might feel like a Wohin?-type of verb, but it actually comes with the Dativ. That's language for you.

Tonight we did various exercises, and practiced conversation with the newly learned rules; it was a fun evening.

Today my uncle Peter celebrated his graduation; he now has a Master of Business Administration degree.

It was a cosy afternoon, and I saw a lot of family. There were a lot of nice things to eat. I was home around 19:00 o'clock.

See also these pictures.

Next week my project will move to another floor in our building. There have been some small organizational changes that are accompanied with a re-shuffle of most projects in the Chess buildings.

Because I have been located on this desk since I started working full-time here, I thought it's nice to take some pictures.

The Chess building, seen from the backside. My office is on the top-floor, on the left-hand side on this image.

The desks of our project.

Erik, my colleague on this project.

My desk. Here I'm working on on some Java code. The red bar on the screen indicates a failed unit-test: this part of the software isn't ready yet. Notice the webcam.

Tonight we had a meeting of my work, a so-called 'tuning'. There are three branches of our company, in three cities in the Netherlands that are far from each other. Therefore this kind of of meetings is always in the center of the country. The philosophy is that if people from all the three cities have to drive far, nobody can complain. Today it was in Zeist.

It was quite interesting, and good to see collegue's from the branches in Eindhoven and Groningen. Serge gave me a ride to Zeist; Sandra brought me back home in the evening (thanks, both of you).

My parents were here tonight and we had dinner together. It was very pleasant; we hadn't seen each other for a couple of weeks. They have a holiday now, the spring-holiday.

I heard a wonderful new song on the radio: "Vondeling van Ameland" by Boudewijn de Groot, perhaps the greatest Dutch singer ever.

Tonight was my first lesson of the German course and it was a lot of fun.

We were a group of ten people, and one teacher. She is a native German speaker. I was a little bit scared to go, because I had missed the first lesson and I wasn't sure what to expect. However, it was a very nice evening -- it's really fun to go 'back to school'.

The lesson started at 18:30 o'clock. Tonight's theme was der Urlaub. We talked a lot of German with each other and the teacher. The grammar tonight was about Wechselprëpositionen, prepositions that can be followed by either der Dativ or der Akkusativ. We were done around 21:00 o'clock.