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.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, October 22, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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.
Friday, October 15, 2010
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.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
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.
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.)
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.)
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
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:
Hopefully this part of the mountain has an apartment on it.
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.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
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.
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.
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