Home Sweet Germany

Time has sped back up in Germany. The past week has gone by very quickly and I've begun to realize that the time has come to say goodbye to Schwäbisch Hall and Germany, both of which have begun to feel a lot like home. When we first arrived, two months seemed like such an incredibly long time to be in a foreign place, but I guess it makes sense that the less foreign a place becomes the shorter the time seems to be.  Similarly, living in Schwäbisch Hall has become more routine and less of a constant exploration. We've seen most of the area and explored most of the different parts of Schwäbisch Hall, so that now everything feels like a rerun.  That isn't to say that life here has become boring, by no means, but rather that these are the things that have come together to make this small town in the south of Germany feel like home.  I noticed a week or two ago that I recognized a few people in the local pubs and cafés that I had seen elsewhere about town during my time here and it struck me that I was becoming, if only marginally, a part of a community. That said, I'm excited to move on to Vienna and for the coming of spring and for all the new possibilities for exploration that will come with it, but there's still that sense of melancholy understanding that I have to uproot myself yet again, like moving to or away from school for the summer.

 

Of course, that doesn't mean there haven't been adventures.  Last weekend was another day trip, this time to Nürnberg.  The morning began with a two hour bus ride from Schwäbs, accompanied by a local who either knew a lot about Nürnberg or had lived there.  He introduced himself over the bus's loudspeaker and told us some basic facts about the city, the history, the population, culture and so forth.  After about fifteen minutes, he sat down, but it wasn't five minutes before he had picked the microphone back up and begun talking again.  The loudspeaker was just that, loud, and I, having had a hard time falling asleep the night before, just wanted to sleep or gaze at the German landscape as it passed us by.  Nope, not happening.  Our guide proceeded to babble on about the Autobahn, the different meanings of the different colors of the different signs along the Autobahn, how you could tell this or that truck was Polish, and eventually, he just broke down and made annoying noises for the duration of the trip.  Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but he did talk the entire time, and I'm sure it was mostly for the sake of making noise. Thank the dear sweet iLord for iPods.

 

Nürnberg from the Nürnberg Castle.

 

Luckily, as we stepped off the bus, he mentioned that we were welcome to follow him around the city and take part in his tour, or we could simply go off on our own.  After another ten minutes of his prattling on at the local art museum, my friends and I decided to ditch the tour and explore Nürnberg for ourselves.  We were all mostly interested seeing things related to the Nürnberg Trials, but as it turns out, most of that happened in a nearby suburb or something and required the better part of a day and a good chance of missing the bus to experience.  The things we did experience were: the only scrambled egg-serving café in the entirety of Germany, the most bizarre statues ever (see below), at least three epically echoing churches, a fortress/castle that was once home to several generations of Holy Roman Kaisers (the giant wooden door had the Austrian coat of emblazoned on it, oddly enough), the unfortunately locked door of the Kunstbunker (yes, Art Bunker), and the best damn pizza I've ever had, as made by bona-fide Italians from Italy.  

 

There's more to this statue, but it would be grossly inappropriate to show.

 

However, my favorite part came when I went into one of the numerous gift shops looking for a Bavarian flag to satisfy both my ancestral yearnings and my newfound obsession with flags.  When the woman went to sell me the flag, she told me the price in English, but as I was counting out my money, I repeated the amount in German.  "Oh! Sie sprechen Deutsch?" she asked me. "Ja.  Natürlich!" I told her.  And we proceeded to have a conversation about where I was studying, how nice of a city Nürnberg was, and how I had family ties in Bavaria.  I marched out of that gift shop not only with a deliciously awesome flag of my ancestors, but also with the knowledge, that, yes, I had actually learned some German and could converse with an actual German without making them cringe!

 

It could only get less epic from there, of course.  All week I've been getting ready to move to Vienna (kind of) and spending time on a tangential obsession called geo-fiction that is a sort of fall-out from my vexillology obsession.  The long and short of it is, you participate in an online game where you're in charge of creating the entire culture, history, government, and just about everything else pertaining to a fictional country of your own design on a fictional Earth-esque planet.  It's basically a legitimized version of what's been bouncing around in my head since about the age of 10.  More about it later, including a link to my country's website, once it's finished.

 

Geofiction may or may not be a thinly disguised excuse for flag design.  The fact that this flag contains the colors of the German flag crossed with the colors of the Austrian one is entirely coincidental.

 

Oh yeah... and it looks like my school may finally be publishing one of my writing pieces in a literary magazine!  Apparently, both a short story of mine and a few poems are being considered for publication Rivercraft, which has summarily rejected everything else I've ever flung at it.  With any luck, something will get published!  Keep your fingers crossed!

Inevitable Disillusionment

Remember all my griping in my last post about how my class was too easy?  I take it all back.  As it turns out, the easy teach was only a week-long substitute for our new teacher, a man who looks like a young Einstein and sounds more like a German than anyone else I've met so far.  He has a very different teaching style from the other teachers I've had up to this point, meaning that he's very direct and very demanding.  That isn't to say that he's not nice - my friends and I have chalked it up to a mixture of culture shock and die-hard feelings of American entitlement.  That, of course, doesn't keep me from getting my feelings hurt when Einstein tells us, quite seriously, that our attempts to successfully utilize subordinate conjunctions was a "Katastrophe," or when he tells me that my presentation would have been good if I didn't start so many sentences out with "And here we have..." (Und hier haben wir...).

Of course, that isn't the half of it.  What's really been baking my noodle are my table-mates, a young girl from Taiwan, and a forty-something guy from Turkey.  Both of them are extremely nice, but they're a nightmare to work with.  A basic example: we're given a half hour to complete the task of coming up with a commercial for our school's program and then perform it in front of the class.  From the word go, Ali, the Turkish guy, buries his nose in his dictionary like he's stocking up nuts for the winter and won't come out even if Jesus Christ himself came through the door.  When he finally does emerge he always manages to have something completely irrelevant to add to the discussion.  On the other hand, Pei (Taiwan) is ready to work, but offers little of her own suggestions and doesn't respond one way or the other when I ask her if she likes my ideas, just stares at me like I'm either the purdiest or ugliest thing she's ever seen.  And when I do just go ahead with my ideas for lack of feedback, she seems to get mad.  Fifteen minutes into our half our, we've got a healthy portion of nothing written down, and I just sit there listening to two of my American friends at the next table joking with the Irish guy at their table; they're already finished.  "Ali, got any ideas?" Nothing from behind the German-Turkish dictionary.  "Pei, wanna run with my idea, or would you rather do somthing else?"  Blank stare.  Laughter from the other Americans.  "What, Ali?  You want to talk about fishing?  You don't care if that has nothing at all to do with this project?  Okay.  Cool."  AAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHH!

Needless to say, all of this, while not horrible by any means, has been building up on me all week and contributing to the gradual breakdown of my spirits.  I was at about the breaking point yesterday right before the first morning break when I realized what was really bothering me so much.  I wasn't looking forward to school anymore.  For the first time.  It was something of an emotional roller coaster for me all day, but speaking with a few local Germans and going out with my friends for a drink managed to distract me for the most part.  Today was better, but perhaps because I've decided to ignore my teacher and learn anyway (he is a nice guy 75% of the time) and do all the work myself when my partners seem unable to.  Harry Potter in German (and all of its translational hilarity) has also been key in helping me keep my sanity.  And venting to Megan.

In any case, tomorrow we're going to Nürnberg and it promises to be very schön and historical and wonderful and Einsteinless.  I promise to have a happy post and many pictures thereof upon my return.

Adventures in Internal Combustion and Vexillology

Admittedly, the rate of adventure has certainly gone down since I have returned from Berlin.  The first week of our second-month course has gone smoothly and I feel pretty much settled back in Schwäbisch Hall.  After Berlin, it seems like someone has dialed down the speed of time in Schwäbs.  February means the start of our second course at the Goethe Institut, which in turn means a new teacher and a higher degree of difficulty (in theory).  So far, the difference between the B1.1 level and the B1.2 level seems to be little if not a reversal.  While our first course was very much a rigorous course with daily grammar lessons and nightly homework, so far this week, the second course has been almost entirely speaking-based with only one small grammar lesson (it was participles - nothing huge).  I'm glad to have all the extra speaking practice, but I also wish we could have more writing and grammar practice as well.  Perhaps that will pick up as the course goes on...

 

In other news, my friends and I went on an excursion on Thursday to a nearby field on top of a nearby hill that is part of a nearby farm.  It was delightfully Sound of Music-esque and definitely solicited some singing from yours truly.  The area surrounding Schwäbisch Hall is pretty much all rural, hilly, and with a smattering of woods here and there.  It makes for really rather epic hiking and exploring opportunities, which I imagine I will be taking more advantage of as the weather gets nicer and as I have already done most of the activities the school offers during the week.

 

 

Rachel standing on the horizon of our Sound of Music hill.

 

However, perhaps the most exciting thing to happen in the last 6 days was our second trip to Stuttgart and THE MERCEDES-BENZ MUSEUM!  It was a steal; for 6 euro, our train rides and museum trip were taken care of.  The museum is very futuristic  architecturally and you ride a lift (an elevator for you non-Europeans, HAHAHA) to the very top of the building where you work your way back down to the main floor through more than a hundred years of automotive history.  I specifically thought of my cousin Cole when we got down to the 2nd floor and got to ride in the race-car simulator... I recognized Monte Carlo from playing some Playstation game with him and Uncle Eric and Grandma and Grandpa's house.

 

 

The first car with its own chassis (second motorized carriage), invented by Karl Benz after Gottlieb Daimler's adapted horse-drawn carriage, the front wheel of which can be seen on the left.

 

We wound our way through the floors using special audio devices that could detect what room you were in and what display you were looking at.  It was both fascinating and amusing to have an Austrian guy in my ear pronouncing "tubes" as "tübes" and "super-charged" as "super-sharged."  Amongst the many cars on display, we saw the first motorized carriage; a 1902 Mercedes Simplex 40 PS, the first to carry the Mercedes name; the first ever built 300 SLR (1955), which I may or may not have sneakily touched; a gull-wing version of the same car; and the SUV they used to film The Lost World; oh yeah... and the Popemobile.  It was unbelievably cool.  I want a Mercedes.
 

A 300 SL hardtop circa the 1950's.

 
Stephen Spielberg probably touched this car.

And what with virtually no homework and very little of Schwäbisch Hall left unexplored, I've been left to my own devices for self-amusement.  I've spent a good portion portion of my free time this week diving into the world of vexillology which I sort of tripped into originally after staring at the Austrian flag I have hanging over my desk.  I've become quite obsessed with flags in the past few days to the point that I'm running out of world flags the histories of which I have not read (at least major countries' flags).  I've also stumbled on the North American Vexillological Association's (NAVA) website, where I have discovered that they keep a database of members' personal flags.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to join and I've worked on Photoshop all week perfecting a flag design I came up with in high school.  I've also been reading Harry Potter auf Deutsch, which has proved to be another instance where my past mania has been an asset... whenever I run across a word or sentence I don't understand, I can usually think of the exact sentence in Englisch and make the necessary connections myself.  I guess listening to Jim Dale read Harry Potter approximately 3.5 million times in high school is finally paying off.  If all of this sounds fun to you, you're probably nuts.
 

The current version of my personal flag.

A Nice View of Berlin

Yesterday, my group and I made a safe return to Schwäbisch Hall, via six or seven different trains totaling over 9 hours and with only one missed stop and subsequent re-routing.  Today has been full of rousing activities like laundry, grocery shopping, and the like.  However, I did post a whole bunch o' photos from Berlin and Dresden on my Facebook account.  I have just recently learned that I can provide non-Facebookers with public links to any album I create on Facebook, so I have created several links in my Photography section through which anyone can view my photos.  Check them out!  (Also I apologize in advance for any odd pictures involving my friends and I making weird faces and or jumping.)

Rostock can be Chilly in January

I got more use out of my zoom lense yesterday that perhaps I ever have before. Yep, I got an opportunity to do some "wildlife photography" during our trip to the Berlin Zoo. In general, it was a typical zoo experience, with the one major exception being that we got to see KNUT! In case you missed it, this polar bear (Eisbär) captured pretty much the whole world's attention about a year ago when his mother rejected him and was the center of a controversey over whether or not it would be ethical to raise him without the guidance of his proper mother. Wherever you stand on the issue, you have to admit that Knut is both cute and crazy. We must have hung around the polar bear area watching him amuse himself for at least 15 minutes. In that time I got some pretty crazy pictures of Knut being Knut and I can't wait to share them.

At this point in my entry I can literally feel my Englisch falling away, and I appologize for the effects a German environment is having on me. In any case, today Tommy, Annie, Rachel, and I decided to take an excursion outside the city of Berlin. The original plan was to go to Poland, but that fell through for being too large of an undertaking. Instead, we decided that we would all like to see the Baltic Sea and hopped on a train and headed for the end of the line: Rostock. Unfortunately, we had all slept in and we didn't arrive in the costal town until 3:00 in the afternoon. If Rostock is anything in January, it's frigid. Our spirits were dampened as we fought a bitter wind in oder to get a look at the town. After a late lunch we got on the local train system to get to the coast, but by that time it had already become dark. After one premature disembarkation and a twenty minute wait for the next train, we finally made it to the coast, the sky and the water pitch black. The part of Rostock that is by the sea must be very nice in the summer, as full as the harbor was of sailboats and as well stocked as the streets were with restaurants, but in the winter all the ships were in and the shops closed up. Still determined to make something out of our trip, we headed towards the beach, heads bowed against a wind that seemd to grow stronger the closer we got. We ended up hiking accross a giant sandbar to a lighthouse that was hard to photograph at night. By this point, we had lost all sense of sanity in the face of such rediculous conditions and, fearing we might all be blown into the water, we retreated to the safety of the train station. 3 long hours later, here I am, safe, sound, and warm in the relatively balmy city of Berlin, no worse for the wear, but perhaps a little disappointed. Oh well... at least I can say I saw the Baltic Sea, if only three or so feet of it!