Spring Break: The Final Itinerary

The last week of school before break is coming up, and at the beginning of March I'm going to be taking a pretty extended trip away from Hamburg. School breaks in Hamburg are much longer than in the USA. Breaks during the school year are two weeks, but the trade off is they only have two months of summer. Like I said earlier, for the first week I'm going to be between Amsterdam and Brussels with a day or two in Bruges, and after that I'm going to be flying back to Berlin for a few days for a little downtime between the first two legs of the trip.

After that I'm hopping on a plane and heading down to Granada, Spain to see my friend Shannon (the soloist in that ICVS video I linked to in the blog actually) for 4-5 days! I tried to get down to Spain for Christmas, but I ended up deciding to stay in Hamburg for the holidays, so this trip has been long coming. A few of my friends have spent time in Granada, and they all say that it's an amazing little city, so I'm really stoked to go and to see Shan again, and hoping the weather is pretty decent!

And, finally, it worked out that the annual German Fulbright Conference is the week after Hamburg's Spring Break, so after Spain I'm flying up to Berlin yet again to attend the conference. It should be a good time. My advisor at Ithaca, Michael Twomey, had a Fulbright Professorship in Dresden back in the day, and he said the research project presentations are really interesting to attend. The program is full of panels and workshops and presentations and networking opportunities and dinners, so it promises to be a good time. It'll be good to see the people I saw at orientation and exchange notes on our experiences too. I haven't seen a lot of them since September, so it'll be good to catch up and see how everything has been going in our own little corners of the country.

Traveling to Copenhagen back in January relit that little fire of Wanderlust in my stomach again. I was thinking the other day, and ever summer since 2007 I've managed to work in some big Adventure every year, be it road trips or backpacking or studying abroad, so travel has been a recurring theme in my life for a while. I'll miss everyone back in HH of course, but it'll be great living out of a backpack for a few weeks.

Auf dem Weg

My first class Junior year in high school was AP European History. I remember this distinctly because I used to spend a pretty large portion of the class staring out the window at the Wasatch Mountain Range waiting for the sunrise, which was always spectacular sight. It started with little beams of light peeking out from behind the crags of Mt. Olympus, which always cut razor-sharp, mountain-shaped shadows across the sky, which was followed by an explosion of light over the whole valley. As great a teacher as I had, sometimes the power of nature trumped lectures on the Industrial Revolution, but I digress:

Anyway, that year the school musical was The Music Man, which I was cast in. There was a demo showing one afternoon for students and faculty to entice them to come to the show later that evening, and among the crowd was my history teacher. We had recently taken a quiz in class or handed in a piece of homework or something, and the following day alongside my grade she had written me a note. It said something along the lines of, "Andy, in class you've always got such a sour look on your face (granted, a comment I probably deserved when I was 16), but it was an absolute delight to see you on stage yesterday. Watching you singing and dancing and smiling was really touching, and I'm glad I got to see you doing something you really enjoy."

Now, five years and a million miles later, I had an experience like that this week from the other side of the student-teacher relationship. Unfortunately in German schools (in Hamburg at least) there are very few after school clubs or organizations or anything. School is a place for learning, and after class gets out kids go home and play sports in various neighborhood Sportvereins or play music in youth orchestras outside of the school. There are some events though, and this week was the Kultureller Abend, or Cultural Evening. It was a pretty interesting affair. Everything was organized under one theme: "Auf dem Weg" (on the way). There were a bunch of little musical acts, self-written theatre pieces, poetry readings, even a fashion show at the end, and everything revolved around different interpretations of being "on the way" to something (the future, success, death, happiness, love, etc.).

One thing I've come to realize during this year is that school isn't just about book learning. As important as it is to impart knowledge to the kids, there's also a lot of value in letting them experience things outside of a simple, traditional education. I was talking with a teacher around the beginning of my time here, and she said that students don't remember the everyday lessons--they remember the unique things about their time in school. Friends, school field trips, assemblies, teachers with whom they had a special relationship, even the smell of the classrooms and the decorations on the walls. Which, when you think about it, is very true. Do I remember anything I learned in Algebra II? No. I remember getting punched really hard in the nose during a fight rehearsal for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and bleeding everywhere; I remember the jazz quartet I played in for this combination poetry reading/jazz night we did Senior year and trying to impress some girl in the crowd with my guitar solo on "Take Five"; I remember the tour to NYC we did with the Troubadours Junior year, and trying to sort out the subway system after a group of other clueless Utah high school students and I got separated from the main group.

It was really great to be able to sit down and watch the students doing something they like. A lot of my favorite classes and favorite students had prepared material to perform, and I also got to see a bunch of students who I had never even seen before. In the classroom students behave one way, and sometimes you it can be really discouraging when someone isn't putting forth a lot of effort in English, but it was such a different experience watching students do something they cared about--watching them work at something. Granted, not all of it was great, but a lot of it was much better than I was expecting, and all of it was performed with a lot of enthusiasm. One of the gems I took away from the show was a booklet of student-written poetry and short stories. My favorite piece in the booklet was written by an eighth grade girl, entitled "Auf dem Weg...":

Ich war auf dem Weg zu dir,
ich war auf dem Weg zur Liebe.
Ich war auf dem Weg zu dir,
als ich sah wie es geschah.

Ich war auf dem Weg zu dir,
ich war auf dem Weg zur Liebe.
Ich war da als ich sah,
wie sie dich küsste.

Ich war auf dem Weg zu dir,
ich war auf dem Weg zur Liebe.
Ich war auf dem Weg zu dir,
als mein Herz zerbrach.

And the translation:

I was on the way to you,
I was on the way to love.
I was on the way to you,
when I saw how it happened.

I was on the way to you,
I was on the way to love,
I was there when I saw,
how she kissed you.

I was on the way to you,
I was on the way to love.
I was on the way to you,
when my heart broke.

There's such...basic truth in there, you know? This girl is 14 years old, and she expressed with metered, organized, patterned, and beautifully simple language one of the universal truths of human experience--something everyone has felt at one point or another. I walked up to her after the show and told her that she did a great job with her poem.

Halfway

About a week and a half ago I hit five months in Hamburg. Five months out of a ten-month grant period. The occasion actually sort of slipped my notice for a number of reasons, but a couple weeks into month six I’m starting to think back on it. Half of my time up. It’s not quite a sad realization, not something that I’m regretting or anything. There aren’t any ticking clocks in my head, so to speak. Month One was a huge mile marker for sure, as were those that followed, but recent months been different. They’re no longer momentous, earth shaking measurements of time—they’re numbers. One more indication among many that this place and these people aren’t strange, foreign oddities anymore. They’re my reality, they’re what I Do, which is really amazing when you get down to it. I still have to figure out just what exactly I’m doing after this year is up, but sometimes I think about staying here. Long term living in this city would be so different from what I’m doing now, and would be a really serious commitment to make, but sometimes I fantasize a little bit.

There are a few exciting things to report. For one, I actually just organized a big trip with a lot of my friends last week. A few underclassmen in Voicestream are studying abroad in a couple European cities this year (three in London and one in Granada, Spain), so we all organized a little bit via email and ended up finding a weekend that we can all get together to see one another! In the second weekend in April everyone’s coming up to Hamburg for a little mini-reunion, which is going to be really great. When I was with Ally in Köln back in December we were talking about how nice it is to see familiar people. Meeting so many new people and making new friends is nice of course, but, to put it in her words, “It’s nice not having to explain everything all the time.” I’ve found that there’s an unnamable something about people from your own country and culture. It gets a little exhausting having to filter and translate your personality between cultures sometimes. I’m definitely looking forward to things.

Aside for that, the spring break for Hamburg is right around the corner (first two weeks of March), and I’m currently in the middle of putting together a little mini trip. Sticking around in Hamburg for the holidays was nice since there were other people around, but I have the feeling the city is gonna get pretty empty pretty fast over spring break, so I don’t wanna stick around here with nothing to do! For the first week of break I’m going to be with Brendan and Karl, two of the other Fulbrighters in Hamburg. So far we’ve got the week divided up between Amsterdam and Brussels. I hear awesome things about Amsterdam (I suspect it’s actually pretty similar to Copenhagen), and Brussels is also a nice city. It was actually the last stop on my big backpacking extravaganza back in summer 2009 (I need to come up with an official name for that trip actually, “that backpacking trip I did once” hardly does it justice), and it was a great end point for everything. It was comparatively smaller than a lot of cities I went to, and had less going on, but I enjoyed in nevertheless. I’m looking forward to heading back to the Delirium Café again as well. It has one of the largest beer selections in the world, and two floors (one dedicated to tap, the other dedicated to bottles). You can even get an imported Coors for about seven Euros if I remember correctly.

School has been going well, as always. Today not so much actually, but last week in particular was very good. In a lot of the seventh grade classes I did a lesson on Voicestream, which included some pictures of the group and a little description of what we do. For the most part though the lesson was a translation of the song “Breath,” which is one of the songs on the CD we put out last year. Song lyrics are pretty difficult in foreign languages since word order/choice/use is a little…artistic sometimes, and not exactly perfect, but the kids did surprisingly well with everything, and really liked the song as well.

Copenhagen part 2

So! A few weekends ago I went up to Copenhagen with a few friends to check out the city for the weekend and see the sights. I won’t give you the whole trip in full, I’ll let the pictures and captions speak for themselves. I WILL say, however, that Copenhagen is an absolutely amazing city. Having traveled to a reasonable number of cities on this continent, I’ve found that there’s definitely a “type,” if you want to call it that, to your standard big, old European city. There’s always the 600-year old cathedral right in the center of town, there’s always a river or some major body of water (great places for lunch and journal writing, btw), there’s always the huge ritzy shopping street, etc. Not to say that this diminishes my appreciation of them at all—we’re not talking like Anywhere, USA syndrome—but a lot of medieval city planners took their moves from the same book. Copenhagen, however, belongs to that rare class of city that stands out and grabs your attention completely. It’s got an unmistakable character and flair to it that absolutely blew me away, and I was totally taken with it for the three or so days we were there. It was nice in January, but walking around you could tell that the place is astonishingly beautiful in spring or summer, so a return trip is definitely in order.

Anyway, what I will dedicate the majority of this post to is my return trip back to Hamburg. Once upon a time I came across the phrase, “It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong,” in some forgotten book or magazine, and it’s been a recurring and persistently accurate motif in my life ever since. But anyway, the back-story: this particular trip to Copenhagen has actually been in the works for about a month, so everybody else who went bought their tickets pretty early. I got in on it too late though, so I had to book a different return train than everyone else. Which wasn’t bad at all—the solo train trip is actually a great place to just sit down and do whatever you want for three or four hours, completely disconnected from the rest of the world. You can read, write, sleep, watch the scenery, sleep, absolutely whatever, so I was actually kind of looking forward to it.

Anyway, the trip started out normally enough. I stocked up on some croissants for the trip and stuffed them in my backpack, seeing as the train didn’t have a restaurant car, and waited. There are big electronic billboards on railway platforms that let you know when trains are coming and going, and even though I don’t speak Danish, the big red “15 Minut” I saw pop up on the screen was easy enough to understand. At first I was a little concerned. After all, the thing that the whole European railway system hangs on is efficiency and punctuality. When one train is late that messes everyone’s connections up, then other trains can’t get to their platforms in time, so on and so forth. I had about a ten-minute connection between my first train and my second train, so I probably wasn’t going to make it. But it’s usually the case with these sorts of things that you can catch a later train. For a route like Flensburg-Hamburg (my connection) there’s a train every hour, so I wasn’t so worried.

So I sat down, enjoyed a croissant, snapped a few photos of the absolutely breathtaking fiery orange sunset out of the window, and didn’t worry myself. The entire time announcements in Danish were happening over the intercom and people were moving seats. Speaking no Danish, and not having the benefit of bilingual train announcements (standard on any German train), I moved seats when I was told (Why? Who knows.), not really sure of what was going on or what I needed to do. At some point I stopped a ticket checker to ask what the deal was, and she said there was some problem with the final destination. The train was supposed to run between Copenhagen to Flensburg, Germany, but the train wasn’t going the whole length of the journey because of the delay, so I had to switch to a bus at some point, which would take me the rest of the way to Flensburg. “Great,” I thought, “Busses are really not the greatest, but at least we should get there in a reasonable amount of time, right? They wouldn’t dump me off in some backwater German town on the Dutch border in the middle of the night without any way to get home, right?”

Wrong. What would have been about 45 minutes by train translated into about three hours by bus. Part of Denmark consists of islands between the Baltic and North Sea, but there’s a big chunk of it attached to the European continent as well. Looking back at a map after the fact, we pretty much drove from the very tip of mainland Denmark, on the edge of the ocean, to the German border. Tired and a little overwhelmed, I walked up to the bus driver after about an hour and a half into the trip:

Me: “Hallo, können Sie Deutsch? Wissen Sie, wieviel Stunden gibt’s noch?”
Driver: “Umm..”
Me: “Ok, do you speak English? How much longer do we still have to go?”
Driver: “Uh…”

All I could get out of him was, “Not long, not long,” which translated into almost two more hours of bus travel. Every half an hour we would stop at some random destination, and we were on actual highways for a very small portion of the trip. Not to mention the fact that the bus driver announced at one point that he had “sich verfahren” (got lost, took a wrong turn), so the trip lasted even longer than it would have otherwise.

Having stowed my backpack in the storage area, and having nothing to do or read, I started chatting up the passenger next to me. She was actually really nice. Her name was Eva, and she was a professor in a university in Berlin. We talked about her travels in Argentina, hitchhiking to Romania, what I think about Germany, Utah history and culture, the different things I’ve seen and done and the trips I’ve been on in the USA and in Europe. A hefty amount of complaining was to be had as well, but for the most part it was actually a great conversation, all in German too. Once we got to Flensburg we bought a few Flensburgs (locally brewed beer) and sat on a bench in the train station waiting for the next train to Hamburg to come. We ended up waiting there about another two to three hours and had to snag seats on the overnight train to Hamburg since it was so late. When all was said and done I didn’t get back to Hamburg until about 2:30 in the morning.

Even though it was a huge extension to my return trip (the whole thing took about six hours longer than it should have), and I had to be in school by 9:00 the next morning, all in all it was actually kind of nice. Eva and I befriended some other travelers in the same predicament, we got to sit around and just talk and get to know each other for a while. I would have never met any of those people otherwise, so our collective predicament was a good excuse to make new friends.

Copenhagen Trip!

Hey everyone!

Well, there was a little space between the last post and now, eh? I got a little busy with some things, so I've sort of spaced on making updates, but hey: let's get caught up!

So, for the first of many update posts: I went on a little weekend trip up to Copenhagen with a few friends a few weekends ago. It was actually a really great trip (as I will explain in a later post), but for now I'll just share some pictures and captions.

Walking along Canal Street. The multicolored houses and all the boats were really gorgeous.

At one end of Canal Street with the crew: Elizabet, me, and Marie-Eve.

One section of the long lake that runs the length of the city.

On the ferry! Since Copenhagen is on an island the train actually gets on a boat for part of the trip to go across the ocean. Left to right: me, Marie-Eve, and Arnaud. And our friend Lawrence the camel.

Another shot on the ferry.

A spiral tower on a church in the Eastern half of the city. Unfortunately it was closed for the winter, but usually you can go up to get a view.

More canals and boats.

There was some amazing graffiti in the city. This is in the Christiania section of town.

People biking/jogging over a bridge. I like this photo.

Sunrise on our last day. Absolutely amazing.