Thursday and Friday: Finish line in sight!

This would be my last blog here in Cincinnati. So it is a good time to see, what i have learned here.

At first, I learned a lot about the culture in the USA. I love, that we learned much more practical stuff than in our English lessons in Germany. Here we were taught in different social problems, which could appear during our trip. It was not just grammar or just vocabulary like in Germany.

Here we learned different, because we had the possibility to speak to native speakers. So if you are observing, you can enhance your English with every conversation. And you can play "trail and error", if you say something wrong, the native speaker (hopefully) corrects you immediately.

I think, I have now advantages against other of my students colleagues in Germany: I got a deep look in the American culture and I have an idea how the Americans may tick. This knowledge is good, when I travel next time in the United States to make some business :)

Wednesday: Rock n Roll!

Yesterday we were in Cleveland at the "Rock and Roll hall of Fame and Museum". There exists seven floors with different exhibitions around the music and the lifestyle of Rock n Roll. You can get in touch with a lot of artifacts from many different icons of the Rock N Roll era. It starts with objects from famous people of Blues and Soul (mentioned as the roots of Rock n Roll), continues with a huge repertory an daily objects from bands like "The Beatles", and "Rolling Stones", build a bridge to further music styles like Pop and HipHop with exhibitions from Madonna and Run DMC, and ends with exhibits from Michael Jackson, Queen, and Bruce Springsteen.

The museum designer also used different media for presenting: beside the classical presentation of objects, you can also find different audio equipment to hear the sound of Rock And Roll, and different produced movies either on big screens (e.g. explaining the persons and groups in the Hall of Fame) or a couple of monitor, which were arranged like a tree.

Remarkable is, that different topics get different spaces. The Soul and the Blues section were nearly as big as the section about Rolling Stones. I have also missed bands like Genesis with their great singers Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. The music I like, the hole electronic music part with Techno or House, were not mentioned there. The reasons are probably, that some bands and music styles are more popular than others, or some bands have signed just by the wrong label.

According to the museum, Rock And Roll plays or played a big role in the United States, it formed a whole generation of young people.

It is hard to say, why such musicians often were praised as angels or heroes. Fact is, that they also did and do a lot of stupid things and mistakes. Maybe fans find a connection to them, because the musicians live their dream and do what they want (that is probably what the fans think), while the normal guy is captured in his daily routine. I think nobody would ever be able to understand the personality cult.