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.
"an imported Coors for about seven Euros" might be the most tragic moment of my week. Living in the land of hand-crafted delicious microbrews has created degrees of snobbery I would not have believed possible (although I have to give Utah credit for their efforts, also delicious!).
ReplyDeleteReally wonderful that you can share Voicestream with your kids, though! That's all the best parts of the US in a three minute piece, right there.
Haha, yeah, it is kind of sad, but the novelty is fantastic, you have to admit. There's actually this really awesome type of beer in Belgium called gueze. There's a river in Belgium that has this really specific type of bacteria in it, and all of the beer brewed from that water has a really unique taste because of the bacteria. I can't really describe it, but it is d.e.l.i.c.i.o.u.s.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, they actually really enjoyed it! One of the girls came up to me after class today and showed me her assignment actually. She had translated the whole song by herself at home even though we only did parts of it in class, and she did a really great job with it too! That was a cool moment :)