Living at Steiger Krögis

I’m no longer a Christian, see Lost and How I went to theology school and lost my faith

Even without the excellent teaching we’re getting - living here is incredible. There are about 100 people living here - staff and students.

Everyone speaks different languages - but we now have 3 translators going: Polish, Russian, and Portuguese (For our Poles, Ukrainians, and Brazilians) - and when someone isn’t speaking English they have to be translated twice (say Russian to English then English to Portuguese). I’m learning how incredibly awful the New Zealand accent is - running our words together, never saying our ‘r’s, and with our wildly different vowel sounds it can be a challenge to understand, let alone my usual incomprehensibleness. I was playing cards on Friday evening with Ukrainians and Brazilians who don’t have perfect English, and we were all trying to learn each others languages, then French and Japanese were getting thrown in too (and there are no French or Japanese here).

I’m sharing a room with 6 others - 2 Australians, 3 Brazilians, 1 Belarussian, and 1 other Kiwi. (For those who are paying attention/good at maths - One of the Australians is also Brazilian).

Monday is our day off, so we went on a day trip to Prague - seeing as it’s just over there, and why not. So about 15 of us loaded into a bus (The people here have a BUS!) and drove across the border (this might not be that amazing to many of you but it was my very first time driving into a country). We walked through old Prague and saw so many old buildings - I took so many photos that I need a bigger camera battery (also a bigger camera)

Dinner dishes have become a feature of my life. We all have chores: I’m in the team in charge of setting up and cleaning up dinner. Even with a commercial dishwasher we get a lot of time to sing. And everyone here sings.

We have an exercise program that some of us do: called ‘Insanity’. It is well named. I’ve made it the whole way through the last time I did it, but it’s pretty tough.

Our schedule here is at once intense and spacious - we have teaching morning and evening on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday, Work projects (Hard manual labour) on Tuesday afternoon, planning for our outreach on Thursday afternoon. Friday is our seek-God-monks-in-a-monastery day. Saturday we go into Dresden to outreach, Sunday is worship and teaching and internet-home-time, and Monday is our rest day.