A Happy Christmas I Wish You

Well, it's 11:00 AM on Christmas Eve over here in Hamburg. We've got about six inches of snow on the ground (very unusual for Hamburg), it's a cold but tolerable 28 degrees, and good old Wilhelmsburg is sleepy and quiet (which isn't really any different from the norm around here, but whatever). This will be the first holiday season in my life that I've spent away from family, which is a bit of an odd sensation. I can withstand about two weeks of SLC before going crazy over the winter holidays, but at least those first two weeks were really nice--fireplaces, Christmas trees, friends, family. It's quite a different experience to be out on "the end of the limb" as my Dad puts it; out in far away, distant lands, miles away from the familiar.

It is a bit sad on one hand, but then again it's not like I'm totally 100% removed from everyone back home. There's phone calls and emails and video chatting and international shipping for gifts, so if I can't be right back there in the action at least I can say hello from afar. Nor will I just be huddled up with my computer alone in the dark on Christmas Eve: tonight I'm going to be having dinner with one of the teachers at my school and her family, and then on Christmas morning I'll be having lunch with the Ketels. So I'll be celebrating at least, with a new crowd and thousands of miles away from the usual venue, but celebrating none-the-less!

The school week leading up to the break was pretty nice. A lot of classes were taking tests, so for a few periods I didn't have to show up, and then when the students had finished with their work the pace slowed down a lot, so class was pretty informal. On Monday night I actually went to a movie night at another teacher's house to bake cookies and spend some time with her 11'th grade class. It was a bit of a trip hanging out with a bunch of 17 year-olds, but the evening wasn't half bad. We drank hot chocolate and made little Christmas tree and angel shaped cookies, played this karaoke game for a while, a couple of the guys brought guitars over and we jammed for a little bit, good times all in all. Tuesday was our traditional game night at Sausalito's, a restaurant down in the city center, and that was a good opportunity to get together with everyone for one last time and say goodbye for the holidays.

And finally, on Wednesday there was a big "Weinachtenschulfest" (Christmas school party), so all of the classes spent the whole day playing games and hanging out. I got to play musical chairs on two separate occasions with the sixth and seventh graders, proctored a make-up test for some of the upper-level students who had missed the in-class test, ate a ton of snacks, it was a good time. At the end of the day there was a big faculty party in the teacher's lounge, and that was a good opportunity to just hang out with some of the other teachers and breathe a collective sigh of relief that the holidays are finally here! One of the teachers from one of my favorite seventh grade classes also gave me a little Christmas gift at the party--a 11x17 piece of paper with little messages from the students in the class. That was a great gift, and all the messages were really, really nice. Some of my favorites:

"He is a best teacher :P"
"He love beer"
"I heart you x4"
"You are sehr witzig and hilfsbereit" (you are very funny and helpful),
and "hat schnell Deutsch gelernt" (learned German quickly. At the beginning of the year we told them that I couldn't speak German, so I guess whoever wrote that thought I learned the whole language in the past three months.)

Happy holidays from the Vaterland everyone! Or, as one of my well meaning but slower 10'th graders phrased it to me, "A happy Christmas I wish you!" I'll be sure to fill you in on holiday activities and New Year's goings-on. Be merry, stay safe, eat lots of food, and enjoy the company of your friends and family!

The tree outside my window, totally frozen over.

The big Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market) in front of City Hall.

Faculty party on Wednesday.

My little present :).

End of school/pre-holiday dinner at Jim's Burritos with the guys.

Day trip to check out the Lüneburg Weihnachtsmarkt with some of the other teaching assistants.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Three months! Part two.

Well, the hotly anticipated part two of our three months post. Here’s a few more blurbs on what’s been going on recently:

-Tutoring. I’ve picked up a few extra students outside of school to start earning a little extra money. Eight-hundred Euros a month is a surprisingly livable wage in Germany, since a lot of things end up being cheaper than their American counterparts, but that’s still not a lot of money. Anyway, my landlady is pretty well connected in the neighborhood, so I ended up landing three tutoring students through one of the Turkish families on our street: Memet, Betül, and Esra. Immigrants in Germany kind of get a rough deal in school, since English is a mandatory subject, and they have to take another foreign language on top of that. So your standard immigrant student speaks their parents’ language at home, German around town, and English + Spanish/French/Italian in school. In a lot of cases the immigrant kids actually speak the best English in class, since they’re already used to learning foreign languages, but for the most part it’s just confusing and frustrating for the kids to be stuck between 3-4 languages.

But anyway, it’s been fun helping out with the three kids’ homework. The family is really nice too. They always take my coat when I walk in the door, give me coffee and tea, let me try out a bunch of different Turkish foods all arranged out on platters in the living room. Sometimes I stick around and chat a little bit after we’re finished.

-Classy Parties. The other Fulbrighters and I got invited to a holiday open house at the US Consulate yesterday afternoon to meet and greet, and that was quite an experience. Walking up to the building was pretty stressful--lots of police with guns and vests and metal detectors, and then a bunch of Secret Service-looking guys on the inside. The building itself was very impressive: vaulted ceilings, hardwood floors, great outlook right onto the Alster (the big lake in Hamburg). At first the party was a little weird, since I was the first Fulbrighter that showed up, and was at least 20-30 years younger than everybody else there. I chatted up some guy in a suit for a little bit, drank some eggnog, and then fortunately some other people from Hamburg/the surrounding area showed up, so I had some people to talk with. We all introduced ourselves to the Consul General before we left, and she turned out to be a really friendly lady.

-Christmas Plans. Gonna stay in Hamburg for Christmas I believe, at any rate I’m not going home for the holidays. Having suffered through 25 hours of planes and airports upon first arriving in Germany, I definitely don’t want to repeat the experience two more times in a week and a half! I’ve got a few friends who are staying in town, and I also think I’m going to be celebrating Christmas itself with the Ketels (note to self: send that email soon), so I won’t be totally alone. That would be terrible and a little depressing around this time of year. Thanksgiving away from America turned out pretty well, so hopefully the first Christmas away from family will be good too.

Three Months! part 1

And, yet again, no blog posts for another two weeks. Really falling behind on this whole thing, sorry for that. Looking back there's a scant three entries between Month Two and Month Three, so gonna have to get back into the proverbial swing of things.

So, to make up for lost time, I'll include a bunch of pictures for you as well! Anyway, the Cliff Notes for the past couple weeks are:

-Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was actually a huge success. As I mentioned last time, a little "skeptisch" on what we would be able to come up with, but the meal actually turned out to great. We had all the essentials: turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, stuffing, and carrot cake for dessert. All hand-made, and all delicious. We even got to treat my roommate Loic and one of Karl's friends (also French) to their first Thanksgiving dinner, and they walked away appropriately stuffed and barely able to walk. The only downside to the whole ordeal was the irate Slavic people that were in and out of the kitchen while we were cooking. We did it over at Karl's student dorm, which had a shared kitchen, and apparently the festivities didn't sit too well with some other residents in the dorm. From time to time the Slavs would come in to cook as well and cuss us out in languages we didn't understand since the meal took so long to prepare. Didn't put a damper on the evening at all though.

Thanksgiving crew!

-School. Has been going very well, of course. After a few months of doing this I've worked up a really good relationship with all (well, 99% anyway) of the kids at school, and I've definitely learned a few more little teacher tricks, so the job's getting easier. The students are always (well, usually) really stoked to work with me. Last week in a couple classes I had the seventh and eighth graders practically dying to answer questions. It is really damn cool to be up at the front of a class and watch kids almost fall out of their seats with their hands as high in the air as they can go when you ask them to answer a question out of the book.

In one seventh grade class in particular I had a really awesome session. Last Wednesday I took some of the weaker students out to a different classroom to work with them on the simple past (e.g. I watch TV -> I watched TV, or I go -> I went, stuff like that). They should have learned this in the sixth grade, but for whatever reason it didn't really come together or make sense for them, so we took some time out to go over it again. I find I've got a bit of a thing for boiling down difficult grammar for the younger students and explaining it to them in terms they understand, and it was just awesome to see it finally clicking in their heads. They've spent pretty much a year and a half being confused as hell by everything, and when they finally GOT it they could barely contain their enthusiasm, doing the falling-out-of-their-chairs thing I mentioned earlier. It was actually kind of hard to keep everything in order, and I had to make sure that everyone got their fair chance to answer questions. One of the kids actually got a little angry since I didn't call on him when he knew the answer. That was a really special moment for me--getting a bunch of little 12 and 13 year-olds fired up about a pretty mundane and simple piece of grammar.

-Traveling. Mentioned in the last post that I went to see my friend Ally for the weekend in Cologne. That was a great trip, really great to get out of Hamburg for a couple days and see something new. Plus it was nice to spend some time with someone from IC. New people are a lot of fun of course, but it's great to be with someone who comes from your own background, you know? Or, as Ally puts it, "It's really nice not having to explain everything all the time when you're talking about college or home." Even though I've been to Cologne a total of three times now, there was still a bunch of stuff that I've never seen, so it was a lot of fun to check out parts of the city I still hadn't visited. Had a bunch of great beer (the city specialty is Kölsch, a beer that's kind of rare outside of Cologne), great food, got to see Harry Potter 7 in English, got to see my friends Matthias and Sabine (my Couchsurfing hosts in Cologne from summer 09) again, good times.

Ally and me at one of the Weihnachtsmärkte in Cologne.

Cologne from above, with the Rhein down at the bottom.

Still to come: this past weekend, more thoughts and reflections (since I missed out on the big ponderous month-marker post this time around), and some other bits and pieces. Stay tuned.

Hamburg's harbor in the winter. Getting a little cold over here.

Update!

Well, haven't written in this for a little while, sorry about that! I find that's the case with blogs sometimes--you update them rigorously and then fall off after a little while. Anyway, figure I'll take a little time to just update you on where I've been going and what I've been doing:

-Still having a great time in school. Today was one of the best days I've had in class so far actually. Usually Wednesday is a little "anstrengend" as the Germans would put it, cause I spend the entire day working with 7'th and 8'th graders (which, believe me, is no walk in the park). When you get down to it they're actually some of the most interesting students to teach--watching them make those first steps into teenagerdom is really fascinating--but, of course, the crazy changes happening in their brains makes them a little uncontrollable sometimes. Today, though, they were all just absolutely wonderful, and even when they weren't I was able to get things in control quickly. I know I've had a really good day in school when I leave the school singing, and from the faculty room all the way to the bus stop I was humming the Super Mario 2 theme to myself.

-Little bummed that I don't get to spend Thanksgiving in America, but me and a few of the other American Fulbrighters are all planning a dinner for tomorrow night. It will certainly be interesting to see what four guys in a kitchen will be able to come up with, hopefully it'll all turn out according to plan.

-The Weihnachtsmärkte (Christmas Markets) just opened up this week! The Weihnachtsmärkte are these booths they set up in big public areas in German cities, which are all made out of wood and roofed with pine boughs and strung up with lights and made to look pretty. The people in the booths sell all sorts of quaint old fashioned craft stuff, hats and gloves, candles, incense, Glühwein (spiced wine, served hot), bratwurst, and lots of other things. I bought a really awesome leather journal on Monday, and in about 20 minutes I'm meeting up with the Spaniards and some of the French to check out the Market by City Hall. Think I'll try to get myself a nice set of gloves, it's getting kinda cold!

-And, finally, traveling to Cologne this weekend to visit my friend Ally! We both graduated from IC this year, and she's doing a research grant down at the university in Cologne. We've been saying that we're going to visit each other for a while now, but we're just getting around to it now.

Reflections on the Untranslateable

As I get deeper and deeper into this language, it's been very interesting to get past the typical, everyday phrases and words that are pretty much the same in both English and German and to discover the really particular and nuanced aspects of both languages. I'm never just having a conversation nowadays. Every time I'm speaking with someone in German there's always a background process of analysis that's happening in the my head. When speaking in English it's just simple communication--something you don't ever pause to think about--but when speaking in a foreign language you have to pay so much more attention to individual words and sentence structure and grammar and phrasing. Same thing goes for music, movies, TV, books, anything. After enough time you come across the parts of a language that make it unique and distinct from other languages: phrases and ideas in one language that you can't quite adequately explain with the other, or ideas that only take a couple words in one language and multiple sentences in another.

I was watching a movie with Loic on TV the other day, The Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of my favorites when I was a little kid. The movie is equal parts satire and deconstruction of typical Hollywood action movies, full of both stereotypical scenes and variations on the genre. It's actually quite good, I highly recommend it, but I digress. In one fight scene, right before Schwarzenegger throws a greasy, leather jacketed bad guy through a wall, he says, "Don't quit your day job." In the German translation of the movie, "Bleib lieber bei deinem festen Job," a pretty literal translation. To translate it straight back into English, for the sake of demonstration, that's something like, "Better stay at your permanent job."

The line struck me as so strange, because you'd need to have a very specific cultural background to understand it, and to really properly translate it you'd have to find an equivalent phrase in German or just get rid of it/replace it entirely. The meaning of the idiom is immediately apparent to any English speaker: "Hey, bad guy, you're not very good at what you do, so I would try to find a different line of work." But it doesn't make a lot of sense in German:

[Better stay at your permanent job? But that's what the bad guy does; he's a criminal, that IS his permanent job. Furthermore, he's about to get killed. Why would he want to stay at his permanent job if he doesn't do that job very well in the first place? Wouldn't he want to switch to a different job? One where he isn't getting shot up and hurled through sheet rock by huge, musclebound Austrians?]

And through this convoluted series of thoughts and questions we finally arrive at the meaning of the phrase: something short, sarcastic, and simple. A meaning that clicks instantly in the mind of an English speaker, but one that takes a little more thought otherwise (presumably, at least. I can't find the German version of the phrase anywhere in Google). It's such a simple, small little thing, but I've literally been thinking about it for days now. And just this morning one class demonstrated to me how phrases and idioms can have really similar equivalents between languages. We were reading a text, and the phrase, "I know it like the back of my hand," came up. I asked them if they knew what that meant, and they told me that the German version is, "I know it like my jacket pocket." Which makes sense too; your inside jacket pocket is always really close to your body, so you'd know the pocket/whatever was inside it extremely well. If there's one thing I'm going to take away from this experience, it's going to be an appreciation of my own language, and a new look at the aspects of it that I never even stopped to consider before coming here.

New guitar

When I left SLC back in September I could only take on carry on onto the plane. Not wanting to risk checking either my laptop so I could carry my guitar on or vice versa, I decided to leave behind my guitar. I've been playing guitar ever since I was 12, so it was a pretty tough decision to make, but I've heard too many musician horror stories about instruments getting destroyed by airline baggage handlers. Plus when you get down to it a guitar is a really heavy, awkward thing to travel around with, hence it stayed at home.

Since getting here I've been feeling the absence, not only of the guitar but of simply having music in my life. I've always done something musical since I was a little kid, be it playing piano, guitar, singing, arranging for Voicestream, going to concerts, or just listening to music. It's one of the fundamental parts of my personality, so not having an outlet for it is pretty weird. So when my birthday rolled around I decided that a new guitar would be a good idea!

Originally I wanted to go to a music store to get something, although one of the other Fulbrighters here recommended I check out a big flea market they have every weekend in Sternschanze, so I decided to give that a shot. Initially I was pretty unimpressed with what I saw when I visited. There's a bunch of crap in flea markets, and there were some exceptionally weird guitars all over the place--all knockoffs and facsimiles of famous makes and models, a few franken-guitars obviously pieced together from multiple instruments, none that sounded very good, and none that I was enthusiastic about.

I was about to give up when I turned a corner and saw a stall full of really nice-looking acoustics. The man running the stand was in his 60's, long white hair, wrinkled face, long black jacket, and just had the look of a guy who looked like he had spent most of his life dealing with guitars. You see the type in guitar stores all the time--people who have such love of the instrument that they sacrifice themselves to a life of retail work simply to spend as much time as possible around what they love. I stepped up to the stand and looked at the guitars, picked one and sat down to give it a try. I was really surprised with the sound. The tone was loud, clear, none of the notes buzzed, and it just felt right. It was one of those things that had a sense of destiny about it: a used guitar of unknown origin, discovered in some tucked-away corner at a flea market in Europe, waiting for the right person to come and discover it. The opportunity was too rare and unique to pass up, I hadn't traveled across a third of the world to walk away from a find like that. I handed over a hundred Euros to the guy, and told me he was happy that the guitar was "going into good hands."

I've had to make a few alterations and fix it up a little bit, but now that I've got some new strings on it and I've fixed the little kinks it's sounding even better than it did previously. We've had a few friends over since I bought it, and they've all commented on how good it sounds. You know that when non-musicians can hear the quality in an instrument that you've found something good. Really, really enjoyed playing it so far, and I'm still looking for a name. I'm trying to come up with a short little German phrase or something, but so far I'm drawing a blank, and you can't really rush a christening.

Two months

And all of a sudden I've been here for two months, one-fifth of my time here in Hamburg. "Die Zeit läuft," as they say around here. One of the great things about this whole experience is that every day and week changes so much so quickly. Back in the so called normal world the extraordinary or unusual always punctuates the regularity of the everyday--shines a little light into the tedium of a unchanging schedule--but even after two months of living here there are still so many new things that happen from day to day that my life still seems fluid. The concrete still isn't dry, so to speak. There is, of course, a fixed schedule to my week, and a system of roots that's holding me down to the ground, but there's no way I could tell you what exactly I'll be doing a week or a month from now.

The newness is fantastic, of course, but there's nothing like feeling at home. There's a difference between something being new and something being foreign and confusing--a difference between that little flutter in your chest when you miss a step walking down the stairs versus the soreness in your ass after you fall down the whole flight. Finally having a permanent place to stretch out in, a group of friends I'm getting close to, and a close bond with the teachers I'm working at in the school has been absolutely wonderful. Up until now I've sort of been coasting along the surface of the city, but now it's becoming familiar, and I'm starting to get deeper into it. I know all the schedules for the trains in and out of Wilhelmsburg, and I've got a good sense of where all the subway lines take you and where they intersect. I've got an extensive list of landmarks that I recognize each day as I pass them by (Kamps bakery, the blue bridge over the Elbe, the TV tower, the bike rack at the Krupunder station in front of the buses), and an even bigger list of Pascals, Sonjas, Alis, Antonys, Kevins, Ochans, Kristophs, Patricks, Vanessas, and hundreds of other little faces that I see every day in class and around school.

I think I'm getting in so deep that I barely even recognize the changes in my personality and the way I behave anymore. Sometimes the changes are obvious--like waiting patiently at a crosswalk with the other Germans for the crossing signal and not feeling weird or impatient versus letting my American instincts take over and just crossing anyway--but it's going to be so damn interesting coming back to my homeland after this whole experience and finally being able to view a year of living in Germany through the lens of American life. After just six weeks in Berlin and a month of backpacking things like seeing and hearing English everywhere on the street, driving instead of taking the S Bahn, even the American sense of humor (especially the American sense of humor) seemed bizarre and uncomfortable. That whole trip lasted 77 days, and we're only a week and a half away from reaching that. It's going to be an exceptionally odd experience returning home to this strange, foreign land called Amerika at the end of this journey. I wonder if it will ever seem like the United States of America, or just Die Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika. Mal sehen. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, wie viel Zeit es brauchen wird, für alles noch mal normal zu scheinen.

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Anyway, we've got a few more blog posts coming up. Quite a bit has happened in the past week/week and a half (bought a new guitar! started doing my own lessons, taking a German as a foreign language class at the university, etc.), but haven't been in the writing mood for a while. Too much grayness and wind and rain outside. But I did actually get to see blue sky and the sun for like a half hour today, and there's nothing like vitamin D for creativity.