Christmas celebrations

Well, now that we're nearing the end of Hamburg's winter break I suppose I should take some time out to actually write about it! At first I was a little sad to not be celebrating with family this Christmas season, but the surrogate families that I've found here in Germany were more than willing to take me in and let me celebrate with them, which I was exceptionally grateful for.

Christmas Eve ("Der Heiligabend," or the holy evening around here) I spent with one of the teachers at my school, Ute, and her family. All assembled were Ute, her husband, a couple sisters in law, grandpa, and Ute's two children Gerthe and Jasna, who I think were 3 and 5 respectively. Unlike in the USA, Germans actually do their celebrating and gift opening on the night of the 24'th, so the atmosphere around the house with two little kids opening up presents was pretty exciting. I brought over a bottle of wine and some flowers for Ute, and in return I got a book of short stories (always grateful for German reading material, great way to learn new words). Germans also light their trees with actual little candles situated on the ends of branches and held to the tree with clamps, which gave me a bit of a shock when I walked in and saw it for the first time, but thankfully nothing burned down.

Gerthe and Jasna were particularly excited to have me around, and after dinner they brought me some books out of their toy room and asked me to read for them, which--believe me--was super precious. The first book they brought me, though, was actually really challenging, ironically enough. The hardest thing about German for me is just pronouncing words, and the book (I forget the name) was about zoo animals getting onto a train, which went alphabetically from A to Z. Each page was full of these really terrible and confusing alliterations and rhymes and other such linguistic tricks and twists which are no problem for actual Germans, but bring non-native speakers such as myself to their knees. They got a kick out of the trouble I had with it anyway (as did their parents), so I suppose that will be a particularly memorable iteration out of the thousands of times they'll probably have Ute read the story to them. After that we read a story about a gorilla letting animals out of their cages at a zoo (they're big into zoos I guess), and thankfully that one wasn't as hard. The rest of the evening was spent sitting around the kitchen table and chatting, showing everyone where Ithaca and Salt Lake City are on the atlas, and attending a midnight service at a church around the corner, where Ute was playing violin for the orchestra.

Christmas day went well too! It was a bit strange waking up alone in my and Loic's section of the house, and I had forgotten to go shopping before the holidays, so breakfast on Christmas morning consisted of spaghetti with butter (didn't have the luxury of tomato sauce unfortunately), but aside for that everything went fine. I recorded a bunch of little videos for all of my friends this year to say hello and see how things are going, so I spent most of the morning doing that. At 3:00 I headed up to the Ketels' place to have a holiday lunch with them and some of their family friends, and, as always, it was really good to see them again and spend a little time with them. After I was finished with that I headed home and called it a night.

Anyway, have another post on winter break itself coming up, as well as a little something about New Year's Eve in Hamburg, so stay tuned for that!

Also, I'll just make a quick shoutout to my former a cappella group here. Some of the videos from their last concert are going up, and I am just crazy impressed with how they've been doing this year. The song in this video is the last arrangement I did for the group, and they just did a stupendous job on it! I've been watching it on repeat for a couple days now, and I love how much fun they have with everything. So enjoy! :)

A Happy Christmas I Wish You

Well, it's 11:00 AM on Christmas Eve over here in Hamburg. We've got about six inches of snow on the ground (very unusual for Hamburg), it's a cold but tolerable 28 degrees, and good old Wilhelmsburg is sleepy and quiet (which isn't really any different from the norm around here, but whatever). This will be the first holiday season in my life that I've spent away from family, which is a bit of an odd sensation. I can withstand about two weeks of SLC before going crazy over the winter holidays, but at least those first two weeks were really nice--fireplaces, Christmas trees, friends, family. It's quite a different experience to be out on "the end of the limb" as my Dad puts it; out in far away, distant lands, miles away from the familiar.

It is a bit sad on one hand, but then again it's not like I'm totally 100% removed from everyone back home. There's phone calls and emails and video chatting and international shipping for gifts, so if I can't be right back there in the action at least I can say hello from afar. Nor will I just be huddled up with my computer alone in the dark on Christmas Eve: tonight I'm going to be having dinner with one of the teachers at my school and her family, and then on Christmas morning I'll be having lunch with the Ketels. So I'll be celebrating at least, with a new crowd and thousands of miles away from the usual venue, but celebrating none-the-less!

The school week leading up to the break was pretty nice. A lot of classes were taking tests, so for a few periods I didn't have to show up, and then when the students had finished with their work the pace slowed down a lot, so class was pretty informal. On Monday night I actually went to a movie night at another teacher's house to bake cookies and spend some time with her 11'th grade class. It was a bit of a trip hanging out with a bunch of 17 year-olds, but the evening wasn't half bad. We drank hot chocolate and made little Christmas tree and angel shaped cookies, played this karaoke game for a while, a couple of the guys brought guitars over and we jammed for a little bit, good times all in all. Tuesday was our traditional game night at Sausalito's, a restaurant down in the city center, and that was a good opportunity to get together with everyone for one last time and say goodbye for the holidays.

And finally, on Wednesday there was a big "Weinachtenschulfest" (Christmas school party), so all of the classes spent the whole day playing games and hanging out. I got to play musical chairs on two separate occasions with the sixth and seventh graders, proctored a make-up test for some of the upper-level students who had missed the in-class test, ate a ton of snacks, it was a good time. At the end of the day there was a big faculty party in the teacher's lounge, and that was a good opportunity to just hang out with some of the other teachers and breathe a collective sigh of relief that the holidays are finally here! One of the teachers from one of my favorite seventh grade classes also gave me a little Christmas gift at the party--a 11x17 piece of paper with little messages from the students in the class. That was a great gift, and all the messages were really, really nice. Some of my favorites:

"He is a best teacher :P"
"He love beer"
"I heart you x4"
"You are sehr witzig and hilfsbereit" (you are very funny and helpful),
and "hat schnell Deutsch gelernt" (learned German quickly. At the beginning of the year we told them that I couldn't speak German, so I guess whoever wrote that thought I learned the whole language in the past three months.)

Happy holidays from the Vaterland everyone! Or, as one of my well meaning but slower 10'th graders phrased it to me, "A happy Christmas I wish you!" I'll be sure to fill you in on holiday activities and New Year's goings-on. Be merry, stay safe, eat lots of food, and enjoy the company of your friends and family!

The tree outside my window, totally frozen over.

The big Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market) in front of City Hall.

Faculty party on Wednesday.

My little present :).

End of school/pre-holiday dinner at Jim's Burritos with the guys.

Day trip to check out the Lüneburg Weihnachtsmarkt with some of the other teaching assistants.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Three months! Part two.

Well, the hotly anticipated part two of our three months post. Here’s a few more blurbs on what’s been going on recently:

-Tutoring. I’ve picked up a few extra students outside of school to start earning a little extra money. Eight-hundred Euros a month is a surprisingly livable wage in Germany, since a lot of things end up being cheaper than their American counterparts, but that’s still not a lot of money. Anyway, my landlady is pretty well connected in the neighborhood, so I ended up landing three tutoring students through one of the Turkish families on our street: Memet, Betül, and Esra. Immigrants in Germany kind of get a rough deal in school, since English is a mandatory subject, and they have to take another foreign language on top of that. So your standard immigrant student speaks their parents’ language at home, German around town, and English + Spanish/French/Italian in school. In a lot of cases the immigrant kids actually speak the best English in class, since they’re already used to learning foreign languages, but for the most part it’s just confusing and frustrating for the kids to be stuck between 3-4 languages.

But anyway, it’s been fun helping out with the three kids’ homework. The family is really nice too. They always take my coat when I walk in the door, give me coffee and tea, let me try out a bunch of different Turkish foods all arranged out on platters in the living room. Sometimes I stick around and chat a little bit after we’re finished.

-Classy Parties. The other Fulbrighters and I got invited to a holiday open house at the US Consulate yesterday afternoon to meet and greet, and that was quite an experience. Walking up to the building was pretty stressful--lots of police with guns and vests and metal detectors, and then a bunch of Secret Service-looking guys on the inside. The building itself was very impressive: vaulted ceilings, hardwood floors, great outlook right onto the Alster (the big lake in Hamburg). At first the party was a little weird, since I was the first Fulbrighter that showed up, and was at least 20-30 years younger than everybody else there. I chatted up some guy in a suit for a little bit, drank some eggnog, and then fortunately some other people from Hamburg/the surrounding area showed up, so I had some people to talk with. We all introduced ourselves to the Consul General before we left, and she turned out to be a really friendly lady.

-Christmas Plans. Gonna stay in Hamburg for Christmas I believe, at any rate I’m not going home for the holidays. Having suffered through 25 hours of planes and airports upon first arriving in Germany, I definitely don’t want to repeat the experience two more times in a week and a half! I’ve got a few friends who are staying in town, and I also think I’m going to be celebrating Christmas itself with the Ketels (note to self: send that email soon), so I won’t be totally alone. That would be terrible and a little depressing around this time of year. Thanksgiving away from America turned out pretty well, so hopefully the first Christmas away from family will be good too.

Three Months! part 1

And, yet again, no blog posts for another two weeks. Really falling behind on this whole thing, sorry for that. Looking back there's a scant three entries between Month Two and Month Three, so gonna have to get back into the proverbial swing of things.

So, to make up for lost time, I'll include a bunch of pictures for you as well! Anyway, the Cliff Notes for the past couple weeks are:

-Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was actually a huge success. As I mentioned last time, a little "skeptisch" on what we would be able to come up with, but the meal actually turned out to great. We had all the essentials: turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, stuffing, and carrot cake for dessert. All hand-made, and all delicious. We even got to treat my roommate Loic and one of Karl's friends (also French) to their first Thanksgiving dinner, and they walked away appropriately stuffed and barely able to walk. The only downside to the whole ordeal was the irate Slavic people that were in and out of the kitchen while we were cooking. We did it over at Karl's student dorm, which had a shared kitchen, and apparently the festivities didn't sit too well with some other residents in the dorm. From time to time the Slavs would come in to cook as well and cuss us out in languages we didn't understand since the meal took so long to prepare. Didn't put a damper on the evening at all though.

Thanksgiving crew!

-School. Has been going very well, of course. After a few months of doing this I've worked up a really good relationship with all (well, 99% anyway) of the kids at school, and I've definitely learned a few more little teacher tricks, so the job's getting easier. The students are always (well, usually) really stoked to work with me. Last week in a couple classes I had the seventh and eighth graders practically dying to answer questions. It is really damn cool to be up at the front of a class and watch kids almost fall out of their seats with their hands as high in the air as they can go when you ask them to answer a question out of the book.

In one seventh grade class in particular I had a really awesome session. Last Wednesday I took some of the weaker students out to a different classroom to work with them on the simple past (e.g. I watch TV -> I watched TV, or I go -> I went, stuff like that). They should have learned this in the sixth grade, but for whatever reason it didn't really come together or make sense for them, so we took some time out to go over it again. I find I've got a bit of a thing for boiling down difficult grammar for the younger students and explaining it to them in terms they understand, and it was just awesome to see it finally clicking in their heads. They've spent pretty much a year and a half being confused as hell by everything, and when they finally GOT it they could barely contain their enthusiasm, doing the falling-out-of-their-chairs thing I mentioned earlier. It was actually kind of hard to keep everything in order, and I had to make sure that everyone got their fair chance to answer questions. One of the kids actually got a little angry since I didn't call on him when he knew the answer. That was a really special moment for me--getting a bunch of little 12 and 13 year-olds fired up about a pretty mundane and simple piece of grammar.

-Traveling. Mentioned in the last post that I went to see my friend Ally for the weekend in Cologne. That was a great trip, really great to get out of Hamburg for a couple days and see something new. Plus it was nice to spend some time with someone from IC. New people are a lot of fun of course, but it's great to be with someone who comes from your own background, you know? Or, as Ally puts it, "It's really nice not having to explain everything all the time when you're talking about college or home." Even though I've been to Cologne a total of three times now, there was still a bunch of stuff that I've never seen, so it was a lot of fun to check out parts of the city I still hadn't visited. Had a bunch of great beer (the city specialty is Kölsch, a beer that's kind of rare outside of Cologne), great food, got to see Harry Potter 7 in English, got to see my friends Matthias and Sabine (my Couchsurfing hosts in Cologne from summer 09) again, good times.

Ally and me at one of the Weihnachtsmärkte in Cologne.

Cologne from above, with the Rhein down at the bottom.

Still to come: this past weekend, more thoughts and reflections (since I missed out on the big ponderous month-marker post this time around), and some other bits and pieces. Stay tuned.

Hamburg's harbor in the winter. Getting a little cold over here.

Update!

Well, haven't written in this for a little while, sorry about that! I find that's the case with blogs sometimes--you update them rigorously and then fall off after a little while. Anyway, figure I'll take a little time to just update you on where I've been going and what I've been doing:

-Still having a great time in school. Today was one of the best days I've had in class so far actually. Usually Wednesday is a little "anstrengend" as the Germans would put it, cause I spend the entire day working with 7'th and 8'th graders (which, believe me, is no walk in the park). When you get down to it they're actually some of the most interesting students to teach--watching them make those first steps into teenagerdom is really fascinating--but, of course, the crazy changes happening in their brains makes them a little uncontrollable sometimes. Today, though, they were all just absolutely wonderful, and even when they weren't I was able to get things in control quickly. I know I've had a really good day in school when I leave the school singing, and from the faculty room all the way to the bus stop I was humming the Super Mario 2 theme to myself.

-Little bummed that I don't get to spend Thanksgiving in America, but me and a few of the other American Fulbrighters are all planning a dinner for tomorrow night. It will certainly be interesting to see what four guys in a kitchen will be able to come up with, hopefully it'll all turn out according to plan.

-The Weihnachtsmärkte (Christmas Markets) just opened up this week! The Weihnachtsmärkte are these booths they set up in big public areas in German cities, which are all made out of wood and roofed with pine boughs and strung up with lights and made to look pretty. The people in the booths sell all sorts of quaint old fashioned craft stuff, hats and gloves, candles, incense, Glühwein (spiced wine, served hot), bratwurst, and lots of other things. I bought a really awesome leather journal on Monday, and in about 20 minutes I'm meeting up with the Spaniards and some of the French to check out the Market by City Hall. Think I'll try to get myself a nice set of gloves, it's getting kinda cold!

-And, finally, traveling to Cologne this weekend to visit my friend Ally! We both graduated from IC this year, and she's doing a research grant down at the university in Cologne. We've been saying that we're going to visit each other for a while now, but we're just getting around to it now.

Reflections on the Untranslateable

As I get deeper and deeper into this language, it's been very interesting to get past the typical, everyday phrases and words that are pretty much the same in both English and German and to discover the really particular and nuanced aspects of both languages. I'm never just having a conversation nowadays. Every time I'm speaking with someone in German there's always a background process of analysis that's happening in the my head. When speaking in English it's just simple communication--something you don't ever pause to think about--but when speaking in a foreign language you have to pay so much more attention to individual words and sentence structure and grammar and phrasing. Same thing goes for music, movies, TV, books, anything. After enough time you come across the parts of a language that make it unique and distinct from other languages: phrases and ideas in one language that you can't quite adequately explain with the other, or ideas that only take a couple words in one language and multiple sentences in another.

I was watching a movie with Loic on TV the other day, The Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of my favorites when I was a little kid. The movie is equal parts satire and deconstruction of typical Hollywood action movies, full of both stereotypical scenes and variations on the genre. It's actually quite good, I highly recommend it, but I digress. In one fight scene, right before Schwarzenegger throws a greasy, leather jacketed bad guy through a wall, he says, "Don't quit your day job." In the German translation of the movie, "Bleib lieber bei deinem festen Job," a pretty literal translation. To translate it straight back into English, for the sake of demonstration, that's something like, "Better stay at your permanent job."

The line struck me as so strange, because you'd need to have a very specific cultural background to understand it, and to really properly translate it you'd have to find an equivalent phrase in German or just get rid of it/replace it entirely. The meaning of the idiom is immediately apparent to any English speaker: "Hey, bad guy, you're not very good at what you do, so I would try to find a different line of work." But it doesn't make a lot of sense in German:

[Better stay at your permanent job? But that's what the bad guy does; he's a criminal, that IS his permanent job. Furthermore, he's about to get killed. Why would he want to stay at his permanent job if he doesn't do that job very well in the first place? Wouldn't he want to switch to a different job? One where he isn't getting shot up and hurled through sheet rock by huge, musclebound Austrians?]

And through this convoluted series of thoughts and questions we finally arrive at the meaning of the phrase: something short, sarcastic, and simple. A meaning that clicks instantly in the mind of an English speaker, but one that takes a little more thought otherwise (presumably, at least. I can't find the German version of the phrase anywhere in Google). It's such a simple, small little thing, but I've literally been thinking about it for days now. And just this morning one class demonstrated to me how phrases and idioms can have really similar equivalents between languages. We were reading a text, and the phrase, "I know it like the back of my hand," came up. I asked them if they knew what that meant, and they told me that the German version is, "I know it like my jacket pocket." Which makes sense too; your inside jacket pocket is always really close to your body, so you'd know the pocket/whatever was inside it extremely well. If there's one thing I'm going to take away from this experience, it's going to be an appreciation of my own language, and a new look at the aspects of it that I never even stopped to consider before coming here.

New guitar

When I left SLC back in September I could only take on carry on onto the plane. Not wanting to risk checking either my laptop so I could carry my guitar on or vice versa, I decided to leave behind my guitar. I've been playing guitar ever since I was 12, so it was a pretty tough decision to make, but I've heard too many musician horror stories about instruments getting destroyed by airline baggage handlers. Plus when you get down to it a guitar is a really heavy, awkward thing to travel around with, hence it stayed at home.

Since getting here I've been feeling the absence, not only of the guitar but of simply having music in my life. I've always done something musical since I was a little kid, be it playing piano, guitar, singing, arranging for Voicestream, going to concerts, or just listening to music. It's one of the fundamental parts of my personality, so not having an outlet for it is pretty weird. So when my birthday rolled around I decided that a new guitar would be a good idea!

Originally I wanted to go to a music store to get something, although one of the other Fulbrighters here recommended I check out a big flea market they have every weekend in Sternschanze, so I decided to give that a shot. Initially I was pretty unimpressed with what I saw when I visited. There's a bunch of crap in flea markets, and there were some exceptionally weird guitars all over the place--all knockoffs and facsimiles of famous makes and models, a few franken-guitars obviously pieced together from multiple instruments, none that sounded very good, and none that I was enthusiastic about.

I was about to give up when I turned a corner and saw a stall full of really nice-looking acoustics. The man running the stand was in his 60's, long white hair, wrinkled face, long black jacket, and just had the look of a guy who looked like he had spent most of his life dealing with guitars. You see the type in guitar stores all the time--people who have such love of the instrument that they sacrifice themselves to a life of retail work simply to spend as much time as possible around what they love. I stepped up to the stand and looked at the guitars, picked one and sat down to give it a try. I was really surprised with the sound. The tone was loud, clear, none of the notes buzzed, and it just felt right. It was one of those things that had a sense of destiny about it: a used guitar of unknown origin, discovered in some tucked-away corner at a flea market in Europe, waiting for the right person to come and discover it. The opportunity was too rare and unique to pass up, I hadn't traveled across a third of the world to walk away from a find like that. I handed over a hundred Euros to the guy, and told me he was happy that the guitar was "going into good hands."

I've had to make a few alterations and fix it up a little bit, but now that I've got some new strings on it and I've fixed the little kinks it's sounding even better than it did previously. We've had a few friends over since I bought it, and they've all commented on how good it sounds. You know that when non-musicians can hear the quality in an instrument that you've found something good. Really, really enjoyed playing it so far, and I'm still looking for a name. I'm trying to come up with a short little German phrase or something, but so far I'm drawing a blank, and you can't really rush a christening.

Two months

And all of a sudden I've been here for two months, one-fifth of my time here in Hamburg. "Die Zeit läuft," as they say around here. One of the great things about this whole experience is that every day and week changes so much so quickly. Back in the so called normal world the extraordinary or unusual always punctuates the regularity of the everyday--shines a little light into the tedium of a unchanging schedule--but even after two months of living here there are still so many new things that happen from day to day that my life still seems fluid. The concrete still isn't dry, so to speak. There is, of course, a fixed schedule to my week, and a system of roots that's holding me down to the ground, but there's no way I could tell you what exactly I'll be doing a week or a month from now.

The newness is fantastic, of course, but there's nothing like feeling at home. There's a difference between something being new and something being foreign and confusing--a difference between that little flutter in your chest when you miss a step walking down the stairs versus the soreness in your ass after you fall down the whole flight. Finally having a permanent place to stretch out in, a group of friends I'm getting close to, and a close bond with the teachers I'm working at in the school has been absolutely wonderful. Up until now I've sort of been coasting along the surface of the city, but now it's becoming familiar, and I'm starting to get deeper into it. I know all the schedules for the trains in and out of Wilhelmsburg, and I've got a good sense of where all the subway lines take you and where they intersect. I've got an extensive list of landmarks that I recognize each day as I pass them by (Kamps bakery, the blue bridge over the Elbe, the TV tower, the bike rack at the Krupunder station in front of the buses), and an even bigger list of Pascals, Sonjas, Alis, Antonys, Kevins, Ochans, Kristophs, Patricks, Vanessas, and hundreds of other little faces that I see every day in class and around school.

I think I'm getting in so deep that I barely even recognize the changes in my personality and the way I behave anymore. Sometimes the changes are obvious--like waiting patiently at a crosswalk with the other Germans for the crossing signal and not feeling weird or impatient versus letting my American instincts take over and just crossing anyway--but it's going to be so damn interesting coming back to my homeland after this whole experience and finally being able to view a year of living in Germany through the lens of American life. After just six weeks in Berlin and a month of backpacking things like seeing and hearing English everywhere on the street, driving instead of taking the S Bahn, even the American sense of humor (especially the American sense of humor) seemed bizarre and uncomfortable. That whole trip lasted 77 days, and we're only a week and a half away from reaching that. It's going to be an exceptionally odd experience returning home to this strange, foreign land called Amerika at the end of this journey. I wonder if it will ever seem like the United States of America, or just Die Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika. Mal sehen. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, wie viel Zeit es brauchen wird, für alles noch mal normal zu scheinen.

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Anyway, we've got a few more blog posts coming up. Quite a bit has happened in the past week/week and a half (bought a new guitar! started doing my own lessons, taking a German as a foreign language class at the university, etc.), but haven't been in the writing mood for a while. Too much grayness and wind and rain outside. But I did actually get to see blue sky and the sun for like a half hour today, and there's nothing like vitamin D for creativity.

Happie Burthdae meestuh Fraai

This past Tuesday I turned 23. Everybody who grew up watching MTV in the 90's knows the song What's My Age Again by Blink-182. I couldn't count the dozens upon dozens of times I've listened to that song. Back when I was 13, listening to that CD (Enema of the State) and marveling at the ingenious lyrical turns of phrase contained therein, I always came back to a few choice lyrics which I found especially poignant as a teenager in braces just beginning to shape his own independent musical tastes. One of those was, "And that's about the time she walked away from me / Nobody likes you when you're 23."

I always came back to those two lines in particular, thinking they were some sort of dire yet incomprehensible warning from the future; a message from an artist with a decade's more life under his belt than myself, already weary and jaded with life for reasons unknown; the Ancient Mariner relating his tale to the poor, clueless wedding guest. "But why? WHY doesn't anybody like you when you're 23?" I thought. Over the intervening ten years I've come back to that song from time to time to reconsider it, always drawing a blank. The answer, I eventually surmised, was something you had to experience for yourself. Something you can't read in a book or learn from your friends. A truth which has to be experienced first hand rather than vicariously.

So it was a bit surreal Monday night to finally be on the verge of 23, an age which has always had a bit of a strange and mystical sense of destiny around it. Before coming to Hamburg I thought that I had keyed in on the answer. Sitting in my bedroom the night before takeoff, frantically packing and planning and saying goodbye to everything I know and love, the lyric took on a new truth. Here I was, a recent college graduate, about to leave all of my friends and family behind and depart for strange new lands. All of a sudden it seemed that Mark Hoppus' words weren't just meaningless lyrics. "Twenty-three" wasn't a random age or a throw-away filler to complete a rhyme. I was just under two months away from my birthday and about to leave everyone behind for a whole year, the song had truth to it after all. "So," I thought, "it's actually true then. I guess that nobody likes you when you're twenty-three and an anonymous foreigner in a big city."

That little thought, of course, faded pretty quickly when I actually came here. Even before I stepped into the airport and began my journey. Upon arrival in Germany I instantly had a very supportive and friendly group of people to help me out. All of the teachers at my school have just been fantastic and very friendly, Gesche, Manfred and Jakob were wonderful company and very supportive during my first weeks in the city, and I've really been enjoying the company of my fellow Fulbrighters and the other teaching assistants. So it appears that Blink-182 was wrong after all, people do in fact like you when you're 23. I'm very thankful for all of the people I've met in Hamburg so far, all of my friends back home who sent me birthday messages, and that I got to celebrate my birthday in such a fantastic and unique city.

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Anyway, felt like waxing poetic a little bit there, I suppose now I can tell you what my birthday was actually like! It was actually a really great day. The sun was shining, it wasn't too cold, and there was barely a cloud in the sky, aka Perfect Fall Weather. And believe me, days like this are practically unheard of in Hamburg. My first class at 8 am was taking a test, so I got to stay in bed a little longer, and throughout the day I got multiple renditions of "Happy Birthday" from my fellow teachers and students in class. My favorites were two of my 6'th and 7'th grade classes. Hearing a class full of 20 6'th graders singing "Happy Birthday" in little-German-kid accents was pretty cute ("Happie Burthdae meestuh Fra-ai, Happie Burthdae to joo"). When I walked into my 7'th grade class they had actually turned off the lights and lit a candle on the teacher's desk, and when I walked in they started the song.

Later in the day I went to Gesche's house with Loic for a birthday dinner. It was really nice to see them again after being away for a few weeks, and the dinner was really excellent (beef goulasch with potatoes). Gesche also got me a birthday present, a book called "99 Orten in Hamburg" (99 Places in Hamburg), which is a sort guide book with all of the interesting out-of-the-way places in the different neighborhoods of Hamburg and a page or two explaining their significance. I don't have a guide book for the city or anything, so maybe I'll try to make my way through all 99 before I leave.

Five months later

I remember being a little frustrated with my German over the summer. I had to write a bunch of emails and correspond with different people about a bunch of logistical things, and it would always take me a minimum of 30 minutes to pound out even the most basic email. It's pretty tiring to agonize at a keyboard, mulling over a sentence and trying to find ways to fully express your thoughts even in the most basic ways. At one point during a particularly toilsome email writing session I thought, "You know what? When I can whip out emails in German like I can in English, I'm gonna know that I've made a lot of progress."

It's always funny remembering those little thoughts down the line when the things you were thinking about or hoping for finally end up happening. I had a particularly lucid email session this evening, which triggered the memory of how hard it was for me to write over the summer. There's something to be said for knowing the grammar and the vocabulary of a language, but when you finally get to a level where you can express yourself with reasonable comfort, speed, and fluidity, that's something else entirely. It wasn't necessarily the longest email, or the most complicated, and I guarantee there's a fair number of mistakes (there are too many things to mess up in a language like German), but I was pretty proud of how easy it was anyway.

Ich heisse Andy, und ich bin amerikanische Fremdsprachenassistent bei der Gesamtschule Eidelstedt. Ich habe Lust, teil an deinem Literaturkurs zu nehmen, aber ich habe leider die Anmeldung verpasst (es war letzte Freitag, oder?). Ist es noch möglich für mich, teil am Kurs zu nehmen? Als ich in der Uni war habe ich Englische Literatur studiert, und in jedem Fall interessiere ich mich für viele Sorten von Literatur. Ich glaube, dass dieser Kurs mein Deutsch viel verbessern würde.

New digs

After four weeks of concerted effort, about a hundred emails, a few botched roommate tryouts and little success, I finally found a permanent place of residence a couple weeks ago. And it has been such an enormous relief. Simply having a place to yourself--where you can have a sense of permanence and stability--is a really important thing, and something that I took very much for granted before coming here. My first month in Hamburg was full of ups and downs, and feeling rootless and really hard-pressed to find a room in a short period of time heightened my adjustment period troubles significantly.

But I finally have something! And that is a wonderful thing. There's a teacher at a different school who has a couple extra rooms with a living room and bathroom in the top floor of her house that she usually rents to teaching assistants and Fulbright grantees. Finding it completely impossible to land a room in a normal apartment I decided to take her up on it. The place is down in Wilhelmsburg, which is a big island right in the middle of the Elbe, which flows to the south of Hamburg. It's pretty cheap, furnished, and, you know, it's a place to keep all of my stuff, so I'm feeling satisfied with the decision. The only thing is that it takes me upwards of an hour to get to my school, which really sucks when you have to be there by eight in the morning, but I'm making it work. Every Monday and Wednesday I've decided that I'm going to read on the train, and every Tuesday and Thursday I'm going to write.

I've got a roommate too, Loic from France, who is a French teaching assistant at a different school. So far he's been good company, and it's pretty boring living by yourself, so I've appreciated having him around.

Old room at Gesche and Manfred's.

New room!

Living room area.

Fast times in the Eastern Kingdom, Part 2

Late on Friday evening Andrea, a couple of her friends and I packed into a car and drove about an hour north to Wörgl for a “Weisswurscht is” concert. I didn’t have any idea what the music was going to be like beforehand, and there’s no way I could have ever imagined what it would be like. The bad is a self-described “hippie polka reggae” group. Yeah. It’s just about as strange as it sounds.

Words could never give a genre like that any justice; it was one of those uniquely bizarre forms of European music that you’d never see in the United States. And the crowd absolutely loved it—everybody was jumping back and forth and waving their arms and generally just having a great time. After a few Austrian beers I shrugged off the strangeness and got into the proverbial swing of things. Hopping and bouncing around to the strange, strange combination of syncopated reggae guitar and accordion was fun in itself, but the best part came at the end of the show. The band came back on for an encore, and the last song they performed was entitled “Unterhosen Party,” which means “underwear party” in English. At the beginning of the song everybody in the club, band included, took off their pants, flung them all over the place, and started to dance and spin around with even more energy than before. Not expecting this in the slightest, I had no idea what to make of it. It came off as such a normal, everyday thing, like holding up your lighter during a ballad or clapping for an encore. Since everybody was doing it I thought it was some Austrian custom that you take your pants off at the end of a really awesome concert as a sign of approval. Later it was explained to me that this only happens at Weiswurscht is concerts. I was a little disappointed.

Unterhosen Party.

The next day we all piled into the car and took off for Linz, which is three hours on the Autobahn from Innsbruck. Andrea and company had tried to explain the reason for the trip the previous night, but the music was loud and the accents were thick, so I was under the impression we were just going for a day trip. We loaded into the car at the ripe hour of 9:00 and headed out. Only when we actually arrived in Linz did I realize that we weren’t just sightseeing, but were actually attending a planning meeting for an organization called Uni Brennt (“University Burns,” sounds a bit dumb in English), which is an Austrian student protest group that Andrea is pretty heavily involved in. There were about 15 other people from all over the country who showed up to organize events and protests at their own universities. As if the Weisswurscht is concert wasn’t strange enough, the very next day I found myself sitting in at a far-left student protest meeting. The situations I find myself in sometimes…

Autobahning.

As I understand it, for the past ten years there have been some big problems in the Austrian university system—enormous class sizes, few professors, budget cuts, etc. The situation culminated last year with hundreds of students occupying Vienna University, which spread to the rest of the country, and now the organization is planning this year’s protests. On one hand I can agree with smaller lectures and bigger budgets for universities (someone told me that in some Austrian college lectures there can be 800+ students), but it was a little funny as a former American college student listening everyone passionately arguing about 400 Euro tuition fees and the introduction of admission exams into the system (currently the Austrian university system is totally open to anyone who wants to enroll). I didn’t have anything productive to add to the discussion, but it was a good vocab opportunity: Forderungen (demands), Aufnahmeprüfung (admission test), die Bewegung (the movement), Studiengebühr (tuition), etc.

That took up most of the day, so we drove back late and went to bed. The next day was just gorgeous, and I had wanted to head up and hike around in the mountains around Innsbruck ever since I arrived, so the next morning Markus and I headed up to the Nordkette mountain range to hike around a little. I’ve never been out in nature in Europe, but the feel of everything is very different from the USA. In Utah you can walk out your back door and be more or less totally in the wilderness within 15 minutes, but the mountains in Innsbruck were much more…cultivated is the word I’ll use. There was a really high-tech tram/gondola thing that went right to the uppermost peak of the Nordkette, at the halfway-station there’s a whole cluster of restaurants and houses, and at the end of the hike that Markus and I did there was a big restaurant with a huge paved pavilion full of picnic benches. It was actually kind of nice to sit down to a hot meal at the end of the hike, but I think I prefer the comparative rawness of the American wilderness. Nevertheless, it was really quite beautiful, and we got a great view of the city and the surrounding towns from the top.

Markus and me at the half-way station.

Innsbruck from above.

The day after the hike I packed up my things, said goodbye and headed back up to Hamburg. It was really fantastic visiting Markus and Andrea again, and just talking with a bunch of Austrians was actually really good for my language abilities. I’d compare German German to British English (very well pronounced and articulated) and Austrian German to American English (a little slurred and mashed together). Having to pay super close attention when talking with Austrians gave my ear a great workout, and I could understand the accent much better by the end of my trip. All in all a fantastic little mini-vacation; friends, adventure, new cities, good times.

Also, quick post, I was listening to I Know What I Know by Paul Simon as I was getting ready to leave the house today, and heard an interesting lyric that I'd never really payed attention to before. When we were kids my little brother and I used to jump up and down on the living room couch to this song, so it was a "full circle" thing for me to be out here in Hamburg right now and happen to catch this lyric. Here's a link to the part of the song I'm talking about.

Fast times in the Eastern Kingdom, Part One

It’s always amazing to me how quickly strange, out of the ordinary things become normal after a while. With enough repetition things like speaking German all day, taking the U-Bahn to work, measuring temperature in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, become so second nature that you don’t even stop to consider how completely odd it is that you’re actually out here doing these things. To keep that delightful sense of strangeness alive you have to take a second look at everything and remind yourself how unique it all is. Last Wednesday I had a moment like that: “Wait a minute Andy, right now you’re on a train to Innsbruck to visit a bunch of Austrians. We’re in the middle of Bavaria, and this fall weather is exceptionally gorgeous. This isn’t exactly a standard day in America."

View from the train.

It was the train travel that was the familiar, normal part. I took a total of seventeen train trips when I was traveling here two summers ago, so all of the familiar sights and sensations of train travel—little villages and the occasional castle zipping by at 200 kph; the gentle rumble of the train on the tracks; bilingual travel announcements over the loud speakers every half hour—lulled me into that sense of normality. Despite the familiarity, it was still great to travel by train again. Just being able to toss all your stuff into a backpack, jump on a train and go is so liberating. The scenery is gorgeous no matter where you’re headed, there’s plenty of legroom, and you can get up and walk the whole length of the train if you want to stretch.

Anyway, as I was saying, this past week I went down to Innsbruck, Austria to visit my friends Markus and Andrea, who stayed with me and my roommates last year in Ithaca. It was great to see them again, and Innsbruck was absolutely gorgeous. Somehow the fact that Innsbruck is smack dab in the middle of the Alps managed to escape me, so when these huge, craggy peaks exploded out of nowhere between Munich and Innsbruck I was quite taken aback. Everything is completely, totally flat for hundreds of miles around Hamburg, so it was awesome seeing mountains again.

Essentially the Austrian Arc de Triomphe, with the Alps in the background

The ski jump from the 1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics.

Andrea had class for the first couple days that I was in town, and Markus had a short trip that he had to go on that weekend, so for the first couple days I was on my own. The downtown section of Innsbruck is very pretty, so I spent a lot of time just bumming around the city, exploring, reading and writing in the shade of one of those classic European statue-on-a-pillar things. Austria is particularly famous for its coffee, so of course I checked out the coffee house scene quite a bit while I was out on my own. I've been searching for THE coffee house in Hamburg for weeks now: something with a good vibe, good coffee, comfortable furniture, etc. That was pretty much every coffee place in Ithaca, but after a long search I've yet to find something that can compare in Hamburg. Every place in Innsbruck was absolutely stupendous, which has made up for weeks of watery coffee and stiff couches up here in HH.

My first espresso and the most delicious chocolate muffin I've ever eaten in my life.

On the second day I actually chatted up a Korean guy who happened to be snapping photos of the previously mentioned statue-on-a-pillar while I was sitting there. He had a bicycle with two big side bags packed with camping gear and a little South Korean flag flying from the back, so I decided to get up and investigate. His English wasn't particularly good, but he could communicate the basics at any rate. He said he was doing a bike tour of Europe. He started in Paris, went all the way up to Brussels, came back down through Germany to Munich, was currently in Innsbruck, and planned to travel south and east to Bulgaria and then back north to the Czech Republic to finish it off. Quite a trip to say the least.

(Part 2 forthcoming! Because nobody likes a long-winded blog post.)

Quick update

Sorry for the dearth of posts recently. Last Wednesday I left for Innsbruck (as I wrote a little while ago), and I only got back yesterday. Currently in the middle of writing up a little summary of my time there, so you can look forward to that. Extra news:

1) Just moved into my new place tonight! Out of the blue update of course, but I did end up finding a room in Wilhelmsburg. Gott sei Dank as the Germans would say. Gott sei effing Dank.

2) Still have the rest of the week free because of fall break, which means lots of time to write. Probably gonna do a two-post series on Innsbruck, one on my new living arrangements, and then maybe another on...who knows. Stay tuned.

3) Been pretty lax about putting pictures online anywhere to show people, so you can look forward to a pictures post in the next few days as well.

The One Month Mark

Exactly one month ago today I was sitting on a bench in the train station underneath the Cologne airport, tired, smelly, strung out from 24+ hours of airports and airplanes, and not quite believing that I was back in Germany. The experience was at once new and familiar. Walking down city streets in Cologne carrying a huge backpack on my back, hearing and seeing German everywhere, dodging bikes on the sidewalk, was so reminiscent of my time in Berlin and my month long backpacking trip throughout Europe. The nostalgia was great, and every familiar sight and sound made me smile and shake my head a little. At the same time, though, I had just barely made the first few steps into a year-long journey into strange lands, miles away from friends, family, and everything I know and love. The rush of embarking on something new feels wonderful, but the reality of what you're doing ends up creeping into the back of your head at one point or another.

Those first couple days were a strange mix of happiness and sadness--at one moment I could be feeing like I was on top of the world, smiling so hard it hurts, when one little thing in a shop window sparks a memory, sucks the vitality out of my chest, and reminds me that I'm friendless and alone in a foreign country. These feelings have persisted more or less for my whole time here. The emotional ups and downs aren't as sharp as they used to be, but for every moment when I stop to think about what an incredible experience I've been having, there's another moment when my stomach sinks and I realize that I still don't have a very firm footing in Hamburg.

As I've been making my way through The Lord of the Rings in German, I've also been reading The Hobbit in English. I've never read it, and I figure it would good to give my brain an English break occasionally while I'm reading. I read a particularly relevant passage today. In the story, Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves, still in the first stages of their journey, have just left Rivendell and are slowly making their way up and over the Misty Mountains on their way to their final destination, Erebor, The Lonely Mountain:

Long days after they had climbed out of the valley and left the Last Homely House miles behind, they were still going up and up and up. It was a hard path and a dangerous path, a crooked way and a lonely and a long. Now they could look back over the lands they had left, laid out behind them far below. Far, far away in the West, where things were blue and faint, Bilbo knew there lay his own country of safe and comfortable things, and his little hobbit-hole. He shivered.

What a perfect metaphor for my own experience. At the start of The Hobbit Bilbo is a peaceful, complacent, boring individual; someone who would have been quite content to spend his entire life in the Shire and never embark on any sort of adventure or experience anything new. Throughout his travels he's constantly thinking back to his old, comfortable life, wondering why he ever forsook it to go out and risk his life in the wild. At the end of his travels, though, he's gained a taste for adventure and danger and travels in far and distant lands. At the beginning of The Lord of the Rings he's become so fed up with life in Hobbiton that he decides to leave it forever, traveling far away to live in Rivendell among the elves. I suppose I've been climbing the slope of the Misty Mountains for this past month, wet and cold in the rain, thinking back to Ithaca, Salt Lake City, my "safe and comfortable things." I get the feeling that I'm nearing a plateau soon, though. I can just make out a nice, flat spot on the slope where I can feel secure and sure of myself. It's been a slow and painstaking climb so far, but the slope is getting shallower.

Hopefully this part of the mountain has an apartment on it.

Herbstferien (fall break)

Well, we're officially at the end of the first phase of this whole adventure. There have been a few occasions to mark off the past few days as special: the fall break for Hamburg schools started on Friday, and goes for the next two weeks; today is the 20'th anniversary of the German Reunification; and in two days I will have been in Germany for one month. On one hand it seems a little crazy that I've already been here for one month of my ten month stay, but when you stop to think back, the time has actually gone kind of slowly. I've had to learn and adjust so much to life over here, and each day is full of different challenges and new things, so it seems that things that happened even a week ago are way in the past since there's been so much that has happened in the interim.

For the next couple weeks I'm going to be traveling around a little bit, seeing as I've got the whole fall break to myself, and don't have any particular desire to just hang around here with nothing to do. Last fall in Ithaca my roommates and I hosted a couple Couchsurfers from Germany and Austria for about a week, and had a really great time hanging out with them and showing them the town. They both go to school in Innsbruck, so I'm gonna try to arrange a trip down there to see them again. One of the girls I was in Berlin with last summer, Patty, is still living in the city and working there as a bartender, so I'm going to head up there for a few days as well.

Still clipping right along and picking up a lot of German. One of the interesting things that happens when I speak a lot of German is that I really stop to take a second look at the things I say in English. I wrote an email earlier today and used the phrase "as luck would have it." When you sit down and think about it, "as luck would have it" doesn't make a lot of sense, at least through the lens of the German language. I know intellectually that it's a synonym for coincidentally, but at the same time it takes a lot of thought to tease out the meaning. I've also been making my way through The Lord of the Rings (aka Der Herr der Ringe) in German. I read it in English this summer, so I thought that reading the translation would be a good way to pick up more vocabulary. So far it's actually going pretty well, I'm about 50 pages and two chapters in. Initially it took a ton of time to read just a single page, and I had to stop and think about certain words for a long time for a sentence or paragraph to make sense, but I've been getting faster as I've been going along.

Also, if I can make an aside, noticed something funny about that last sentence when I went back and read it. I wrote "it took a ton of time to read just a single page," which is more of a German sentence construction than an English one (in German: "Es hat viel Zeit gebraucht, nur eine Seite zu lesen."). If my brain was in English mode I would have written "it took a ton of time JUST to read a single page." I catch myself doing stuff like that all the time.

And, lastly, I've thrown in the towel on the apartment search for the time being. Things are just too ridiculous right now with the semester starting and so many students looking for places to stay. Gesche has said it's no problem if I stick around a little longer, and a lot of the teachers at school have said that they have extra rooms if I need a place to stay, so I'm gonna take advantage of the options available to me and try to wait out this first wave of apartment searchers. Plus I'm not going to have an opportunity like fall break to travel around for a while, so I figure I'll let it rest for a couple weeks, go out and have some fun, and come back refreshed. Better than staying here hitting my head against a wall and stressing out.

America is pervert

Here are a few updates on life in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (Hamburg's official title):

This past Friday I went to the Reeperbahn Festival with a couple other Fulbrighters. The festival lasted the whole weekend, with three days worth of music featuring artists from all over the world. The Reeperbahn is Hamburg's red light district, and one of the big nightlife neighborhoods (the other being Sternschanze, which I wrote about a couple posts ago). For 29 Euros you got a wristband for the night and could go into any of the clubs and bars and check out the music. There weren't any huge acts, but Cee Lo Green (the singer in Gnarls Barkley) did a show at 11:00. He has an unbelievably high, clear voice, and Gnarls Barkley is an awesome band, so we all decided to go check him out. The concert definitely didn't disappoint. There were a ton of other people there, the set was really solid, and I even got interviewed by a German news station while I was waiting in line outside. Quality evening all in all. Here's a link to one of Gnarls Barkley's big singles, and a link to one of Cee Lo's singles.

So far as apartments go--I thought I found something pretty solid, but a second visit to the apartment totally changed my mind about the place. For one it got more expensive between visits; originally the room was 370, but one of the current roommates moved into that room, and their old room would have been 410, which is more than half of my stipend. Plus there were a few things about the place that might have made it tough to get rid of if I didn't like it, and I was getting some sketchy vibes from the roommates, so I had to say no. Yet another reiteration of a timeless lesson that seems to pop up over and over: there's no such thing as a done deal.

I did look at another place last night which actually seemed really great though: 300/month, and only about 20 minutes by bus and subway to the school, which is awesome considering that my current commute is 50+ minutes with two bus lines which are always late. Told the guy yes this afternoon, and he's gonna call me back with his decision on Thursday after he meets and greets with a few other people. Fingers crossed.

Also had an interesting experience in one of my 11'th grade classes today. We split the class up; the main teacher taught one part of the class, and I showed a small group a short BBC video about violence in Johannesburg, South Africa, and lead a discussion about it. Which, by the way, I did a fantastic job with considering I only found out what I was supposed to be doing in class about 45 minutes beforehand, but I digress. We strayed somehow to where I was from (the USA), and one of the girls (not the strongest English speaker in the world) told me that "America is pervert." When I asked her to elaborate on that...rather opinionated statement, she said that she saw all sorts of perverted things on MTV, which I guess lead her to assume that all of America is totally immoral. I tried to explain to her that America is just a country like anywhere else on the earth, but she wouldn't have any of it.

It didn't particularly offend me, and that's the first thing I've ever experienced in Europe that even comes close to anti-Americanism, but it was still a little disappointing. I'm pretty well traveled and educated, so I've definitely got a better perspective of the world than a German teenager who's probably never been outside the country, so I suppose I can't fault her for it. I suppose she'll (hopefully) learn the truth one way or another, but it gave me pause to think about what different cultures perceive as perverse. If your experience with American culture consists entirely of Lady Gaga and Jersey Shore, then you're going to get a distorted view of things. It's also very interesting that someone who lives in a country where topless women are pretty standard advertising tools and where prostitution is legal (and taxed) could ever call the United States, a country full of Christine O'Donnells, Baptist churches, and anti-obscenity laws, perverse. That would be a good lesson/series of lessons to do--different perceptions of perversity and morality between the United States and Germany. I'll have to ask the teacher if we can put that together after fall break or something.

A Scene

[Hamburg, 10:00 AM, Friday. Partially cloudy, chance of showers.]

[Telephone rings]

Andy: Hello, Rosaline?
Rosaline: Yes?
Andy: Hi, my name is Andy. I'm looking for a room to rent and I saw your listing on WG-Gesucht.
Rosaline: Sorry, we've already had so many responses that we can't make any more viewing appointments.
Andy: Umm...it's 10:00 in the morning right now.
Rosaline: Yes.
Andy: And the listing was put up at 8:25 today.
Rosaline: Yes.
Andy: And you already aren't scheduling any new viewing appointments.
Rosaline: Yes.

[Pause for disbelief]

Andy: ...have a nice day.

[Scene.]

Language acquisition

When I landed in Cologne two and a half weeks ago I could barely speak any German at all. It was a pretty unpleasant surprise. I'd spent most of the summer writing emails in German and taking care of official forms that were all in German, which sort of "woke up" the language in my head again (if that makes sense), so I thought that I'd be reasonably competent when I hit the ground. Turns out the exact opposite was true--I hadn't taken a German course or really spoken it seriously since summer 2009, so most of the progress I'd made and the confidence I used to have pretty much evaporated out of my head.

In this past little while, though, I've really made a ton of progress. I'm learning a lot of new words, and finding that I'm sort of automatically correcting my grammar without thinking about it. Plus a huge part of speaking a foreign language is simply having the confidence to actually do it. If you're nervous and scared of tripping over your words and making mistakes, then that's exactly what's going to happen in a conversation.

I could really see the difference in my speaking confidence between my first week in Hamburg my second week in Hamburg. During the first week I had to "anmelden," which means I had to register my address with the city government. This is the first and easiest of all the little hoops you have to jump through to live and work here, but I was still struggling with the language and was pretty intimidated by the German Bureaucracy Machine, so I really made a much bigger ordeal of it than it actually was. During my second visit a few days ago I applied for my visa, which is a much more complicated and time consuming process. Since I was sort of familiar with how the system works in the Eimsbüttel Bezirksamt, and I had one more week's worth of German under my belt, things went so much better. It's kind of hard to gauge how much progress you're making in language acquisition sometimes, so having those two experiences to compare to each other was very helpful.

I'm finding it really, really surprising how difficult it is to totally, 100% immerse myself in German though. You'd think that when you're living in Germany with a German family and working with Germans and spending the vast majority of your time around Germans that you'd rarely ever use English, but that's really not the case. Anytime I'm writing emails or on the computer everything is in English, almost all Germans speak English, and I'm teaching English in school, so sometimes I kind of have to work to speak German for a majority of the day.

I'm also discovering that I have to stick to one language or another when I'm speaking or even thinking. If I try to switch back and forth between languages too quickly I can't speak either very well--I forget words, form sentences incorrectly, start mixing in German with my English and vice versa, it's just a mess. It affects my writing too. Sometimes when I'm proofreading these blog posts I come across something I wrote and think, "What?! Well....that doesn't make sense at all does it?" I experienced this last summer when I was in Berlin too, but it's still fascinating to see the different ways that being between two languages affects your ability to communicate. It's something so incredibly basic that we never think about it, so it's an incredible eye-opener when the way you communicate changes so drastically--when you start to lose your grasp on your own native tongue. Fascinating stuff for sure.

Moments / Apartment Update

Sometimes a moment can have a really powerful impact. Life has a way of shifting and slipping around so that you lose track of what's happening after a while. Oftentimes I get so caught up in the movement of everything that I can't step back and look at things from a proper perspective. The past few months in particular have been an absolute whirlwind, so with everything that's been happening it's been tough to take those steps back and look around. It's not until I snag up against something and get caught in a moment that I can take a little rest and get a fresh glimpse of where I am. Today I went back and read a blog entry written by my old roommate Ryan, checked the calendar, and realized it's been a whole two and a half months since I moved out of my apartment in Ithaca, NY. We're coming up on four months since graduation this Thursday. That was one enormous moment of realization for me right there, I've been sitting here thinking about it for a while.

I'm not even sure what to make of these little milestones to be honest. On one hand it's sad. I really enjoyed myself in Ithaca, and it still remains as one of the coolest, most vibrant, most unique little towns in the entire world. College was an absolute blast, and it's a little sad to think that all of the classes, Voicestream rehearsals, late night paper writing sessions, and everything else that goes with the whole college scene is all behind me. It's gonna be pretty rare event that even a small percentage of the people with whom I interacted with on a day to day basis are ever going to be in one spot at the same time ever again. It can be a little sobering to think about the post-graduation diaspora sometimes: all of your friends in different cities, doing different things, leading separate lives.

At the same time, though, I've had a number of moments since I arrived in Germany that have forced me to stop and reflect on what an awesome, unique experience this year is going to be (and already has been). This past week Gesche and Manfred's niece, Leifka, had a birthday, so on Sunday the Ketels and I loaded up into the car and headed off to Kiel to the birthday party, which consisted of lunch with Gesche's sister and the rest of the extended family. I was sitting at the dinner table, helping myself to yet another serving of bread, butter, and salami (incredibly common meal around here, I've just about had my fill of it so far), when I sat back and realized that I was in Schleswig-Holstein celebrating a nine-year-old's birthday party and fumbling my way through all-German conversations with her dad on topics ranging from Utah's economy to the difference between private and public universities in the United States. And to think that a mere three weeks ago I was dashing around the house, packing and planning, saying goodbye, stressing out, and endlessly imagining what this whole experience was going to be like, which has so far been absolutely nothing like I anticipated. Nothing like stopping to appreciate those exceptionally absurd moments to snap you out of the overpowering rush of a new experience.

---

Apartment hunt still continues, but I'm having more success than I was as of the last post. I've really hustled the hell out of this thing. I've given up on emailing (there's pretty much zero hope of getting answered via email), more and more posts are cropping up with phone numbers, and I'm getting more comfortable and assertive during roommate tryouts. So far I've keyed in on one apartment that seems like a good option. The neighborhood is kinda bleak, but the place has a number of things going for it: it's about a ten minute walk from the center of town, it's absolutely huge (360 square meters), and Marcus, the guy who showed me around, seemed like a really cool guy. I'm meeting up with him again tomorrow evening so I can get a second opinion and get to know his roommates better.

Roommate tryouts

Before arriving here I'd heard from a bunch of different people that finding an apartment in Hamburg was difficult. Feeling a little self-assured and dismissive, I downplayed everybody's words in my head. To my imagination the insurmountable, horrifying difficulties that everybody was talking about were grossly exaggerated. Overreactions to a task with a medium difficulty level at best. What could be more basic than simply finding a place to stay? After all, this isn't NYC or something, and Hamburg has fewer residents than Salt Lake City. What was there to be afraid of or nervous about?

Answer: everything. My underestimation of the housing situation in this city has come full circle and kicked me right in the ass. Finding a place to live in Hamburg has been an incredibly frustrating and hopeless process. For one, there are pretty much two resources that you can turn to to find something: http://www.wg-gesucht.de, and the bulletin boards on Hamburg University's campus. Craigslist practically doesn't exist in Germany, and all you find on other housing websites are duplicates of the listings you see on wg-gesucht. Campus bulletin boards, on the other hand, are full of people who are looking for apartments themselves, and precious few actual bulletins advertising apartments.

And you have competition. As in hordes and hordes of other students looking for shared living accommodations. I can't think of a better word for the ruthless and persistent crush of people who are flooding the scene. For a single listing in a single apartment there will literally be about 150 other people who are all fighting for the room. Absolutely no exaggeration on that number. This goes for all parts of the city and all types of apartments. So far I've sent out 20 inquiry emails with 20 additional follow up emails after I wasn't responded to, and I STILL haven't had a response.

Yesterday, however, I finally found a listing with a phone number, and called to set up an appointment to see the place. Little did I know that this wasn't actually an apartment showing, but more like roommate tryouts. There were five or six other people in the apartment, all being chatted up by the people currently living there and shown around the premises at once. The odds of what I'm up against are pretty bleak: a roughly 1:15 chance of simply being replied back to when you inquire about an apartment listing, and then 1:6 (depending on the place) of finally scoring the room once you land an apartment showing. Rough stuff. Thank god I still have another two weeks with the Ketels, I'm going to need every day of my remaining time with them.

This has put me in a pretty grim mood for the most part, but let's not end on a low note. After a particularly frustrating day of apartment searching (which included getting rained on without an umbrella and getting splashed by a car driving through a puddle on the side of the road), I found that I was in a much better mood after putting in a couple hours at the school. I'm not doing real lessons yet, but helping out the students with their work and assisting the teachers in their classrooms just puts me in an incredibly good mood. Probably a good indication that I've keyed into something worthwhile! And I've finally managed to put together a few other meetings with some people on WG-Gesucht, so all of the tooth and nail clawing and fighting is finally paying off a little bit. The situation isn't quite hopeless, I'm sure I'll land something eventually.

Second day in school

Today I had my second day in the school. For the next week or so I'm going to be going to a lot of different classes, introducing myself, and helping out with lessons a bit so I can get a feel for how it's done. So far it's been an extremely...varied experience to be sure. On Monday I was a little depressed at the end of the day, since the 10'th grade students I saw were so wild and unruly. They barely had any respect at all for their teachers, and half of the teachers' attention and energy had to be focused on simply getting the students to stop talking to each other and pay attention to the lesson. I was getting mental flashes of inner-city Baltimore schools and wondering if I'd be spending my Big Important Fulbright Year out here just working as a babysitter for uncontrollable kids.

Today, however, was a ton better. I started out with the 11'th grade classes, which is the highest level of class at this particular school, and there was an incredible difference in the students between 10'th and 11'th grade, like day and night. They were all very attentive, and their English was excellent, so I got to have some more fun with them and didn't have to simplify my sentences too much. It's a huge mental challenge trying to cut corners around difficult words and substitute in words and phrases that students will understand, especially having just gotten out of an environment like college where a heightened vocabulary is pretty much expected. The younger kids are a little more "fun" to work with, since their energy level is a lot higher than that of the older students, but it was still good to relax my brain a little bit in the upper classes.

Speaking of younger kids, I also got to work with a 6'th grade class today. That 45 minutes was quite a trip. Speaking 10-year-old English to a German kid is a challenge enough by itself, but simply interacting with children that young is something else entirely. There's definitely a reason that you have to get a specialized elementary education degree to teach at this level, the kids' needs are so different from older students, and they behave so differently. During the class the kids were working on the present tense ("I am going to work." "I am reading a book." etc.), so for most of the class I put on the best elementary teacher front I could and walked around the classroom helping them out with their worksheets.

Andy: "So what sentence do we have here little guy? 'My uncle sometimes _______ his pipe.' What could go in the blank?"
6'th Grader: "Ummm.....drink?"
Andy: "Noooo. That doesn't make sense. Can you drink a pipe?"
6'th Grader: "No."
Andy: "What do you do with a pipe?"
6'th Grader: "...smoke?"
Andy: "Yes! Exactly. You smoke a pipe, that is correct. So that's what goes in the blank!"

Every time I walk into a new class the students always sit me down and ask me a bunch of questions about the USA and about myself. I mentioned this a few posts before, but one of the most interesting things about this whole experience is seeing Amerika reflected through the lens of what the students at this school have learned. They always ask the same questions and have the same impressions. Amerika for these guys is a one gigantic Los Angelis, full of sunshine, movie stars, rap artists, money, and really hot girls on university campuses. I'm only half-kidding. They're constantly asking me questions like "Do you know any stars?" and "How much did your clothes cost?" I whipped out my iPod to check the time in front of a few younger students at the bus stop, and I was instantly the most important person in the world, just for flashing this one single expensive status symbol. If only they knew the truth--that the USA is just like any other country in the world. It has its fair share of homeless people, drugs, compact cars, grocery stores, schools, and normal, everyday people just trying to raise families and make a living for themselves. Maybe I'll be able to impart a more normal impression of the United States to them during my time here.

Still searching for an apartment, still zero luck. I am hitting these apartment websites really hard, but "nichts hat geklappt" as the saying goes. Gonna write a bunch of follow-up emails to the people I've already contacted and hope for the best.

Sternschanze and die Wohnungssuche

I met up with a couple other Fulbrighters last night who I met at orientation and headed out on the town a little bit. One of the big nightlife scenes here in Hamburg is the Sternschanze neighborhood. On the whole Hamburg is really clean and nice, but Sternschanze is definitely reminiscent of the stuff that I saw while I was in Berlin last summer, one of those blood and vomit on the sidewalk kinds of neighborhoods. (don't worry Mom, everything is perfectly safe there, I promise.) I'm personally kind of attracted to the grittiness, it adds that uniquely urban touch to the place that you don't get in small-town Ithaca or suburban Salt Lake City. It was a tame night, we had our share of Alster out of plastic bottles and turned in super early by European standards (I was back home by 1 AM, and that's when the party starts over here).

Currently I'm in the living room trying to find an apartment. In big German cities in particular it's hard to find a place, and all of us in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, etc., are having a tough time. I spoke to one girl at orientation who said she had to send out 30 emails before she got a response, hopefully I'll have a little more luck than that. Gesche and family have said that I can stay with them for a little longer if nothing works out, but I'm hoping I'll be able to find something by the end of my three weeks here. Gonna be hard to leave this family though, they are so incredibly nice. We have breakfast and dinner together every day, I don't have to buy any groceries or anything, they let me have Jakob's old cell phone since he recently got a new one (just have to buy a SIM card and some minutes to use it), I lucked out incredibly by finding them.

And tomorrow I have my first official day at the school! I'm not going to be teaching, just introducing myself to a couple classes and observing some lessons, but I'm excited to start! I've got a pretty wide spread of classes that I'm going to be assistant teaching in--from 7'th grade all the way up to 10'th and 11'th--so it'll be a really varied experience, and I'll get to do a lot of different lessons with the classes, given their different ability levels.