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.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
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.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
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.
---
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.
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.
---
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)