"Endlich..."

"Yeah, kind of..."

"Guten Tag, wie geht's?"

"Fine, und Ihnen?"

"Sehr gut, danke!"

"Where did you learn German? That's amazing!"

 

Rowing at the UCSB.

And so on... All teaching assistants (TA, ähnlich zu den Tutoren in Deutschland) have to take an English Language examination to be employed. All physics students who are going to be a TA had to explain the Coriolis force within 5-7 minutes.

I took the examination as well and the examining professor knew that I was from Germany and said "endlich..." when I entered the room for the exam. There was another professor from the English department who grew up in Germany, so we chatted a bit in German before starting the actual exam. And afterwards we talked about rowing ;-) I just really hope I passed!

So far, I have not met many German people. There are also two post-docs at the Mechanical Engineering faculty I ran into, but that's basically it.