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.

Gut in Hamburg angekommen!

Well, ich bin endlich hier! After months and months of plotting and planning and filling out applications and submitting an endless number of forms I have finally arrived in Hamburg, Germany for the start of my Fulbright Grant. For those not in the know: this past year I applied to be a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Germany. I was awarded the grant this past March, and for the next ten months I'm going to be living and working in Hamburg, assistant teaching English at the Gesamtschule Eidelstedt. I am of course incredibly excited and grateful to be taking part in this. It's going to be an absolutely fantastic year, and now that I'm a week into the grant I thought I'd fill you in with a little news on what's been happening.

Anyway, I left this past Friday from Salt Lake City to Cologne via Chicago and London. Quite a flight for sure; I was in airplanes and airports and trains for over 24 hours, and I slept for 15 when I finally arrived. I spent a day recuperating in the city, and the following Monday all of the other German Fulbrighters and I loaded into a bus and headed to Haus Altenberg for our three-day orientation. The orientation was great. Having spent the week before departure losing sleep and thinking non-stop about the enormity of what I was about to undertake (10+ months in a foreign country, tens of thousands of miles away from everything I know and love), it was comforting to be surrounded by a lot of other people experiencing the exact same thing. We went over a bunch of information related to the program and what exactly the assistant teaching job entails, and at the end we got to do mock lessons to get a little practice in teaching, getting critiques from our teachers and the other grantees. All in all a great experience, and I met some really awesome, friendly people too.

Yesterday I boarded a train from Cologne to Hamburg, which took about four hours, and met up with the host family that I'm going to be staying with until I can find an apartment of my own. For the next three weeks I'm going to be living with Gesche and Manfred Ketels and their 16-year-old son Jakob. So far they've been super friendly and helpful. Last summer I spent six weeks in Berlin doing a short-term study abroad, and I had a bad experience with the lady I was staying with, Katja. I sort of walked into Katja's life at a bad time (she had just gotten out of a pretty serious relationship about a week before I arrived), and our personalities were not terribly compatible to begin with, so I was nervous to see what the Ketels would be like. Thankfully they are all much better adjusted than Katja was, so I'm going to feel right at home while I'm here.

And just today I got to go to the school to meet all the teachers and see the students I'll be teaching! It was an incredible rush getting on the bus this morning and setting out to do what I've been planning for and thinking about for over a year and a half now. I kept on having thoughts like, "Well, five more stops now, can't be far," "Oh man, that's a really little kid, I think he's probably going to the school," "Here come five more. My god, I'm probably going to be teaching these guys," "A school zone! Aaaah! we're getting really close now." Stepping off the bus and walking into the school was really something else, it's a little strange to be on the other side of the education system after having graduated from college only four months ago.

The kids were absolutely fascinated by me. They would flock and crowd around me when I came into their classrooms like I was some kind of celebrity--a foreign oddity from far and distant lands. I guess the ruse we're playing on them is that I don't speak any German, so they could only speak to me in English. They were super excited to test out the phrases they knew on me, some of which included:

"Do you play for the Utah Jazz?"
"Do you come from England?"
"How much did your shoes cost?"
"How old are you?"
"Do you know Beyonce/Michael Jackson/Barack Obama?"
"Do you have a gun?"

Really interesting to see what they've learned about America through the international culture filter. Germans are big on basketball, but the Jazz question was surprising, especially considering they haven't been any good since the 90's, which is when a lot of these kids were born. A few of the students were pretty, um, forward as well. When one of the girls asked me how old I was, and I told her 22, one of the boys from the back chimed in with, "Ach so, he is too old for you!" A little later one of the other girls came up to me, told me that I am "very beautiful." I just sorta smiled and nodded and said thank you.

In the near future is: getting further integrated into the school (observing lessons, etc.), buying a phone and taking care of visas and bank accounts and immigration forms, and finding an apartment of my own. I am so incredibly stoked to be doing this. Unimaginably so. Any and all fears and trepidations I had about this before I left are pretty much gone, I'm just loving it so far. I'm gonna be diligent about keeping this updated, so check back to see what's happening!