i had my first exam today - the german as- and a-level speaking exam. a-levels are the qualifications you get in a subject when finishing secondary school. i'm doing the german a-level because it could be helpful if i ever want to study at an english uni. anyway. the examiner was a native german, very friendly woman, who asked me questions and recorded everything (the work gets sent off and marked elsewhere). i had to talk about topics such as pollution, family relationships, famous people and their exemplary function, health and wellbeing... then i had to talk about two cultural topics they announced two weeks ago on which i had to do 'research'. for the first topic, i had to talk about a german book i read; i took 'tschick' by wolfgang herrndorf - i just made up some facts about wolfgang herrndorf because i couldn't be bothered yesterday to do proper research (they don't look it up anyway, as it is mainly about talking) and talked about the content of the book. the second topic was history in the 20th century, where i had to choose a historically relevant period of the 20th century from a target language-speaking country. as i only know the basic stuff about the world wars, i decided to talk about switzerland and what switzerland did during the second world war. as my examiner had to ask questions about the topic chosen and she didn't know much about it, i could have my notes between us, with it all the year dates i would not have remembered otherwise - lucky me! i talked about the mobilmachung, plan wahlen, rationierung, geistige landesverteidigung, flüchtlingspolitik... it went extremely well :)