Timo Heuers Weblog

I have been in France for the first time in my life last Sunday. I stayed it Offenburg — close to French-German border — and travelled there for the BarCampOffenburg, which I attended on Saturday. It’s easy to go to Strasbourg (France) by train if you are in Offenburg. It takes you 30 minutes without changing the trains. I started 8.34 AM and because I went there with train, the first thing I saw was the “Place de La Gare” and the train station of course. Really amazing. Nice compination of old and new style of building houses.

I did a map with Goole Maps weeks ago where I marked all the sights which I wanted to visit. First on my trip was the famous “Place Kléber”, which is the lagest Strasbourg place according to Wikipedia. But not the most beatiful, if you ask me. After that, I went to the “Notre Dame de Paris” - an amazing church!

After that, I went to “Palais Rohan” near to a river (who can tell me the name?). Also the “Église Saint-Paul” was special, but not that much interesting as “Notre Dame” was.

But now, my favorite place in Strasbourg, where I stayed lots of minutes waiting for nothing, enjoying the sun and the silence (yes, silence, but it’s still in the middle of this city, amazing). The “Place de La République” is located directly beside the “Palais du Rhin” — also a highlight on Strasborug trips.

Shortly after that I discovered the “République” stop of the Tram (Strasbourg Subway) and decided to go to European Parliament with the Tram. I didn’t neither know how to pay nor how much I should pay, so I didn’t pay at all (I paid 1,30 Euro for another Tram trip though).

Strasbourg is one of the most beautiful city I have ever visited and the trip has been really awesome. I think that wasn’t the last time I’ve been there!

I haven’t got any tips yet for my Strasbourg trip on Sunday. If you have one, don’t hesitate to comment and share.

I will be in Offenburg this weekend, which is close to the French border and Alsace. It’s BarCamp time again, sponsored by Burda. I will be there for BarCamp on Saturday and travelling to Strasbourg next day, which is 30 minutes by train.

I will stay in Hotel Palmengarten. Wifi is available in the entire hotel, but is 9 Euro per hour, which means no wifi for me over night. It’s way too expensive!

Will show you some pictures after I am home again Sunday evening. You can keep up to date with my Twitter channel, I try to do most of the posts in English (which takes more time for me, so I will post German tweets when having not enough time).

The reason why I love Seesmic are they conversations. I had some about different subjects the last days and recorded lots of videos even at a birhday party. But the most interesting discussion was with “an English English teacher living in Spain”, how he calls himself. Cool guy. He’s “cataspanglish” on Seesmic if you want to follow him or watch last videos. My Seesmic name is “timo“.

Cannot remember when the discussion started, but it was in the thread “can you help me to learn english”, which a Chinese girl opened. I recorded a video for it when Chris was asking me for tips for learning and improving English skills.

First of all, English in school is mostly crap. It’s too much theory and too less speaking and writing. The teacher is talking German instead of English and if he is talking English, he has to explain the order twice, English and German after it, because not even half of the class understood what do to.

Of course reading English blogs and tweets is important. Listenings to podcasts also fills the important hole of pronouncing and listening comprehension. One of my favorite English podcasts, called Speaking English Podcast, is run by a German who studies American studies and English studied in Hamburg. He podcasts about grammatical problems and words that sound the same but are used in different ways and spelled different.

But what is passive listening and reading without asking questions and interact? In my opinion the most important thing is to interact with native speakers, it doesn’t matter where they are from (India, UK, US, ..). That’s how you can learn sayings and expressions used to describe things. Don’t hesitate to ask them for a correction of your textes. I did that for the “about” page, but don’t do this anymore for normal blog postings - making mistakes and err is human.

That’s all for now. Do you have any further tips?