Well ladies and gentlemen, dear readers, it looks like we've reached the end of this blog. No more Fulbright means no more Fulbright blog! However, a number of people have expressed interest in hearing from me as I make my way across Europe this summer, so I started up another blog to detail my travels.
You can find the link here: http://largerway.blogspot.com/.
I won't be able to get to it as much or spend as much time on the entries as I have in this blog, so don't expect anything of the length or quality you've read here, but I'll get to it as best as I can. I will, of course, be sailing through the islands of Denmark/out on the North Sea for the first week and a half of this adventure, so don't expect an update out of me for a little bit!
Tschüss, as they say around here! As I said before, thank you so much for reading, and I hope to be able to give you at least a little taste of my journey this summer.
Andy
Saturday, July 2, 2011
THE END
A year ago today, I was doing pretty much exactly what I'm doing now--packing up all my things, moving out, and saying goodbye to my friends who were still in Ithaca. I graduated in the middle of May, and stuck around in the city for an extra month since I still had some time on my lease. I used it to unwind and relax from the crazy whirlwind that had been the weeks and months leading up to graduation. I drank a lot of coffee, spent a lot of time outside just enjoying Ithaca in the summer, and said a proper goodbye to all of the people and places I had felt so connected with for the past four years.
And here I am again, in the middle of packing and saying goodbye to Hamburg in my head. It always surprises me how quickly the atmosphere of a room can change. Take down a couple posters, bring down some books from a bookshelf, empty a dresser, and all of a sudden your apartment changes from a place where you live to a place where you lived. Shocking how the things and places you call home can have such a temporary nature to them.
It's all been a fantastic, wonderful time, but it has now come to it's inevitable end. What to say about the experience now that I'm at the end of it? Could I even begin to capture all of the things I've learned and done and seen in the past ten months? Find some way to bring it to a pretty, neat conclusion? I guess the easiest, most accurate way to summarize it all is also one of the shortest: it changed me. This year in Germany has changed me in so many different ways that it's hard for me to even express it or put it into words.
And when I say "change" I don't mean some nice, lovely, gradual process of personal discovery and self-improvement. At the very beginning this experience came up and slapped me in the face and demanded my whole and undivided attention. Right from the start I was dropped into an incredibly difficult position: I was in a new city on the other side of the world, with no friends or family, no apartment, a rudimentary and rusty grasp of the language, and a new job for which I'd had about two-and-a-half days of orientation.
Not only that, but the school itself was yet another hurdle to overcome: a so called integrated school, with a huge number of students with social, behavioral, and educational issues, and an 80% immigrant population. In one of my first periods at the school I unintentionally started a quasi-race fight between a group of Turks and Germans in a 10'th grade class. What had started the fight? A student asked what my favorite thing about Germany is, and, for lack of a better answer, I told her that "Döner," a Turkish kebab, was my favorite thing. Another Turkish student raised her had and wanted to make sure that I knew that Döner was a Turkish invention, not a German one, which started up all sorts of mean and offensive yelling from the Germans on the other side of the classroom. I remember taking the bus home that day and wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into.
This, as you can imagine, was incredibly overwhelming. Finding my footing in Hamburg was like trying to run in sneakers across a skating rink covered in wet ice. For a solid month I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and each setback--each time I lost my traction on the ice and face planted--hit me so hard psychologically.
It's so interesting looking back at the beginning and reading posts like this and this, and remembering what it was like. For a while it was incredibly hard; coming over here and getting myself started in Hamburg was one of the most difficult things I've ever done with my life. But after a while the strangeness and newness started to fade away, and Hamburg transformed from a city where I felt displaced and lonely and uncomfortable to a place where I feel really, really at home. It's all a process of adjustment I guess. After a prolonged and aggravating search, I finally found a place to live after a few weeks, and even got used to the 1:30 commute to my school. I worked as hard as I could to speak and read as much German as I could, and progressed to a level I wouldn't have dreamed possible at the beginning of the year. After coming to accept that the students were going to challenge me I started learning how to deal with them, and came to really enjoy going to school. And, after a while, Hamburg changed from a city full of strangers to a city full of friends (corny sentence, I know, but it's true).
In fact, it barely feels right to have written a post like this, considering where I am nowadays. Writing about all the difficulties I had doesn't really feel like an appropriate way to represent the year since they lasted for such a short time, but the effect that all of those challenges had ended up being the point of the experience in the end. Had I never come out here--never transplanted myself into this place and undergone all of the stress and pain of adjustment that came along with it--then I would have never changed in the ways I have, never grown. I am such a different person because of it all, and that will be the most valuable thing I take away from these ten months.
I'm sad to finally come to the end of this year, but I cannot imagine it turning out better than it did. So, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who helped to make it so good: the Fulbright Commission for always being available to answer my questions and for offering me the chance to have this experience; my friends and family back home for always providing me support and encouragement; the Ketels, my host family, for providing such amazing support for me during my first few weeks here; my mentor and my colleagues at school for being so helpful in integrating me into the school and teaching me how to teach; my landlady for giving me a place to stay and always being around to chat in the afternoons; all of the bartenders in the Sternschanze and the Kiez; whoever invented the Franzbrötchen and Mexikaner; and, finally, every single person I met and befriended while I was over here--you made this year what it was, and I am incredibly grateful to have shared it with you.
And that, as they say, is that. I'll leave you with a few of my favorite photos of the year, and say thank you for reading! I enjoyed writing as much as you enjoyed following along.
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| Skipping rocks at Third Dam Gorge in Ithaca. |
It's all been a fantastic, wonderful time, but it has now come to it's inevitable end. What to say about the experience now that I'm at the end of it? Could I even begin to capture all of the things I've learned and done and seen in the past ten months? Find some way to bring it to a pretty, neat conclusion? I guess the easiest, most accurate way to summarize it all is also one of the shortest: it changed me. This year in Germany has changed me in so many different ways that it's hard for me to even express it or put it into words.
And when I say "change" I don't mean some nice, lovely, gradual process of personal discovery and self-improvement. At the very beginning this experience came up and slapped me in the face and demanded my whole and undivided attention. Right from the start I was dropped into an incredibly difficult position: I was in a new city on the other side of the world, with no friends or family, no apartment, a rudimentary and rusty grasp of the language, and a new job for which I'd had about two-and-a-half days of orientation.
Not only that, but the school itself was yet another hurdle to overcome: a so called integrated school, with a huge number of students with social, behavioral, and educational issues, and an 80% immigrant population. In one of my first periods at the school I unintentionally started a quasi-race fight between a group of Turks and Germans in a 10'th grade class. What had started the fight? A student asked what my favorite thing about Germany is, and, for lack of a better answer, I told her that "Döner," a Turkish kebab, was my favorite thing. Another Turkish student raised her had and wanted to make sure that I knew that Döner was a Turkish invention, not a German one, which started up all sorts of mean and offensive yelling from the Germans on the other side of the classroom. I remember taking the bus home that day and wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into.
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| One of the main buildings on the school campus. |
It's so interesting looking back at the beginning and reading posts like this and this, and remembering what it was like. For a while it was incredibly hard; coming over here and getting myself started in Hamburg was one of the most difficult things I've ever done with my life. But after a while the strangeness and newness started to fade away, and Hamburg transformed from a city where I felt displaced and lonely and uncomfortable to a place where I feel really, really at home. It's all a process of adjustment I guess. After a prolonged and aggravating search, I finally found a place to live after a few weeks, and even got used to the 1:30 commute to my school. I worked as hard as I could to speak and read as much German as I could, and progressed to a level I wouldn't have dreamed possible at the beginning of the year. After coming to accept that the students were going to challenge me I started learning how to deal with them, and came to really enjoy going to school. And, after a while, Hamburg changed from a city full of strangers to a city full of friends (corny sentence, I know, but it's true).
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| Loic's birthday party in our living room. |
In fact, it barely feels right to have written a post like this, considering where I am nowadays. Writing about all the difficulties I had doesn't really feel like an appropriate way to represent the year since they lasted for such a short time, but the effect that all of those challenges had ended up being the point of the experience in the end. Had I never come out here--never transplanted myself into this place and undergone all of the stress and pain of adjustment that came along with it--then I would have never changed in the ways I have, never grown. I am such a different person because of it all, and that will be the most valuable thing I take away from these ten months.
I'm sad to finally come to the end of this year, but I cannot imagine it turning out better than it did. So, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who helped to make it so good: the Fulbright Commission for always being available to answer my questions and for offering me the chance to have this experience; my friends and family back home for always providing me support and encouragement; the Ketels, my host family, for providing such amazing support for me during my first few weeks here; my mentor and my colleagues at school for being so helpful in integrating me into the school and teaching me how to teach; my landlady for giving me a place to stay and always being around to chat in the afternoons; all of the bartenders in the Sternschanze and the Kiez; whoever invented the Franzbrötchen and Mexikaner; and, finally, every single person I met and befriended while I was over here--you made this year what it was, and I am incredibly grateful to have shared it with you.
And that, as they say, is that. I'll leave you with a few of my favorite photos of the year, and say thank you for reading! I enjoyed writing as much as you enjoyed following along.
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| In the London Eye with a group of the eight graders who went along on the class trip. |
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| Reading a story to one of my teachers' kids. I celebrated Christmas Eve with them. |
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| John, Me, Karl, another Fulbrighter, Brendan, and Kiersten. Sitting on the fountain in Alexanderplatz during the Fulbright Conference in March. |
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| Sunset in Katharinenheerd, where I celebrated Easter with the Ketels. |
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| Thanksgiving dinner at Karl's place. |
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| Spring on the Alster. |
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Summer Plans
Since before coming over to Germany I've been planning to do a lot of traveling this summer. The travel agency that Fulbright set us all up with, STA Travel, lets you book a return ticket pretty much anytime you like so long as it's within 365 days of your flight to Germany, so I've got my return set for August 30'th. From June 3rd to August 30'th I'll be on the proverbial road: eight-and-a-half weeks out in the world. The planning for all of it has been a little stressful, especially considering the fact that I'm planning and doing everything pretty much 100% solo, as opposed to my last backpacking trip when I was traveling with my friend Alex from the Berlin program, but I am unbelievably stoked to be doing it! I've worked up a really excellent itinerary so far, and while it's not completely set in stone just yet, I'll share the rough outline of what everything is shaping up to look like:
PART ONE: For the first week and a half of July I will, as the famous Lonely Island refrain goes, literally be on a boat. A little while ago one of the other Fulbrighters in Kiel who's really into the sailing scene up there put up a link to this website. The organization, ELSA (English Learning Sailing Adventures), now in its second year, does English learning sailing trips for German students. Essentially you jump on board a ship, learn how to sail, and get two hours of English instruction per day. This, of course, struck me as an amazingly cool opportunity, and I sent the guy who runs everything an email asking if I could come aboard and work. Not only did I get a spot on the trip, but in exchange for teaching I get the whole thing for free! So from the 4'th of July to the 13'th I'll be on the Gulden Leeuw (Dutch for Golden Lion). We're departing from Kiel, sailing up through Denmark, and then setting out westward on the North Sea, ending in Aberdeen, Scotland. Not a bad way to start things off!
PART TWO: I'll disembark in Aberdeen, and meet up with my girlfriend Jessie. She's staying in Germany for a couple weeks after our grant period ends, so before she flies back to the US we'll meet up and travel in Scotland for a few days. We'll be spending one night in Aberdeen and two in Edinburgh. After that she'll fly back and I'll be riding the rails for about a week-and-a-half. This part of the trip is still a little vague, and I've got several options I've been thinking of:
1) The first is a trip up to the Isle of Skye, one of the islands in northern Scotland. I've been looking at pictures and reading descriptions of the rock formations and castles and mountains and hiking trails up there, and it looks like such a unique, fascinating place. In the last stage of the journey (more on that in a bit) I'm going to be doing a ton of hiking, so hiking around the Isle of Skye would be a good way to warm up. If I take this option I'd probably spend a few days up on the island and travel further in Scotland afterwards.
2) The second option would be to spend a lot of time in Ireland, which is endlessly recommended to me every time I talk about traveling in Europe. Everyone says to get out to the coast and to check out the rural parts of Ireland, and I would really love to get out and experience that. Nature is something I've seen very little of, having lived in the second largest city in Germany for ten months now, so it sounds particularly appealing to get out into some of the more remote parts of the island. I was talking to one of my friends last night, Marie Eve, who traveled there a little while ago, and she said she'd never seen such green grass or an ocean quite that color in her life. Out of all the places she's ever traveled to in Europe she said Ireland was her favorite--a solid recommendation if I've ever heard one.
3) Another option is to visit my former roommate Loic in Cambridge, in the south of England, for a day or so. He's been working at a language school there for a year or two, and he'll be there over the summer before going back to school in the fall. It was a fabulous time living with him over the course of the year (living with good roommates is such an important part of feeling at home in a place), and it hardly seems right to be in the area and not visit him. The only thing is that he's incredibly busy when he's down there, so it may not end up that I get to see very much of him if I visit. But we'll see how it turns out.
PART THREE: The final stretch of the trip, and in a lot of ways the one I'm looking forward to the most, is something called the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The Camino is an ancient pilgrim's path in northern Spain, which runs from St. Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in the northwest corner of Spain. The path runs all the way along Spain lengthwise, and it is about 800 kilometers in total. Here's a map of the route so you can get an idea of what it looks like. A while ago one of the girls who was in IC Voicestream with me, KC Englander, did a documentary on the Camino, where she traveled along the route with a film crew and documented the experiences of the people walking it. You can visit the website for the documentary here and check out the trailer for the film (as yet uncompleted) here. At the time I thought it would be an amazing thing to do, but forgot about it until yet another ICVSer, Shannon, walked part of it a few weeks ago.
It is going to be very intense: five straight weeks of walking 25+ kilometers a day (16+ miles), but it appeals to me for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it's just a damn cool thing to do. Countless tens of thousands have done a European rail journey (including me!), but there's something special about doing a hike like this. Out in the wilderness, taking my time, seeing a part of Europe that few people get to experience, it's a very unique opportunity. I've been looking at photos and watching videos and reading up on it, and it looks so staggeringly beautiful in places.
Secondly, there's a simplicity to it that I wouldn't get if I traveled somewhere else. One of the worst things about traveling in Europe, ESPECIALLY during the summer, is the maddening logistics of it all. Where am I going? What am I going to see? How long am I staying? Where am I going to stay? How much does it cost? Where am I going after that? Am I missing out on something by traveling to destination X instead of destination Y? Ad nauseum. Not only do you have to make an endless series of very complex decisions while trying to enjoy the trip at the same time, but you're almost competing with the other tourists around you while you're doing it. In 2009 I wanted to travel to Stockholm, and I couldn't find a single hostel with a free bed in the whole city, and this is the capitol of Sweden we're talking about. EVERYWHERE was literally booked for weeks in advance. On the Camino, though, there are special hostels for pilgrims called Aubergines. You show up, pay a very small sum (7-10 Euros usually), stay one night, and they kick you out at 8 AM so they can serve the next round of hikers coming through. The path is predetermined, the accommodations bountiful and inexpensive, and the only schedule I have to worry about is my own walking pace.
And finally, it's seeming more and more like a really special, significant way to end this year. I've undergone so many changes and experienced so much over the past ten months, and this summer is likely going to be...let's change that, definitely going to be one of the most significant and memorable things I ever do with my life. Even if I'm not doing the pilgrimage for religious reasons, there's a strong symbolism with walking a path to a final destination, something loaded with meaning and hundreds of years of history. It seems like the appropriate way to end my year in Europe: one final journey before I finally pack my bags, get on a plane and say goodbye to this place. Everybody walks the Camino for a different reason, and mine will be to give this year closure and bring it to an end.
So that's the plan! As is the case with all things, the details will endlessly reorganize and shift and switch around until I'm actually on the road doing it, but for now this is the mostly finalized form.
I. can. not. wait.
PART ONE: For the first week and a half of July I will, as the famous Lonely Island refrain goes, literally be on a boat. A little while ago one of the other Fulbrighters in Kiel who's really into the sailing scene up there put up a link to this website. The organization, ELSA (English Learning Sailing Adventures), now in its second year, does English learning sailing trips for German students. Essentially you jump on board a ship, learn how to sail, and get two hours of English instruction per day. This, of course, struck me as an amazingly cool opportunity, and I sent the guy who runs everything an email asking if I could come aboard and work. Not only did I get a spot on the trip, but in exchange for teaching I get the whole thing for free! So from the 4'th of July to the 13'th I'll be on the Gulden Leeuw (Dutch for Golden Lion). We're departing from Kiel, sailing up through Denmark, and then setting out westward on the North Sea, ending in Aberdeen, Scotland. Not a bad way to start things off!
PART TWO: I'll disembark in Aberdeen, and meet up with my girlfriend Jessie. She's staying in Germany for a couple weeks after our grant period ends, so before she flies back to the US we'll meet up and travel in Scotland for a few days. We'll be spending one night in Aberdeen and two in Edinburgh. After that she'll fly back and I'll be riding the rails for about a week-and-a-half. This part of the trip is still a little vague, and I've got several options I've been thinking of:
1) The first is a trip up to the Isle of Skye, one of the islands in northern Scotland. I've been looking at pictures and reading descriptions of the rock formations and castles and mountains and hiking trails up there, and it looks like such a unique, fascinating place. In the last stage of the journey (more on that in a bit) I'm going to be doing a ton of hiking, so hiking around the Isle of Skye would be a good way to warm up. If I take this option I'd probably spend a few days up on the island and travel further in Scotland afterwards.
2) The second option would be to spend a lot of time in Ireland, which is endlessly recommended to me every time I talk about traveling in Europe. Everyone says to get out to the coast and to check out the rural parts of Ireland, and I would really love to get out and experience that. Nature is something I've seen very little of, having lived in the second largest city in Germany for ten months now, so it sounds particularly appealing to get out into some of the more remote parts of the island. I was talking to one of my friends last night, Marie Eve, who traveled there a little while ago, and she said she'd never seen such green grass or an ocean quite that color in her life. Out of all the places she's ever traveled to in Europe she said Ireland was her favorite--a solid recommendation if I've ever heard one.
3) Another option is to visit my former roommate Loic in Cambridge, in the south of England, for a day or so. He's been working at a language school there for a year or two, and he'll be there over the summer before going back to school in the fall. It was a fabulous time living with him over the course of the year (living with good roommates is such an important part of feeling at home in a place), and it hardly seems right to be in the area and not visit him. The only thing is that he's incredibly busy when he's down there, so it may not end up that I get to see very much of him if I visit. But we'll see how it turns out.
PART THREE: The final stretch of the trip, and in a lot of ways the one I'm looking forward to the most, is something called the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The Camino is an ancient pilgrim's path in northern Spain, which runs from St. Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in the northwest corner of Spain. The path runs all the way along Spain lengthwise, and it is about 800 kilometers in total. Here's a map of the route so you can get an idea of what it looks like. A while ago one of the girls who was in IC Voicestream with me, KC Englander, did a documentary on the Camino, where she traveled along the route with a film crew and documented the experiences of the people walking it. You can visit the website for the documentary here and check out the trailer for the film (as yet uncompleted) here. At the time I thought it would be an amazing thing to do, but forgot about it until yet another ICVSer, Shannon, walked part of it a few weeks ago.
It is going to be very intense: five straight weeks of walking 25+ kilometers a day (16+ miles), but it appeals to me for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it's just a damn cool thing to do. Countless tens of thousands have done a European rail journey (including me!), but there's something special about doing a hike like this. Out in the wilderness, taking my time, seeing a part of Europe that few people get to experience, it's a very unique opportunity. I've been looking at photos and watching videos and reading up on it, and it looks so staggeringly beautiful in places.
Secondly, there's a simplicity to it that I wouldn't get if I traveled somewhere else. One of the worst things about traveling in Europe, ESPECIALLY during the summer, is the maddening logistics of it all. Where am I going? What am I going to see? How long am I staying? Where am I going to stay? How much does it cost? Where am I going after that? Am I missing out on something by traveling to destination X instead of destination Y? Ad nauseum. Not only do you have to make an endless series of very complex decisions while trying to enjoy the trip at the same time, but you're almost competing with the other tourists around you while you're doing it. In 2009 I wanted to travel to Stockholm, and I couldn't find a single hostel with a free bed in the whole city, and this is the capitol of Sweden we're talking about. EVERYWHERE was literally booked for weeks in advance. On the Camino, though, there are special hostels for pilgrims called Aubergines. You show up, pay a very small sum (7-10 Euros usually), stay one night, and they kick you out at 8 AM so they can serve the next round of hikers coming through. The path is predetermined, the accommodations bountiful and inexpensive, and the only schedule I have to worry about is my own walking pace.
And finally, it's seeming more and more like a really special, significant way to end this year. I've undergone so many changes and experienced so much over the past ten months, and this summer is likely going to be...let's change that, definitely going to be one of the most significant and memorable things I ever do with my life. Even if I'm not doing the pilgrimage for religious reasons, there's a strong symbolism with walking a path to a final destination, something loaded with meaning and hundreds of years of history. It seems like the appropriate way to end my year in Europe: one final journey before I finally pack my bags, get on a plane and say goodbye to this place. Everybody walks the Camino for a different reason, and mine will be to give this year closure and bring it to an end.
So that's the plan! As is the case with all things, the details will endlessly reorganize and shift and switch around until I'm actually on the road doing it, but for now this is the mostly finalized form.
I. can. not. wait.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Hopes and Expectations, Black Holes and Revelations
As this year winds down to a close, I’ve been thinking it’d be a cool thing to write down some of the expectations I had before coming to Germany, and the realities that I ended up experiencing over here. Needless to say, I spent weeks and months during the buildup to this year imagining up a million different ways this would all turn out, where I would go, what I would do, and pretty much none of it happened the way I anticipated. I’ll probably have more later, but here are a few:
1) I would have brilliant, Wunderkind students. Every German I’d ever met until coming to Hamburg in September spoke fantastic English. And by fantastic I mean that sometimes when I’d try to have conversations with them in my own choppy, mutilated version of their language they’d simply switch to English mid-sentence and carry on as if I was speaking with any other normal American. This gave me a pretty distorted perspective on the level of English in Germany, and gave me really inflated expectations for my students. I thought if everybody that I ever tried to speak German with pretty much spoke perfect English already that the level of language instruction in German schools must be incredibly advanced. What’s more, English is one of the few required subjects to take in German schools, so I figured that any given class would be incredibly fluent compared to its American counterparts.
Well, I was wrong. I packed along the Norton Anthology of Poetry (a leftover from my Intro to Poetry course in college), hoping to use it in class and do some lessons on poetry, and after a few weeks I barely even gave a thought to opening it. It’s not that the students are horrible. On the contrary, some of them are REALLY good--incredibly good when you consider that they only ever get three to four hours of English instruction per week—but it’s not on the level I expected. I’ve seen fifth graders draw a dozen questions marks on a test instead of answering the questions because they didn’t understand anything; had seventh graders ask me what the word “but” means in German; seen tenth graders who still say “Have you a pen?” instead of “Do you have a pen?” after six years of English. So I had to readjust my expectations and take things slower than I wanted, and after I came to grips with that I started being much more effective at teaching.
2) I’d live with Germans, only have German friends, and be completely integrated into the city. Before coming over here I expected complete, total, 100% immersion into the culture. When I was in Berlin in the summer before senior year I mostly ran around with the other Americans in my study abroad program. Granted, I still learned a lot of German in a very short amount of time, but aside for the German I was living with and the professors at school I had very little contact with the people of Berlin themselves. This time around I was more interested in getting totally surrounded by the German culture, and was convinced that I’d barely have any other American friends.
This, too, turned out to be an expectation that didn’t pan out. Had I lived in a smaller city with no other Fulbrighters or other teaching assistants this may have turned out differently, but after a whole ten months in Hamburg I’ve made relatively few German friends. At the orientation I met the other three guys who were placed in Hamburg with me (John, Brendan, and Karl), and from the beginning we’ve spent a lot of time around each other. I had been nervous about making friends before coming, but I didn’t realize how lonely things can be in reality when you arrive in a new city. It was a huge mental adjustment building a life over here, getting used to the school, and trying to integrate myself into the city. At the beginning all four of us were pretty much in the same boat, and didn’t know anyone else in Hamburg, so we all hung out with each other. As much as I wanted to get really deep into the city, I hadn’t stopped to consider how nice it is to have people around you who are in the same position as you are and who are going through the same things. Even though we speak a ton of English around each other, it has been really valuable to have the other Fulbrighters here in Hamburg and around the area as well. By now we’ve all become really good friends.
And even besides Karl, Brendan, and John, I at least managed to make a lot of European friends. There are similar assistant teacher programs for a lot of European countries alongside the Fulbright program in Germany, so there was actually a little mini network of 20-something expatriates all throughout the city. As I think I mentioned, my (now ex-) roommate Loic (another assistant like me) is French, and I’ve made a ton of French, Spanish, English, Polish, and even French Canadian friends. For the most part we all spoke German amongst each other too, so even if I didn’t necessarily get the German friends I was looking for, I at least found a bunch of people to practice the language with.
3) I’d spend this year in Germany, have my fill, and want to be back in the USA by the end of it. For a long time the song Starlight by Muse was the sort of guiding philosophy for this experience, one lyric in particular: “Starlight / I will be chasing it, Starlight / until the end of my life / I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore.” I saw Germany as my Starlight: that thing out at the far reaches of space, something that you spend your entire life reaching out for at the expense of your friends and family and everyone back home. Heading out here for a whole year would mean sacrificing to some degree all my relationships back home. I could stay back and make sure I kept all of those friendships and stayed in close contact, or I could step into the spaceship and disappear for a while, out chasing some sort of fantastical, far flung adventure on the other side of the world. And after all, I wouldn’t be out there forever, I’d come back eventually, and everyone would still be there when I got back. As the bridge in Starlight goes: “I’ll never let you go / if you promise not to fade away.”
And now it’s turning out to be the exact opposite: I don’t want to leave! I entirely underestimated the effect being over here for so long would have on me. When you get down to it, I just really enjoy the life over here: always not quite in my element, always just a little outside of the culture. I’m not German, and that gives me a unique appreciation for a lot of things in this country. For the most part it’s a lot of fun not quite belonging to the culture of a place—until you’re a foreigner yourself you can’t quite understand the double-edged nature of being a stranger in a strange land. How simple things like registering your address with the city government or getting a haircut spark deep-rooted spasms of loathing and terror in you because of all the unknown and confusing vocabulary you’ll come up against; how you’re always the most interesting person at any given party, even though it’s sometimes really hard to loosen up your tongue and really use the language to your full ability (Astra helps); how the locals find your accent and imperfect grasp of their grammar endearing and “sympathisch.” It seems really boring in comparison to think of going back to America, where I know how everything works and I’m just another Ami among hundreds of millions.
1) I would have brilliant, Wunderkind students. Every German I’d ever met until coming to Hamburg in September spoke fantastic English. And by fantastic I mean that sometimes when I’d try to have conversations with them in my own choppy, mutilated version of their language they’d simply switch to English mid-sentence and carry on as if I was speaking with any other normal American. This gave me a pretty distorted perspective on the level of English in Germany, and gave me really inflated expectations for my students. I thought if everybody that I ever tried to speak German with pretty much spoke perfect English already that the level of language instruction in German schools must be incredibly advanced. What’s more, English is one of the few required subjects to take in German schools, so I figured that any given class would be incredibly fluent compared to its American counterparts.
Well, I was wrong. I packed along the Norton Anthology of Poetry (a leftover from my Intro to Poetry course in college), hoping to use it in class and do some lessons on poetry, and after a few weeks I barely even gave a thought to opening it. It’s not that the students are horrible. On the contrary, some of them are REALLY good--incredibly good when you consider that they only ever get three to four hours of English instruction per week—but it’s not on the level I expected. I’ve seen fifth graders draw a dozen questions marks on a test instead of answering the questions because they didn’t understand anything; had seventh graders ask me what the word “but” means in German; seen tenth graders who still say “Have you a pen?” instead of “Do you have a pen?” after six years of English. So I had to readjust my expectations and take things slower than I wanted, and after I came to grips with that I started being much more effective at teaching.
2) I’d live with Germans, only have German friends, and be completely integrated into the city. Before coming over here I expected complete, total, 100% immersion into the culture. When I was in Berlin in the summer before senior year I mostly ran around with the other Americans in my study abroad program. Granted, I still learned a lot of German in a very short amount of time, but aside for the German I was living with and the professors at school I had very little contact with the people of Berlin themselves. This time around I was more interested in getting totally surrounded by the German culture, and was convinced that I’d barely have any other American friends.
This, too, turned out to be an expectation that didn’t pan out. Had I lived in a smaller city with no other Fulbrighters or other teaching assistants this may have turned out differently, but after a whole ten months in Hamburg I’ve made relatively few German friends. At the orientation I met the other three guys who were placed in Hamburg with me (John, Brendan, and Karl), and from the beginning we’ve spent a lot of time around each other. I had been nervous about making friends before coming, but I didn’t realize how lonely things can be in reality when you arrive in a new city. It was a huge mental adjustment building a life over here, getting used to the school, and trying to integrate myself into the city. At the beginning all four of us were pretty much in the same boat, and didn’t know anyone else in Hamburg, so we all hung out with each other. As much as I wanted to get really deep into the city, I hadn’t stopped to consider how nice it is to have people around you who are in the same position as you are and who are going through the same things. Even though we speak a ton of English around each other, it has been really valuable to have the other Fulbrighters here in Hamburg and around the area as well. By now we’ve all become really good friends.
And even besides Karl, Brendan, and John, I at least managed to make a lot of European friends. There are similar assistant teacher programs for a lot of European countries alongside the Fulbright program in Germany, so there was actually a little mini network of 20-something expatriates all throughout the city. As I think I mentioned, my (now ex-) roommate Loic (another assistant like me) is French, and I’ve made a ton of French, Spanish, English, Polish, and even French Canadian friends. For the most part we all spoke German amongst each other too, so even if I didn’t necessarily get the German friends I was looking for, I at least found a bunch of people to practice the language with.
3) I’d spend this year in Germany, have my fill, and want to be back in the USA by the end of it. For a long time the song Starlight by Muse was the sort of guiding philosophy for this experience, one lyric in particular: “Starlight / I will be chasing it, Starlight / until the end of my life / I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore.” I saw Germany as my Starlight: that thing out at the far reaches of space, something that you spend your entire life reaching out for at the expense of your friends and family and everyone back home. Heading out here for a whole year would mean sacrificing to some degree all my relationships back home. I could stay back and make sure I kept all of those friendships and stayed in close contact, or I could step into the spaceship and disappear for a while, out chasing some sort of fantastical, far flung adventure on the other side of the world. And after all, I wouldn’t be out there forever, I’d come back eventually, and everyone would still be there when I got back. As the bridge in Starlight goes: “I’ll never let you go / if you promise not to fade away.”
And now it’s turning out to be the exact opposite: I don’t want to leave! I entirely underestimated the effect being over here for so long would have on me. When you get down to it, I just really enjoy the life over here: always not quite in my element, always just a little outside of the culture. I’m not German, and that gives me a unique appreciation for a lot of things in this country. For the most part it’s a lot of fun not quite belonging to the culture of a place—until you’re a foreigner yourself you can’t quite understand the double-edged nature of being a stranger in a strange land. How simple things like registering your address with the city government or getting a haircut spark deep-rooted spasms of loathing and terror in you because of all the unknown and confusing vocabulary you’ll come up against; how you’re always the most interesting person at any given party, even though it’s sometimes really hard to loosen up your tongue and really use the language to your full ability (Astra helps); how the locals find your accent and imperfect grasp of their grammar endearing and “sympathisch.” It seems really boring in comparison to think of going back to America, where I know how everything works and I’m just another Ami among hundreds of millions.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Londinium
A couple of weeks ago I went on a class trip with a bunch of the 8'th graders at my school to London. Around the beginning of the year my mentor at school asked me if I'd like to come along and chaperone, and, of course, I answered with a resounding yes. The summer after my freshman year I did a short study abroad program in London, and absolutely loved the city. That was my first real experience of being out in world on my own, and the first time I'd ever traveled to Europe before, and the whole thing left a huge impression on me in a lot of ways. It hugely influenced my desire to even consider living outside of the USA. I really count it as one of the most influential experiences in my life.
Plus, the city of London is just cool as hell. Having traveled in a fair number of cities on the continent and lived here for a while, I can say with a fair amount of authority that there's no place like it on Earth. The size of it, the energy, the crush of humanity in places like Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street, the culture and life you see walking along the South Bank of the Thames--it's really a place unto itself. One of those irreplaceable places in the world. I was really enthusiastic to return.
Anyway, we took off on a Sunday afternoon on an Easyjet airplane and got into the hotel late in the evening. It was interesting seeing the students' reactions to being out of Germany. I think it was the first airplane flight that a lot of them had ever taken, and many of them said it was the first time they'd been this far away from Hamburg. All in all they handled it pretty well. There was a pre-selection process to make sure the students who went along wouldn't cause any problems on the trip, so all of the 30+ students who came along were really well behaved and fun to be with.
That was actually one of the best aspects of the trip: the fact that I could spend more time with the students and get to know them more than I otherwise would in school. You'd think that after spending whole months working with these guys that you'd come to know them pretty well, but I find the opposite is true. The ones who really participate a lot in class of course get more attention and stick in my mind, and when I'm walking around in the courtyard I stop to chat to groups of students often, but on several occasions I've stumbled upon a student in a class who I didn't even know existed since they're so quiet and never raise their hand. There's so much more you have to take into consideration and pay attention to when trying to teach a class than the students themselves, which makes it hard to get to know them as people.
On the trip, however, I got to spend a lot more time with them, chatting and fooling around and cracking jokes. Ironically enough, most of them didn't speak any English to me unless they needed me to translate something or were feeling particularly virtuous and wanted the practice, so it was great for my language ability. I spoke way more German in England than I ever do when I'm in Hamburg, and I had to communicate some difficult concepts to them the whole time: translations of/explanations of art exhibits and monuments; when we're meeting for lunch/dinner/a tour and at what time; why cultural oddity X is how it is in London; why you "shouldn't touch what you don't understand" because that button you just pressed was the emergency call intercom for the London Eye, etc.
Anyway, the whole week would be way too much for one post, but I'll put up the highlights anyway:
1) Taking a group of students to tour and take pictures of the Arsenal stadium after dinner one night. It was particularly cool to walk around the stadium and just see what there was to see. At one point we came across a father and son passing a soccer ball back and forth, and we asked if we could join them for a while, which they agreed to. On the train ride back we also ran into some locals heading home for the night and we sparked up some conversations between them and the students.
2) Leading yet another group to the Tate Modern Gallery to check out the museum. I think a lot of them were confused and bored by all the modern art displays, but while we were going through the museum by ourselves I ended up bumping into one of the girls, and we walked through the rooms together. I sort of "directed her thinking" about the exhibits as it were, offering up little bits of interpretation just to give her a better idea of what everything means/could mean, and by the end she was dragging me from exhibit to exhibit asking me what everything was and what it meant. That was a really special thing for me anyway--to think I might have been the one to introduce a kid to art and maybe spark their interest and appreciation in it.
3) Being back in the city period was wonderful too. The sheer joy and nostalgia of being back in a familiar place is just indescribable. I hadn't been back since summer 2009, but I still hadn't forgotten how the whole things fits together, the stops on the Tube, the feel and look of the city. It was great walking through it all, kinda like walking through a memory while living in the present at the same time.
I'll leave you with a few pictures I took that week
Plus, the city of London is just cool as hell. Having traveled in a fair number of cities on the continent and lived here for a while, I can say with a fair amount of authority that there's no place like it on Earth. The size of it, the energy, the crush of humanity in places like Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street, the culture and life you see walking along the South Bank of the Thames--it's really a place unto itself. One of those irreplaceable places in the world. I was really enthusiastic to return.
Anyway, we took off on a Sunday afternoon on an Easyjet airplane and got into the hotel late in the evening. It was interesting seeing the students' reactions to being out of Germany. I think it was the first airplane flight that a lot of them had ever taken, and many of them said it was the first time they'd been this far away from Hamburg. All in all they handled it pretty well. There was a pre-selection process to make sure the students who went along wouldn't cause any problems on the trip, so all of the 30+ students who came along were really well behaved and fun to be with.
That was actually one of the best aspects of the trip: the fact that I could spend more time with the students and get to know them more than I otherwise would in school. You'd think that after spending whole months working with these guys that you'd come to know them pretty well, but I find the opposite is true. The ones who really participate a lot in class of course get more attention and stick in my mind, and when I'm walking around in the courtyard I stop to chat to groups of students often, but on several occasions I've stumbled upon a student in a class who I didn't even know existed since they're so quiet and never raise their hand. There's so much more you have to take into consideration and pay attention to when trying to teach a class than the students themselves, which makes it hard to get to know them as people.
On the trip, however, I got to spend a lot more time with them, chatting and fooling around and cracking jokes. Ironically enough, most of them didn't speak any English to me unless they needed me to translate something or were feeling particularly virtuous and wanted the practice, so it was great for my language ability. I spoke way more German in England than I ever do when I'm in Hamburg, and I had to communicate some difficult concepts to them the whole time: translations of/explanations of art exhibits and monuments; when we're meeting for lunch/dinner/a tour and at what time; why cultural oddity X is how it is in London; why you "shouldn't touch what you don't understand" because that button you just pressed was the emergency call intercom for the London Eye, etc.
Anyway, the whole week would be way too much for one post, but I'll put up the highlights anyway:
1) Taking a group of students to tour and take pictures of the Arsenal stadium after dinner one night. It was particularly cool to walk around the stadium and just see what there was to see. At one point we came across a father and son passing a soccer ball back and forth, and we asked if we could join them for a while, which they agreed to. On the train ride back we also ran into some locals heading home for the night and we sparked up some conversations between them and the students.
2) Leading yet another group to the Tate Modern Gallery to check out the museum. I think a lot of them were confused and bored by all the modern art displays, but while we were going through the museum by ourselves I ended up bumping into one of the girls, and we walked through the rooms together. I sort of "directed her thinking" about the exhibits as it were, offering up little bits of interpretation just to give her a better idea of what everything means/could mean, and by the end she was dragging me from exhibit to exhibit asking me what everything was and what it meant. That was a really special thing for me anyway--to think I might have been the one to introduce a kid to art and maybe spark their interest and appreciation in it.
3) Being back in the city period was wonderful too. The sheer joy and nostalgia of being back in a familiar place is just indescribable. I hadn't been back since summer 2009, but I still hadn't forgotten how the whole things fits together, the stops on the Tube, the feel and look of the city. It was great walking through it all, kinda like walking through a memory while living in the present at the same time.
I'll leave you with a few pictures I took that week
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| I think you all know what this is! |
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| The London Eye, the biggest ferris wheel in Europe. |
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| A shot of St. Paul's Cathedral with the Millennium Bridge and the Thames |
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| Me outside of Arsenal's Stadium. |
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| A shot from the Churchill War Rooms, a museum built in the secret war facilities from which Churchill led WWII. |
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| When I was backpacking here in 2009 I took a picture of this poem on a sidewalk tile on the South Bank. I really like it. |
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| The outdoor book shop on the South Bank. I bought The Manticore by Roberston Davies. |
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| In the London Eye! |
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| The kids would recruit me to take group photos from time to time. I think there are like eight cameras hanging from me. |
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| At the end of the trip some of the students bought me chocolates for leading them around the city and helping out and translating. Like I said, really nice kids :) |
Monday, May 30, 2011
Andy, bleibst du bei uns für immer?
As of today I have one more month in Hamburg. Thirty-one more days in this fantastic, incredible city. It's a bit surreal to think about. In fact, ever since about March or April things have started to shift gears in my head--take on a funny sort of hue in my thoughts. I got back after being away for three weeks at the end of March, and all of a sudden the city looked different. I left it in snow and ice and cold, and came back to shining sun and sunglasses and blossoming trees. I had grown to really know Hamburg in the winter, and it was a strange experience coming back to it in the spring.
Somehow it seemed different, like it wasn't quite the city I had left. I'd almost get lost walking around the streets since I didn't recognize everything in the new weather. Nor did it have the sense of permanence for me that it formerly did. I already had the sense that I was only going to be here for a short period of time, that I was going to leave in just a matter of months. Ever since the feeling has deepened--I'm still getting to know the city better, still discovering it, but it almost has a sense of nostalgia to it even though I haven't left yet.
It's all had a funny effect on my emotions to say the least. On one hand I can easily imagine myself staying here for a really long time. The kids at least seem to think I'm going to be around for a while; on several occasions in the past few weeks they've asked me, "Andy, bleibst du bei uns für immer?" (Andy, are you going to stay with us forever?). They always look really surprised when I tell them that my time is up in Germany at the end of June. "Aber warum?" they always ask. Which is a good question actually: why?
I guess the basic, adult answer would be that my work visa runs out at the end of June. I've got my plane tickets booked already. I haven't seen the majority of my family or friends in a year. America seems to be the place to be at the moment. The simplicity of that question, "Why?", really gets me every time though. I've come to really love this place, hearing and speaking German all the time, enjoying the little quirks and small things about life in Germany that you just can't find anywhere else. The fact a two minute train delay sparks outrage in me nowadays, that I get agitated crossing the street when the crossing signal is red, more so when there are other people around.
Maybe the kids are right. It seems a waste to have spent all this time over here and just say goodbye to the place. It's a somber thought thinking about going back to America, hearing nothing but English, driving everywhere, forgetting German. Especially forgetting German. It was an absolute shock getting here in September and discovering how sloppy and rough my German had become. Nowadays I can understand 99% of what I hear, and communicate my thoughts and feelings almost perfectly (if not grammatically perfectly). Losing the language is almost a worse thought than leaving the country. For the moment anyway I'll be returning back to the USA (at least some of those kids are going to grow up to work in the Bezirksamt when they grow older, and then they'll understand), but we'll see if I can cope with renaturalizing myself into my own country again. It's going to be quite the adjustment after all this.
Somehow it seemed different, like it wasn't quite the city I had left. I'd almost get lost walking around the streets since I didn't recognize everything in the new weather. Nor did it have the sense of permanence for me that it formerly did. I already had the sense that I was only going to be here for a short period of time, that I was going to leave in just a matter of months. Ever since the feeling has deepened--I'm still getting to know the city better, still discovering it, but it almost has a sense of nostalgia to it even though I haven't left yet.
It's all had a funny effect on my emotions to say the least. On one hand I can easily imagine myself staying here for a really long time. The kids at least seem to think I'm going to be around for a while; on several occasions in the past few weeks they've asked me, "Andy, bleibst du bei uns für immer?" (Andy, are you going to stay with us forever?). They always look really surprised when I tell them that my time is up in Germany at the end of June. "Aber warum?" they always ask. Which is a good question actually: why?
I guess the basic, adult answer would be that my work visa runs out at the end of June. I've got my plane tickets booked already. I haven't seen the majority of my family or friends in a year. America seems to be the place to be at the moment. The simplicity of that question, "Why?", really gets me every time though. I've come to really love this place, hearing and speaking German all the time, enjoying the little quirks and small things about life in Germany that you just can't find anywhere else. The fact a two minute train delay sparks outrage in me nowadays, that I get agitated crossing the street when the crossing signal is red, more so when there are other people around.
Maybe the kids are right. It seems a waste to have spent all this time over here and just say goodbye to the place. It's a somber thought thinking about going back to America, hearing nothing but English, driving everywhere, forgetting German. Especially forgetting German. It was an absolute shock getting here in September and discovering how sloppy and rough my German had become. Nowadays I can understand 99% of what I hear, and communicate my thoughts and feelings almost perfectly (if not grammatically perfectly). Losing the language is almost a worse thought than leaving the country. For the moment anyway I'll be returning back to the USA (at least some of those kids are going to grow up to work in the Bezirksamt when they grow older, and then they'll understand), but we'll see if I can cope with renaturalizing myself into my own country again. It's going to be quite the adjustment after all this.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
In which Andy just sums it up and gets it over with, part 2
4) Dad and Kim come to visit! Way back in January or December or so my Dad and Stepmom Kim had been making plans to come out and visit me in Hamburg, and right after Voicestream left they arrived in Hamburg after a little stay in Paris. This was especially exciting for them, considering this was my Dad's first trip to Europe ever, and Kim hadn't been here since high school or so. It was a really good time seeing them and catching up after having been apart for so long (I haven't seen anyone in my family since the beginning of September!). I did a lot of the same stuff with them that I did with Voicestream: gave them the city tour, took them into school for an extended visit with some of my classes (which the students all loved), ate out, did a little shopping, etc.
On that weekend we all loaded into a train to head down to Dresden for the weekend. A few friends I've made over here have made trips down to Dresden, and they along with a few other Germans I met said Dresden was really beautiful. And they were definitely right. East Germany is so different from the West, especially in a city like Dresden. In Berlin there are almost no original buildings left from before WWII, but in Dresden a lot of the old Baroque-era buildings were rebuilt. Very strange walking around town and seeing these huge, beautiful buildings juxtaposed with really harsh, angular Communist architecture.
5) Hafengeburtstag (Harbor Birthday)! A couple weekends ago Hamburg celebrated the 125'th anniversary of the harbor, which is one of the central pieces of the town, and one of the biggest reasons why Hamburg is the city it is today. I had no idea it was going on--the occasion somehow slipped my notice--but it was a huge event. Lots of ships of all kinds heading up and down the Elbe--sailing ships, military battle ships, cruise liners, you name it, it was all there. And there was a huge crowd on the docks for the whole weekend, it had a really awesome carnival atmosphere.
The highlight of the weekend, however, was the Queen Mary 2, the biggest cruise ship in the world. It docked in Hamburg for a few days, and left Sunday evening. Seeing it was just unreal. You can't understand how big the thing is until you see it with your own eyes. For a little perspective: I looked up some info on it afterwards, and apparently it's like 10 meters longer than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
6) Grünanlage: After the Hafengeburtstag (actually, on the very same weekend) I ended up getting hooked into a group of people who were going to check out the Grünanlage. What is this you ask? Well, it's an ENORMOUS outdoor techno festival that they host every year in Hamburg (that particular was full of "big" things, come to think of it). I thought I was staying for about a half hour (as it was Sunday) and ended up staying for about three. I'd never been to anything like that, nor do I think I'd go just on my own, but it was a really...unique experience. I'm actually really glad I went.
On that weekend we all loaded into a train to head down to Dresden for the weekend. A few friends I've made over here have made trips down to Dresden, and they along with a few other Germans I met said Dresden was really beautiful. And they were definitely right. East Germany is so different from the West, especially in a city like Dresden. In Berlin there are almost no original buildings left from before WWII, but in Dresden a lot of the old Baroque-era buildings were rebuilt. Very strange walking around town and seeing these huge, beautiful buildings juxtaposed with really harsh, angular Communist architecture.
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| Our hotel room in Dresden. Surprise suite (Rick Steves called it "cozy" or something). |
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| Dad and Kim admiring the sights. |
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| Climbing the stairs to the top of the Bastei. |
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| A look down on the Elbe (it flows through Dresden too!) |
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| Observation area in the Bastei. Really amazing place. |
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| The three of us up at the top. |
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| Downtown, with the dome of the Frauenkirche on the left. |
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| The old center of Dresden, completely restored after the firebombing. |
The highlight of the weekend, however, was the Queen Mary 2, the biggest cruise ship in the world. It docked in Hamburg for a few days, and left Sunday evening. Seeing it was just unreal. You can't understand how big the thing is until you see it with your own eyes. For a little perspective: I looked up some info on it afterwards, and apparently it's like 10 meters longer than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
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| The Queen Mary 2. Enormous. |
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| Another shot of the ship. |
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| Grünanlage. A tiny, tiny view of the crowd. |
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| Every once in a while someone would light of a traffic flare in the crowd and dance around with it. Insane. |
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
In which Andy just sums it up and gets it over with (part 1)
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| Sitting in a square in the Albacine neighborhood, with the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevadas in the background |
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| A view of the Sierra Nevadas. |
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| The beach at Nerja. |
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| Street art in Granada. The city is particularly famous for it. |
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| A small town on the side of the road between Granada and Nerja |
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| The Park Inn Hotel in Berlin, where the conference was held. |
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| Me with Kiersten and Karl, fellow Fulbrighters. |
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| Enjoying some street beers on the edge of the fountain in Alexanderplatz, close to the hotel. |
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| A shot of Albacine neighborhood. |
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| Outdoor spice market! |
3) Voicestream comes to visit! After all that running around I had about a week and a half to rest and recuperate, and then some current Voicestreamers all came to visit me in Hamburg! Willie and Casey (who were studying in London) and Shannon all came up for the weekend, stayed at my place, and we all got to reunite and do a little sight seeing! I had joked around with them back in Ithaca about doing a reunion trip like that, and it was so cool that we put a weekend together and actually did it! They hadn't seen each other since the previous semester either, so it was a great opportunity for us all to get back together and catch up. I took them to my school to introduce them to some classes, did my classic, well rehearsed Hamburg city tour with them, blew their minds with Currywurst and other German delicacies, and generally just had an awesome time and rehashed many tried and true ICVS stories and inside jokes.
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| Willie taking a picture in the park. |
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| All of us in the observation deck of St. Michel. |
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
The Death of Osama Bin Laden: A Perspective from Germany
It was a pretty normal Monday morning in Germany. May second, the first Monday back from the Easter holidays. I had just had a really pleasant week of relaxing in Hamburg--sun, 70 degrees, friends, books, barbeques, a quick trip out to Friesland to see a fellow Fulbrighter--and was getting ready to get back into the swing of things at school. Like every 20-something with a laptop, I jumped on Facebook to check up on things quickly before leaving the house, and this is the first thing I saw:
It's quite a comment on our world today that this is how a major, MAJOR piece of world news got broken to me. I remember the chaos on the radio when I woke up on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. How none of the commentators on X96 or NPR had any idea what was going on that early in the day, only a couple hours after the first plane hit. How everyone in Frau Kerr's 8'th grade German class were staring at the TV in the corner watching the second tower collapse. Little details stick out in particular: the confused, frightened expression I saw on Frau Kerr's face when I walked into the classroom; the bewildered way we all walked around the school, trying to comprehend an event with implications that totally surpassed the understanding of a bunch of suburban junior high school students; Jenny Moody crying in the hallway.
Almost ten years later some lolcat-inspired photo of Obama in sunglasses and a handful of status updates brought that chapter in American history to a close for me. The world is a strange place.
It's stranger still thinking and looking at how this event is happening in the US. On Monday I went to school, taught some kids, went to a cafe and wrote some emails, finished the day with our weekly game night at Down Under on Grindelallee, and went to bed. I didn't even talk about Bin Laden's death to anyone until I met up with a few other Americans in the city later that night.
I did a lot of thinking about the whole thing, but that was basically it for me.
The atmosphere on the other side of the Atlantic, as I understand it, was electric. There were spontaneous rallies in the street all over the USA on Monday. Firefighters and policemen parading around Ground Zero with thousands of New Yorkers cheering them on. People dancing and singing on the National Mall and in front of the White House. American news websites were overflowing with reports about Bin Laden's death, and I imagine the big cable news networks were abuzz the whole day with coverage. There was a fierce division among my friends about everything. Some praised the actions of our military, jubilant that the face of terrorism for the past ten years has finally been brought to justice, God-Blessing America up and down. Others were torn about the event, or even critical of it, commenting on the irony of the celebration of death--even the death of the most famous mass murderer in the world.
I don't even know what to think really. Looking at America nowadays is like looking at a foreign country. If you put me on a plane and sent me back tonight I would be totally overwhelmed by the response. While the comparative silence of the Germans around me is weird enough (I'm still an American, after all), the videos and news reports and blogs I see and read are strange as well. The death of Osama Bin Laden has so many implications for so many different parts of the world that it's hard to form a single opinion about it.
I wouldn't say that the Germans around me have been ambivalent about the event, but their silence is strange. I haven't even talked to any of my teachers about it, which goes to show how the topic is being treated over here. Interesting how something as major as the death of the mastermind behind 9/11 is hardly something worth talking about over here, and I don't think I'm tainting that judgment with my own cultural background--the event had deep and long lasting implications all over the world. Granted, it's more relevant in America and the Middle East than in other parts of the world, but somehow...I would expect something else I guess. A different response. Europe as a whole has been very opposed to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars since the beginning. One of my friends who went on a trip to France close to the beginning of the Iraq war said that some people on the street would spit at him for the sheer virtue of his nationality. This could be the beginning of the end for those conflicts, and yet this past Monday was just like any other day since I've been here.
And my own opinion on the matter? I can barely put it into words. Am I ultimately glad that there's one less evil person in the world? Yes. Am I going to sing and dance in the streets about it? No. I think the world needs to move on from this period in our collective history. This one man wrought so much evil and put so many terrible events into motion, and even his name and the ideas and ideologies he stood far have been misused and twisted and manipulated to justify even more acts of violence and death. It would be an absolute shame to let his influence outlive him. "We got him," as our President puts it, and I really, really hope that this marks a turning point for America and the rest of the world. After ten years we finally got him, and we need to put what he did to rest.
It's quite a comment on our world today that this is how a major, MAJOR piece of world news got broken to me. I remember the chaos on the radio when I woke up on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. How none of the commentators on X96 or NPR had any idea what was going on that early in the day, only a couple hours after the first plane hit. How everyone in Frau Kerr's 8'th grade German class were staring at the TV in the corner watching the second tower collapse. Little details stick out in particular: the confused, frightened expression I saw on Frau Kerr's face when I walked into the classroom; the bewildered way we all walked around the school, trying to comprehend an event with implications that totally surpassed the understanding of a bunch of suburban junior high school students; Jenny Moody crying in the hallway.
Almost ten years later some lolcat-inspired photo of Obama in sunglasses and a handful of status updates brought that chapter in American history to a close for me. The world is a strange place.
It's stranger still thinking and looking at how this event is happening in the US. On Monday I went to school, taught some kids, went to a cafe and wrote some emails, finished the day with our weekly game night at Down Under on Grindelallee, and went to bed. I didn't even talk about Bin Laden's death to anyone until I met up with a few other Americans in the city later that night.
I did a lot of thinking about the whole thing, but that was basically it for me.
The atmosphere on the other side of the Atlantic, as I understand it, was electric. There were spontaneous rallies in the street all over the USA on Monday. Firefighters and policemen parading around Ground Zero with thousands of New Yorkers cheering them on. People dancing and singing on the National Mall and in front of the White House. American news websites were overflowing with reports about Bin Laden's death, and I imagine the big cable news networks were abuzz the whole day with coverage. There was a fierce division among my friends about everything. Some praised the actions of our military, jubilant that the face of terrorism for the past ten years has finally been brought to justice, God-Blessing America up and down. Others were torn about the event, or even critical of it, commenting on the irony of the celebration of death--even the death of the most famous mass murderer in the world.
I don't even know what to think really. Looking at America nowadays is like looking at a foreign country. If you put me on a plane and sent me back tonight I would be totally overwhelmed by the response. While the comparative silence of the Germans around me is weird enough (I'm still an American, after all), the videos and news reports and blogs I see and read are strange as well. The death of Osama Bin Laden has so many implications for so many different parts of the world that it's hard to form a single opinion about it.
I wouldn't say that the Germans around me have been ambivalent about the event, but their silence is strange. I haven't even talked to any of my teachers about it, which goes to show how the topic is being treated over here. Interesting how something as major as the death of the mastermind behind 9/11 is hardly something worth talking about over here, and I don't think I'm tainting that judgment with my own cultural background--the event had deep and long lasting implications all over the world. Granted, it's more relevant in America and the Middle East than in other parts of the world, but somehow...I would expect something else I guess. A different response. Europe as a whole has been very opposed to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars since the beginning. One of my friends who went on a trip to France close to the beginning of the Iraq war said that some people on the street would spit at him for the sheer virtue of his nationality. This could be the beginning of the end for those conflicts, and yet this past Monday was just like any other day since I've been here.
And my own opinion on the matter? I can barely put it into words. Am I ultimately glad that there's one less evil person in the world? Yes. Am I going to sing and dance in the streets about it? No. I think the world needs to move on from this period in our collective history. This one man wrought so much evil and put so many terrible events into motion, and even his name and the ideas and ideologies he stood far have been misused and twisted and manipulated to justify even more acts of violence and death. It would be an absolute shame to let his influence outlive him. "We got him," as our President puts it, and I really, really hope that this marks a turning point for America and the rest of the world. After ten years we finally got him, and we need to put what he did to rest.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Part Three: Brussels
The last part of our tour was Brussels, which we were only visiting for a day and a half. No big problem for me, since I’d already been there before as well, and it was great to visit it again. Brussels had been the last stop on my backpacking tour, and I really liked the city. It’s a strange mix of urban nastiness and old European beauty. The city on a whole is just gorgeous, but when you’re walking through it the atmosphere is so urban and chaotic. There are police sirens everywhere, homeless people all over the sidewalk, trash and dirt and graffiti—a city of contrasts, if you will. Even though it’s kinda small, it’s nevertheless a really interesting place, and I was excited to see it a second time and compare experiences. Plus I got to act as a secondary tour guide: a supplement to Mr. Steves. The whole time I kept on going, “Woah! I’ve totally been here!” and, “Guys, this place is just around the corner, trust me.” Brendan and Karl called it “The Andy Fry Nostalgia Tour of Brussels.”
This was also the first and only place on the tour that we scored a Couchsurfing host (for those unfamiliar with the website, you can find some info on it here). Since there are so many tourists in Europe it’s kinda hard to find a host, but after a protracted search we finally found one in Brussels. And I have to say, our host was probably one of the most…unique and interesting people I’ve ever met. Her name was Suki Jenkins, pronounced “Sooki” (no, I’m not lying, that’s actually her name). She was an American, born in Seattle, and had been living in Brussels for the past fifteen years. When we got to her place we started chatting and getting into her life story, and the thing just got better and better as we went along.
As I said, she was born and raised in Seattle, and spent the first part of her life living and working there right in the middle of the grunge scene in the 90’s. She’s spent her whole life working in the music industry, and got her start at Subpop Records. The first act she ever signed with her label? Nirvana. The second act? Sound Garden. AKA this lady is famous. We were floored. I spent a pretty large portion of my formative years listening to Nevermind on repeat in my CD player, and to be with someone who had, you know, given Nirvana their start was just insane. Something I wasn’t expecting out of this particular CS experience at all, which is half of the attraction of the thing. She also said she worked for a time at the Cowboy Café, which was one of the big bars in the Seattle grunge scene. She said she’d always serve Kurt Cobain free beers since he was broke all the time.
Her life story gets stranger after that. She said that higher up in the music industry things get really nasty and heartless—the upper echelons of the big labels are full of people in suits who are just in it for the money and don’t care about the music. So she decided to turn expat, and came out to Europe. I can’t remember exactly, but she’d spent time in Belgium, Germany and France working in varying capacities in different music scenes, finally settling in Brussels and starting her own music co-op: Music Brussels. She spoke four languages—English, German, French, and Dutch, and supposedly held something like four or five university degrees, although I’m not sure how much I believe that. At either rate, we had some very interesting conversation for those first few hours in her living room. You could tell the lady had partied pretty hard throughout all of that history too—she was only in her late 30’s/early 40’s, but her face told a different story.
Anyway, she had some business to take care of, so we excused ourselves for the afternoon. She invited us out to a concert her co-op was throwing later that night, so we wandered around the city for a while and met up with her later. Of course, this was no normal music venue. Apparently in the 20’s “tent shows” were all the rage. They were essentially touring music venues—the thing looked like an enormous circus tent, dark red and faded yellow, and the inside was all decked out with hardwood floors, tables, booths, a stage and a bar. I think this particular tent had started in Berlin at some point in its early history, and had been on the move ever since. Somehow Suki had managed to get in contact with a group that still maintains and uses one of these tents, and they set up camp in the square behind one of the big churches in Brussels.
The show was kinda small—a three-piece Belgian act was playing, and the audience was basically Suki’s friends and some other randoms. Suki’s posse was, of course, a bit eccentric—definitely a group of fringe characters hailing from all over Europe—but they were all friendly and really inviting, and showed us a great time. After the concert we went on a tour of all the smaller local bars in the city, and generally just had a great time.
The next day was the official end of our trip. We hadn’t been in Brussels long, but the week was up, and we all had different plans at the end of the week and different places we had to be, so we couldn’t stay in the city much longer than we did. We got up at a leisurely hour and hung around for a bit, said goodbye to Suki, hit the few remaining sights we hadn’t seen the day before, and headed off to the airport to fly back to Berlin. It marked the midway point of my own journey, and once we got to Berlin we said goodbye to Brendan, and I hung out with Karl and his girlfriend Kiersten at Kiersten’s place in Berlin, giving myself a bit of a layover before heading to my next destination.
All in all it was an incredible trip. I got to see some new places, revisit old ones and get a new perspective on them, and spend a lot of time with Karl and Brendan. The Wanderlust strikes me from time to time, especially after summer 2009. It comes in waves, harder at some times, lighter at others, and this was the first time since then that I’ve been able to travel for a long(ish) period of time on this continent since then. I spent my few days in Berlin just relishing in it, remembering back, finishing journal entries on the whole thing and just taking it easy after being on the move for a week straight. And I wasn’t even finished! I had Granada right around the corner, and the Fulbright conference after that.
Stay tuned for part four: Granada.
This was also the first and only place on the tour that we scored a Couchsurfing host (for those unfamiliar with the website, you can find some info on it here). Since there are so many tourists in Europe it’s kinda hard to find a host, but after a protracted search we finally found one in Brussels. And I have to say, our host was probably one of the most…unique and interesting people I’ve ever met. Her name was Suki Jenkins, pronounced “Sooki” (no, I’m not lying, that’s actually her name). She was an American, born in Seattle, and had been living in Brussels for the past fifteen years. When we got to her place we started chatting and getting into her life story, and the thing just got better and better as we went along.
As I said, she was born and raised in Seattle, and spent the first part of her life living and working there right in the middle of the grunge scene in the 90’s. She’s spent her whole life working in the music industry, and got her start at Subpop Records. The first act she ever signed with her label? Nirvana. The second act? Sound Garden. AKA this lady is famous. We were floored. I spent a pretty large portion of my formative years listening to Nevermind on repeat in my CD player, and to be with someone who had, you know, given Nirvana their start was just insane. Something I wasn’t expecting out of this particular CS experience at all, which is half of the attraction of the thing. She also said she worked for a time at the Cowboy Café, which was one of the big bars in the Seattle grunge scene. She said she’d always serve Kurt Cobain free beers since he was broke all the time.
Her life story gets stranger after that. She said that higher up in the music industry things get really nasty and heartless—the upper echelons of the big labels are full of people in suits who are just in it for the money and don’t care about the music. So she decided to turn expat, and came out to Europe. I can’t remember exactly, but she’d spent time in Belgium, Germany and France working in varying capacities in different music scenes, finally settling in Brussels and starting her own music co-op: Music Brussels. She spoke four languages—English, German, French, and Dutch, and supposedly held something like four or five university degrees, although I’m not sure how much I believe that. At either rate, we had some very interesting conversation for those first few hours in her living room. You could tell the lady had partied pretty hard throughout all of that history too—she was only in her late 30’s/early 40’s, but her face told a different story.
Anyway, she had some business to take care of, so we excused ourselves for the afternoon. She invited us out to a concert her co-op was throwing later that night, so we wandered around the city for a while and met up with her later. Of course, this was no normal music venue. Apparently in the 20’s “tent shows” were all the rage. They were essentially touring music venues—the thing looked like an enormous circus tent, dark red and faded yellow, and the inside was all decked out with hardwood floors, tables, booths, a stage and a bar. I think this particular tent had started in Berlin at some point in its early history, and had been on the move ever since. Somehow Suki had managed to get in contact with a group that still maintains and uses one of these tents, and they set up camp in the square behind one of the big churches in Brussels.
The show was kinda small—a three-piece Belgian act was playing, and the audience was basically Suki’s friends and some other randoms. Suki’s posse was, of course, a bit eccentric—definitely a group of fringe characters hailing from all over Europe—but they were all friendly and really inviting, and showed us a great time. After the concert we went on a tour of all the smaller local bars in the city, and generally just had a great time.
The next day was the official end of our trip. We hadn’t been in Brussels long, but the week was up, and we all had different plans at the end of the week and different places we had to be, so we couldn’t stay in the city much longer than we did. We got up at a leisurely hour and hung around for a bit, said goodbye to Suki, hit the few remaining sights we hadn’t seen the day before, and headed off to the airport to fly back to Berlin. It marked the midway point of my own journey, and once we got to Berlin we said goodbye to Brendan, and I hung out with Karl and his girlfriend Kiersten at Kiersten’s place in Berlin, giving myself a bit of a layover before heading to my next destination.
All in all it was an incredible trip. I got to see some new places, revisit old ones and get a new perspective on them, and spend a lot of time with Karl and Brendan. The Wanderlust strikes me from time to time, especially after summer 2009. It comes in waves, harder at some times, lighter at others, and this was the first time since then that I’ve been able to travel for a long(ish) period of time on this continent since then. I spent my few days in Berlin just relishing in it, remembering back, finishing journal entries on the whole thing and just taking it easy after being on the move for a week straight. And I wasn’t even finished! I had Granada right around the corner, and the Fulbright conference after that.
Stay tuned for part four: Granada.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Part Two: Brugge
After a few days in Amsterdam, doing a couple day trips to nearby Den Haag and Haarlem, we made our way south by bus to Brugge. If you recognize the name from somewhere, it’s probably because you’ve heard of or seen the movie In Brugge with Colin Farrell (which is actually pretty good, I highly recommend it). At first I was really, really unenthusiastic about going to Brugge. I’d already been there once before in summer 2009, but that wasn’t the issue. All I remembered about Brugge is that it was absolutely mobbed with people (I went in the middle of August, right during the peak of the tourist season). I saw and heard zero Flemish in the stores or on the street, and there was absolutely nothing going on in town.
The place felt basically dead, like some other boring, old town that would be totally without merit were it not for all of the other tourists visiting. The huge, major event going on when I visited was a horse and buggy show running through the town square. One of my few distinct memories about the city is that there were so many fat, sweating, fedora-wearing middle aged tourists taking shitty, boring photos with point and shoot cameras that I could barely navigate my way through. I protested a little bit, but Karl and Brendan were set on going, so I went along anyway, leaving my opinion open for change and hoping it would.
And it did. In a big way. Just around the time we got there the weather was getting to be really nice, and when we checked into the hostel we barely even needed sweaters. Brugge in August was hell, but it was absolutely delightful in March. There was actually room to breath on the winding, cobble-stoned streets, and I saw the most incredible, ornate, ancient buildings; buildings that I don’t even remember seeing since I was so busy with searching for a path through the crush of humanity around me, lamenting a day poorly spent on my trip. Brugge is one of the best-preserved Medieval towns in all of Europe, and the personality and beauty of the place is overwhelming. It’s one of those cities where you walk around unsure of what you should even be taking pictures of since it’s all so wonderful. I could try to explain the place away in writing, but I’ll let a few photos do the talking for me.
The buildings on the left in the previous photo, with the statue in the middle of the square.
A canal towards the south of the city, with a view of the backside of the cathedral tower in picture one.
The hostel we stayed at in Amsterdam was a little questionable and very expensive (I blew about 2/3’s of my travel budget there alone), but we ended up scoring a really nice, reputable, clean place in Brugge with a great atmosphere and really friendly staff.
Since we got in a little late the previous evening, we spent most of the next day touring around on rented bikes through the city, ticking off the sights and taking some photos. One of the great things about Europe is that the whole place is really bike friendly. Even I get annoyed with bicyclers in the USA, but around here people have a lot more patience for bikes—they’re a much more integrated part of the traffic around here, which means that it’s a great way to get around. All of the cobblestones on the street made for a sore butt by the end of the day, but that didn’t detract from the experience at all. It was pretty magical (for lack of a better term) to bike around the city, dashing through little side-alleyways, heading up and over bridges over canals, breathing in the chill air and taking in the sights.
Around 1:00 or so on day two we took a tour of the Halve Maan (half moon) Brewery one of the oldest in Brugge. The tour wasn’t actually very good unfortunately, but at the end we did get a free token for one of the brewery’s beers, which I used on a Brugse Zot. Belgium is famous for its beer (the country puts Germany absolutely to shame), and drinking a beer fresh out of the tap in the very brewery in which it was made was just incredible. That will probably be the best beer that I will ever drink. I tried the same beer later that night from a bottle, and even though it had been brewed and bottled and sold all in the same city, there was already an amazing difference in taste.
It was also in Brugge that I had “The Sublime Moment” of the trip, as I took to calling it. That one little part of the whole experience that sums it up in one beautiful, half-surreal, peaceful moment. At the end of the day we biked out to the nearby town of Damme, about 5 kilometers outside of Brugge. The weather was just a little cloudy and cold, the bike path smooth and straight, running right along a canal that led into Brugge from a nearby river. Damme, although not well known, was almost better that Brugge itself. The town had a nice little center to it, and was pretty quiet and quaint, but the main attraction was the enormous, monolithic 13’th century church lying just outside of the main part of town. Yes, 13’th century, as in the 1200’s. I was floored. With the exception of the Coliseum in Rome, I had never seen an older building. And it was huge—towering way above our heads like some sort of ancient, ruined relic from a long forgotten, vanished civilization. The sort of stuff that Tolkien is made out of. Being three males who grew up in the middle of the videogame era, we of course joked that it looked like something out of Zelda, but we were all taken with it.
A view from the bottom.
It put me in a contemplative, grateful mood, and as we were heading back to Brugge the clouds opened up in the west and we were greeted by a beautiful orange and yellow sunset. Hamburg is cloudy and gray pretty much all the time, and it had been a few months since I’d seen a really good sunset, and it blew me away. I was speaking with Karl later around the end of the trip, and he commented that we had just lived a lot of people’s dreams. Thousands of people will buy the Rick Steves’ Guide to The Netherlands and Belgium, read it cover to cover, fantasize endlessly about making the very same journey that we had just completed, and never do it. We were pretty damn lucky to have the means and the time to go out and do this ourselves, and that good fortune culminated for me with the bike ride back into town. All three of us were spread out along the path, I was in the front, with a rare bit of time to myself to pedal and think, breath and contemplate. Riding through all of those fields, past run down, decaying farm sheds which were probably older than the United States itself, past windmills and villages and with a arrow-straight view into Brugge and this amazing sunset right behind the city, it was nothing less than sublime.
The place felt basically dead, like some other boring, old town that would be totally without merit were it not for all of the other tourists visiting. The huge, major event going on when I visited was a horse and buggy show running through the town square. One of my few distinct memories about the city is that there were so many fat, sweating, fedora-wearing middle aged tourists taking shitty, boring photos with point and shoot cameras that I could barely navigate my way through. I protested a little bit, but Karl and Brendan were set on going, so I went along anyway, leaving my opinion open for change and hoping it would.
And it did. In a big way. Just around the time we got there the weather was getting to be really nice, and when we checked into the hostel we barely even needed sweaters. Brugge in August was hell, but it was absolutely delightful in March. There was actually room to breath on the winding, cobble-stoned streets, and I saw the most incredible, ornate, ancient buildings; buildings that I don’t even remember seeing since I was so busy with searching for a path through the crush of humanity around me, lamenting a day poorly spent on my trip. Brugge is one of the best-preserved Medieval towns in all of Europe, and the personality and beauty of the place is overwhelming. It’s one of those cities where you walk around unsure of what you should even be taking pictures of since it’s all so wonderful. I could try to explain the place away in writing, but I’ll let a few photos do the talking for me.
The central square in town.
The buildings on the left in the previous photo, with the statue in the middle of the square.
A canal towards the south of the city, with a view of the backside of the cathedral tower in picture one.
The hostel we stayed at in Amsterdam was a little questionable and very expensive (I blew about 2/3’s of my travel budget there alone), but we ended up scoring a really nice, reputable, clean place in Brugge with a great atmosphere and really friendly staff.
Since we got in a little late the previous evening, we spent most of the next day touring around on rented bikes through the city, ticking off the sights and taking some photos. One of the great things about Europe is that the whole place is really bike friendly. Even I get annoyed with bicyclers in the USA, but around here people have a lot more patience for bikes—they’re a much more integrated part of the traffic around here, which means that it’s a great way to get around. All of the cobblestones on the street made for a sore butt by the end of the day, but that didn’t detract from the experience at all. It was pretty magical (for lack of a better term) to bike around the city, dashing through little side-alleyways, heading up and over bridges over canals, breathing in the chill air and taking in the sights.
Karl (left) and Brendan (right)
Minor bike disaster on the way out to Damme, fixed in about a half hour with a borrowed screw driver from a fishing shop down the street.
Around 1:00 or so on day two we took a tour of the Halve Maan (half moon) Brewery one of the oldest in Brugge. The tour wasn’t actually very good unfortunately, but at the end we did get a free token for one of the brewery’s beers, which I used on a Brugse Zot. Belgium is famous for its beer (the country puts Germany absolutely to shame), and drinking a beer fresh out of the tap in the very brewery in which it was made was just incredible. That will probably be the best beer that I will ever drink. I tried the same beer later that night from a bottle, and even though it had been brewed and bottled and sold all in the same city, there was already an amazing difference in taste.
It was also in Brugge that I had “The Sublime Moment” of the trip, as I took to calling it. That one little part of the whole experience that sums it up in one beautiful, half-surreal, peaceful moment. At the end of the day we biked out to the nearby town of Damme, about 5 kilometers outside of Brugge. The weather was just a little cloudy and cold, the bike path smooth and straight, running right along a canal that led into Brugge from a nearby river. Damme, although not well known, was almost better that Brugge itself. The town had a nice little center to it, and was pretty quiet and quaint, but the main attraction was the enormous, monolithic 13’th century church lying just outside of the main part of town. Yes, 13’th century, as in the 1200’s. I was floored. With the exception of the Coliseum in Rome, I had never seen an older building. And it was huge—towering way above our heads like some sort of ancient, ruined relic from a long forgotten, vanished civilization. The sort of stuff that Tolkien is made out of. Being three males who grew up in the middle of the videogame era, we of course joked that it looked like something out of Zelda, but we were all taken with it.
At the base of the church on my bike.
A view from the bottom.
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