The most productive week of my German life

I haven’t done ANY traveling lately (staying in Tübingen has been amazing and totally necessary in that I’ve been writing a Hausarbeit, term paper, and trying to study for exams). I have therefore been unusually productive lately, and thus last week is a great week to highlight how I spend my time here without seeming like a total lazy bum.

Monday: American history at 10am, salad for lunch at the Mensa (student cafeteria), library to jump on the computers and print stuff out, Poverty class at 4pm, home for dinner, back to the library to do some reading, bed. Note: Monday nights are NOT normally spent at the library, but rather at “Tangente” a wonderfully sketchy bar that has karaoke on Monday nights.

Tuesday: Schnitzler class at 10 am, kinda boring, home for lunch, read for my next class, go to the American history sub-section-type-thing, go home, dinner. Not terribly productive.

Wednesday: Wake up, write an intro for my Hausarbeit, meet some other Americans at a café, pound out quite a few more pages, type up notes for two of my exams that I’ll take a week from Monday, dinner and bed. Note: Wednesday nights are also normally spent going out somewhere, sometimes to Tübingens really big club “Top 10.”

Thursday: Wake up late, read a bit for class, go to “Dorfgeschichten” at noon, have some lunch and answer emails, go to Pronunciation Training at 3, meet some people at a café to do work after class, write a few more pages. Have delicious falafel for dinner, do a bit more writing in the library, and then go “Würfel unser Cocktails!” (order a cocktail, roll a dice, how much you roll is how much you pay) at Schöne Aussichten.

Friday: Wake up late, go to the Bürgeramt (Citizens Office?) to un-register from the city (sadness!!!) go to a café and continue the mad writing spree, finish my paper, (WIN, its over 4500 words auf Deutsch), buy some wine, and have a girls-night on the balcony/porch/thing at my apartment.

Saturday: Wake up not too late, go to the library, start revising my paper, have lunch, continue revising, sort-of finish revising, go to a café for some much-needed caffeine, go home and have dinner, then meet some Germans at Tübingens little Bier-garten on the river, and speak lots of German.

Sunday: Wake up late, finish revising the paper/adding some secondary literature, church at 6:30pm, home to dinner and bed.

The week of work really paid off, as I was able to turn in my Hausarbeit this past Tuesday! After my roommate corrected it for me on Monday night – it took her two hours and she had a rather confused/extremely concentrated look on her face the whole time. Hope my professor doesn’t fail me for my crap academic written German...I also went to my last class Thursday (sooo happy that Uni is over) and have just two mündliche Prüfungen (oral exams) next week before I'm done!

Universität

Now that the semester is basically over (I have two weeks of classes left), I’ll let you know what’s going on: school is really, really, really hard. I had no idea how very rudimentary (and honestly, quite crappy) my German was until I got stuck in a less-than-acoustically-wonderful classroom with a German speaking professor and twenty rapid-speaking (and sometimes also heavily accented or dialect-speaking) students. Wayyyyy harder than I anticipated it would be! All semester I anticipated it would eventually get better; sadly, I haven’t noticed a huge change.

For those of you who are interested, here are the classes I’m taking:

1. Arthur Schnitzler in the Context of Viennese Modernism. I freaking adore Schnitzler, so I love reading for this class, but usually get pretty lost during the discussions…it’s frustrating.

2. History of the US in the 20^th Century. This class is great because 1. I’m relearning American history, which is just life-good, and 2. It’s a total confidence-builder for my German. Since I usually have a good idea of what’s going on, since I’ve obviously learned US History before, I can really focus on the German, picking up new vocab and expressions, while at the same time definitely learning some new things. This is a lecture course, but two other “Amis” and I are taking the accompanying discussion section, where the prof loves to ask us stuff as native speakers and real-live-Americans (example: “What holds your country together as a nation?”). We never have a good answer and I’m pretty sure the other German students think we’re absolute morons.

3. Poverty in the 19^th and 20^th Century. Also a lecture, which means all listening and no stress of having to speak. I like this class, because I think the topic is interesting, and the professor speaks pretty quickly, so it’s a good challenge to my German. I don’t like this class because the professor is also really funny, making me feel totally out of the loop and non-German speaking – the reason is know he’s funny is not because I get his jokes/funny comments, but because the class erupts in laughter approximately every 15 minutes.

4. Mass-media and advertising in Germany. This class is not a real-University class, but one offered by the “German as a Foreign Language Department.” This basically means low-stress because everyone speaks the same broken German I do! While the material/readings are interesting, the class is a total joke – we don’t really “learn” anything or do much critical analysis, we just talk about how much and what kind of TV we watch. It was extremely frustrating because I’d had high expectations for it, but over already…hopefully I passed the Klausur (end-of-semester-exam).

5. Village-stories from the German speaking-area (terrible translation, sorry). I’m more auditing this class than taking it, because I think it’s interesting and like the stories, but can never finish the reading and didn’t think I was in shape to write a final paper for it. Might not get a thing from WashU for it, but it’s good to get more time each week reading and listening to German I figure, even though it makes me feel like I’m drowning sometimes.

6. Pronunciation training! Another class I’ll get no credit for but totally life-useful. While 14 one-hour classes certainly aren’t going to get rid of my horrible American accent, I’m hoping it will help a little, and it’s nice to actually learn some rules for pronunciation outside of the basic stuff you get in year-1 German. I’ve already learned quite a lot actually.

So that’s class. It’s hard, totally different from the American system, and demoralizing…luckily lots of other parts of this semester abroad have been wonderful! Since Uni turned out to be an Enttäuschung (dissapointment).

Salzburg

…was one of the best trips I’ve had this whole semester. Despite the fact I was feeling super traveled-out after Leipzig. I spent four days there with Christy, and we went from being cultural-y to exploring nature to going into full-on shameless tourist mode. It was amazing. Here’s a breakdown:

I arrived Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening we were classy-touristy. After changing into appropriate theater-going clothes, we hit up the art museum in the Altstadt, had dinner, and then saw a production of “Jugend ohne Gott” (Youth without God). I was simultaneously impressed by how much I actually did understand and frustrated by how that still wasn’t enough for me to totally grasp everything that was going on. Fun nonetheless, though.

Monday we took a “Sound of Music” Tour which was incredibly cheesy and amazingly fun – they took us to a bunch of places where the movie had been filmed, and it was crazy to see how the filmmakers pieced together different areas of the city to create the film. After that we went up to Hohensalzburg, a castle/fortress up on a hill to the west of the river, where the view over the city is absolutely stunning.

Tuesday we hopped back over the border into Germany to visit a Salt Mine, which was totally cracked out and incredibly cool – I totally wished the brothers could have been with me to see it! Unfortunately, I didn’t understand a lot of the German they were using to explain the mining process (definitely not the type of vocabulary I’ve ever learned) but it was amazing to be in the mine and walk through the tunnels.

After that we continued on to the Königssee – truly the most beautiful place I’ve seen in Europe this far. It’s a long, skinny lake, incredibly clean and a beautiful aqua color and bordered by huge mountains – sort of Canandaigua-esque…but on steroids. We took a boat ride out to a little point further down the lake and just walked around the paths for a bit. It was drizzling the entire time but the rain and mist really didn’t detract from the experience at all.

Wednesday, then, before we left in the afternoon, we went to the “Trick Fountains” at Hellbrunn Palace, and were decently soaked by the end of the tour – our tour guide was realllly enjoying catching everyone by surprise and turning on random unnoticed fountains the whole time. There were also tons of little kids on the tour, who were mostly adorable and completely enjoying the ridiculousness, aside from the one poor German kid who sobbed the entire tour.

Salzburg as a city was also extremely touristy, but so wonderful/beautiful it didn’t even bother me – I can see why it gets so so many tourists each year!

I’ve spent the past two weekends in Tübingen and plan on being here the next two weekends as well – sort of a record! But totally necessary, as I need to prepare two Referats (oral presentations) as well as write my Hausarbeit (final-term-paper)…I’ve become great friends with the library recently.

Prag, Straßburg, Leipzig, Dresden

The mad travel spree continued this past month. Ali and Helen (sister and cousin) came to visit Deutschland/Europe/me which was WONDERFUL. It was literally so nice to have family around and people to talk about home-things with. Slash we did some amazing traveling:

Prag/Praha/Prague– completely beautiful and horribly touristy. I love the way the city looks – it actually reminded me of Vienna – and how it embraces it’s river – it’s very central to the town has simple gorgeous bridges, which I’m a total sucker for. We spent nearly all day Saturday at the Hrad (castle), a massive complex really, and both beautiful and intimidating in the best sense. Sunday we went to mass in a really stunning church just steps from our hostel, and an hour-long mass in a language I 100% don’t speak realllly made me appreciate Vatican II. We also saw parts of the Jewish Museum in Prag; the Synagoge/Museum focusing on Jewish history in the region from 1000-1800 was one of the best exhibits I think I’ve seen.

Then Ali and Helen ditched me for more awesome traveling (they went to Vienna, Venice, and München) and I went back to Tübingen for a joyous (read sarcastically) week of Uni.

The next Saturday/Sunday we went to Strasbourg/Straßburg. The spelling still confuses me, but it was incredibly beautiful! Which I was not entirely expecting but was pleasantly surprised to discover. I was also extremely pleasantly surprised to find that all of the people there – and by that I really mean the waiters, the only Strasburg-ians we talked to – we super-nice despite the fact we were speaking English (and me accidentally sometimes in German) to them. Although Ali and Helen said Strasburg was the most difficult place to use English that they’d been to, we very much got by.

We were extremely lazy tourists in Strasburg. Mass (in the really stunning Frauenkirche) and a boat tour on the river were the only things we did. All other time was filled with walking from one restaurant or bar or café to the next. It was wonderful.

After three days in Tübingen after Straßburg, we (me plus some Americans and Brazilians from Deutsch-Kompakt) left this past Thursday for Leipzig. We did a “Blind Booking” with Germanwings, which means you choose a general destination or theme (ex, “Eastern Europe” or “Sun and Sand” or “Nightlife”). We chose “Eastern Europe” and naturally get sent somewhere within Germany rather than somewhere like Sarajevo. Oh well. Leipzig was a lot cooler than I was expecting, and we were able to do a day trip on Saturday to Dresden, which is absolutely beautiful along the river. Museum-wise I was feeling a little screwed after the weekend was over, as Leipzig’s City Museum was only half finished (missing the 19^th/20^th Centuries) and the History of the German Military Museum in Dresden was closed until November. There was, of course, plenty of else to do and it was a really fun trip overall.

Tomorrow (Sunday) I leave for a four-day-trip to Salzburg, and then I literally never want to leave Tübingen again. By Sunday in Leipzig we had no desire to do anything, and I think I’m a little traveled-out. The new goal for my last two months here is to explore Baden-Württemburg (the federal state that Tübingen is in) and maybe start being serious about school. Maybe.

So. Much. Traveling.

These past weeks have been filled with just two things: school (aka stress, maybe I’ll do a blog post on that later) and traveling.

After the weekend in München, we did a phenomenal four-day trip to Vienna for Easter, came back to Tübingen for three days, then I met Christy in Berlin for three days, and came back to Tübingen swearing I wouldn’t leave again for a while. That completely didn’t work out, as the following Saturday and Sunday were spent in Stuttgart! Which is only an hour away by train, though, and therefore much less tiring than the previous two weekends. Here’s the breakdown:

Vienna: Vienna is quite seriously my favorite city in the world. One, it is simply beautiful. The architecture is astounding, you feel the remains of an old, powerful empire everywhere, and they still speak German. I’d been to Vienna when I was in Europe vorletzten Sommer (summer before last), but in some ways I saw a completely different side of the city this time. Before, I had hit a lot of museum/tourist attractions, which were wonderful and I loved. This time we still did some touristy stuff, but also just spend a ton of time walking around, eating, taking the trams and the U-bahn to random places…and the more I saw of Vienna, the more beautiful it became.

Highlights of the trip included (among others) seeing the Lipizzaners at the Spanish Riding School (I could have watched those horses literally all day), going to the Prater amusement park (aka, cotton candy, an awesome Ferris Wheel and a phenomenal return to our childhoods), and trekking outside of the main city are to a totally adorable and wonderful Heuriger (wine-garten-thing).

I also went to Easter mass in St. Stephans with another one of the girls I was with. St. Stephans is the huge cathedral in the main square in Vienna, and I have to say that it was less a religious experience and more a phenomenally strange touristy one. First, there was a concert of sorts during the Mass (Wagner, maybe…? Something composed with the intent of being church/mass music!) which meant that mass was over 2 hours long, and secondly, people kept just popping into the back of the church, taking pictures, and leaving! It was kind of maddening. But overall, a really cool experience.

Basically, every time I think about Vienna recently I’m just sad that I’m not still there. Because it is truly amazing.

Berlin: Berlin was the Museum and Culture weekend: Christy (if you’ve forgotten, the WashU PhD student who is living in Tübingen) and I visited the Topography of Terror, which chronicles the years 1933-45, the German Historical Museum (think: last two thousand years of german/European history), which is overwhelmingly huge but great, basically somewhere I felt you could happily go three days in a row, the Pergamom Museum, and then I went to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which chronicles the history of Jews in German over the last two centuries and was super-interesting and informative.

Friday night we went to the ballet, Schneewitchen (Snow White). It was modern, phenomenal, beautiful, and absolutely one of my favorite things I’ve done here. Saturday night, we went to the Symphony to see if they had Restkarten (left over tickets still needing to be sold) and not only did they have them, but we also got the phenomenal student price of 10 euro. They played Beethoven’s 9^th, which was absolutely incredible to hear live.

When I was in Berlin last time, although I totally enjoyed the trip, I didn’t feel any particular love for the city. I knew I wanted to go back though, because there is obviously just sooo much to see in Berlin, but chose a short weekend to do it – by the end of the trip, I sort of wished I’d planned to be there longer! Berlin is simply too huge and has too much to offer. As a city though, it’s not my favorite; I just don’t feel like I can figure out it’s “vibe” – or maybe it’s just not one that I love.

After a verspätete (late) train (that happens to me wayyy too much here), a missed train in Stuttgart, an hour waiting in a café in the Bahnhof in Stuttgart there, and a taxi home from the Bahnhof in Tübingen, I arrived home at around 2:30am and swore to myself I wasn’t leaving Tübingen again for a while. That turned out to be a total fail, as last weekend became Stuttgart-weekend.

Saturday in Stuttgart last weekend: Frühlingsfest (“spring festival”). Basically the second largest Bierfest after Oktoberfest in München, a combination Carnival and Bier-tent-extravaganza. Completely awesome, way too much fun, lots of bier, delicious/unhealthy carnival food, bumper cars, and basically so fun we went back again yesterday! For more bumper cars, water rides, delicious nutella-elephant-ear-like-treats, bier tents, and dancing on tables (it wasn’t trashy, everyone was doing it), and trying to sing along to German songs.

Sunday in Stuttgart last weekend: More ballet! Less modern and more traditional, but still totally beautiful. I think ballet is my new thing, especially since Germany loves its student prices.

In Tübingen for the next six days in a row – very excited to just be here. Future travel plans, though, include Prag (!!!), Straßburg, and Salzburg.

München and the Pope's Bier

München this weekend with some of the girls – completely awesome.

Background for the trip: Germany has this thing called a Schönes-Wochenende-Ticket, which enables up to five people to use Nahverhkehr (translation: the slower, less comfy trains) for an entire day, for only 39 Euro. Considering that that’s 8 Euro per person going there, 8 going back, 20 for one night in a hostel, you have a rather inexpensive weekend trip to München.

The trip really started Friday afternoon though, when we finalized these plans to go by actually booking a hotel. Feeling very yay-cool-lets-travel-last-minute-through-Europe, we then agreed to meet up that night at around 10:30, have a few drinks, and go to this Uni-party in Kuckuck (the student bar 20 seconds from my dorm). Turns out the music at this party is the BEST most of us have experienced at a club/bar so far in Germany (translation: mostly contemporary American pop and rap, mixed with some super-popular German stuff), which meant we didn’t want to leave. Which meant we stayed until like 3:30 or 4am. Which means we just didn’t go to bed – three of us came back to my apt to crash and just stayed up chatting, showered, packed, and headed down to the bus stop at 5:50 am.

So one all nighter, two transfers, three trains, and four hours later, we arrive in München! Our weekend started off with a group of men dressed in Lederhosen confronting us at the Bahnhof, telling us we needed to cut these little bottles of Schnapps off of this one guy’s onesie-costume-thingy. When I asked him what they were doing, the guy with the Schnapps says “Ich muss heiraten,” or, “I have to get married,” which I thought was just phenomenally funnily phrased. Anyways, this was at 10:30 am and the groom-to-be was already completely hammered, slurring his German so badly I couldn’t understand it half the time, so that his friend had to repeat everything for us.

Funny start aside, we did some serious things here, mixed in with a very healthy amount of drinking Bier and eating German food.

First serious thing was Saturday: Dachau (just fyi, the next 7 paragraphs are my thoughts/impressions about that experience. Comment on this please if you have other thoughts!). I’m guessing most of you know that Dachau is a concentration camp in Germany; what makes it perhaps especially interesting is that it was the first concentration camp (established in 1933 just after Hitler came to power) and was supposed to “serve as a model for all other camps.” I knew this walking in – what I didn’t realize is that Dachau is also quite simply the name of the town where the camp is located. It was very strange chilling on the S-bahn for 25 minutes and then suddenly getting off at a Bahnhof called “Dachau,” and then seeing buses for the “City of Dachau” and etc. It was sort of chilling for me, and I wonder how it would feel to live in a town with such an infamous name.

A short bus ride later, we get off the bus at “KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau,” “Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.” The first thing that struck me was that the pathway leading to the information center and then a few hundred meters later to the actual site of the camp was beautiful, well maintained and prettily planned. That was an uncomfortable feeling, the instant, “oh what a lovely day and a pretty path.”

The discomfort really only continued though, but not in the way I had thought it would. After literally feeling that I was going to puke after seeing the “Arbeit macht frei” door and reading that where I was standing was the path that prisoners walked, headed towards that door into that camp, I walked into the prisoners section of the camp. There, the “administrative building” had been transformed into a museum, the only barracks there were two that had been rebuilt as replicas, and towards the back of the prisoners area were religious memorials – one from the Catholic church, one Evangelical, one Jewish and a Russian Orthodox on a bit farther off.

These struck me as completely inappropriate and ironic. One, Nazi ideology was totally against organized religion; there would have been no place for religiosity in a concentration camp. There was none of the goodness/mercy/love that religion preaches inherent in a concentration camp. I really cannot understand why someone thought it appropriate, then, for these religiously-based Denkmale (memorials) to be there. Not to say they don’t have a place in Holocaust memorialization, but in my opinion that place is not in the actual concentration camps. But these are just my initial thoughts, so perhaps more on that later. (Thesis for next year…?)

So, confused by the somewhat prettiness of the surrounding area, annoyed with all of the churches/religious stuff, completely unable to actually picture that people had lived horribly as prisoners here, I started noticing that the people around me were taking pictures, and in a way that I was totally not ok with. I too, of course, was taking pictures, but of the camp and the things that struck me. A lot of the people around me were taking pictures of themselves in the camp – one man I saw asked his wife to take a picture of him in front of “Arbeit macht frei,” another young girl actually laid down against a tree in the camp and started posing. I literally wanted to slap these people, not just for completely disturbing my experience with their callousness but for being so incredibly thoughtless and disrespectful. I don’t understand what someone hopes to gain by having documented themselves freely standing next to or walking under such an iconic representation of Nazism and the Holocaust – “look Ma I was really here!” just doesn’t cut it.

My final thought is that the gas-chamber/crematorium was genuinely chilling to see. Although the gas-chambers in Dachau were never put to use, it was horrible just to see the space, to see what someone had designed in order to murder people. The very first thing I noticed there was that ceiling in that room is lower than any of the other rooms – it is a genuinely horribly cramped space. The crematorium, on the other side, had been used, and it was most nauseating to think about those prisoners who had to carry out the process of actually cremating the bodies.

Really my final thought, though, is that there is this big sign in the camp that says “Nie wieder,” “Never agan,” “никогда больше” and a few other languages – I thought this was maybe the worst part of the camp, because it’s just not true.

Moving on from that, the other serious thing we did was take a city tour on Sunday, which on the one hand was totally funny and mostly about Bier (I learned that the pope’s favorite Bier is Augustiner Edelstoff from München – naturally we tried it later, it’s delicious, and I understand why he has it imported to the Vatican bi-monthly), but also about Münchens history as the city with a very deep Nazi past – Hitler called it the “Hauptstadt der Bewegung,” or, “Capital of the (National Socialist) movement. München has over a hundred small memorials all over the city commemorating the Holocaust/War/Resistance Movement, mostly unexplained and easy to overlook – our tour guide asked us to compare for ourselves the effectiveness of such memorials (which require you to go seek out information and learn for yourself about what happened) with memoralize like the “Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe” in Berlin, which is not subtle but takes up a whole city block (go google pictures!). All in all, this weekend really made me start thinking about the process of memorialization.

So, all seriousness aside, we also of course went to the Hofbräuhaus (Saturday), went to an Augustiner Biergarten (Sunday), and saw tons of people dressed in Lederhosen and Dirndls (the entire weekend). Weigh in, all: should I buy a Dirndl next time we go to München? ! They’re expensive but I would have a killer Halloween costume for the rest of my life.

I also had the funny/strange experience of trying to go to church in the Frauenkirche (Münchens huge Catholic Church and the seat of the Archbishop of München and Freiburg) and ending up in a little chapel behind the altar with 18 other people, the priest, and the alter server. Mass was only 38 minutes long (beat that, parents/brothers), and it seems you have to go to the 10am Mass for it to be celebrated in the main church.

Basically in the end we decided we’re going to have to come back to München again one weekend! It’s an easy, not too expensive way to get out of Tübingen for a short weekend, and there’s so much to see, and of course so many more Biergarten to visit.

Final note is that being in a big city was really, really nice – don’t get me wrong, I love Tübingen, but München is just big and legit, with so much and extensive public transportation, so many more restaurants, a real, huge Bahnhof, and such a history. Loved it!

Tübingen + Sunshine + Mayfield Reunion part II

Chris came to visit Tübingen this weekend AND the weather was the most beautiful it’s been since I arrived in Germany which means 1. I got to be a tourist in my own town (awesome!) and 2. I got sunburnt (extremely not awesome).

Basically, we tried to make the weekend as typically German/Schwäbisch as possible! Which means we ate German pretzels and pastry, Wurst, Eis (ice cream), and Spätzle (egg noodle); we drank Apfelschörle (carbonated apple-juice), German bier, and delicious white wine; visited the picturesque little town of Bebenhausen, saw an amazing castle/fortress called Burg Hohenzollern (google pictures, you will be amazed), sat on the island in the Neckar, and went to a Biergarten, where there were peacocks wandering around. Crazyyy.

The more amusing points of the weekend included a non-English speaking tour guide and me crappily trying to translate things for Chris (who has a freakishly good passive understanding of German) and seeing a massive group of men dressed in Lederhosen at the castle (turns out they were just actors on some trip, not authentic Bavarians, but oh well) and me freaking out when the bus to the Biergarten came 6 minutes late. That had never happened to me here! But then Sunday evening the bus I wanted to take into the city was like 7 minutes late, throwing my entire confidence in the bus system here into doubt. Chris was completely amused by my state of confusion/frustration/shock/disorientation at the bus situation; German is evidently wayyyy more orderly than Italy and a late bus is no big deal.

The Neckarinsel.

Castle! aka Burg Hohenzollern.

Castle again.

Freakishly picturesque German countryside...

Freakishly picturesque little town of Bebenhausen.

Basically, now that spring has arrived, my life is nothing but freakishly picturesque sights of every nature confronting me everywhere.

On another note, I started class yesterday! More on that later, though.

Amsterdam

Mayfield reunion in Amsterdam! I spent this past Friday through Sunday in Holland with Chris Hughes and Charlotte Greene – major life win.

The trip started off not-so-well, as approximately 30 other people and I missed our connecting train to Amsterdam in Düsseldorf – as we pulled into the train station in Düsseldorf, we saw our next train across the platform and all got ready to sprint the 15 meters it would take to get us across the platform. And then we watched as our train came to a full stop, and the new one started to pull away.

A really slow DB worker, a new ticket, three more (slow!) trains, another really tight connection, and four hours later I arrived in Amsterdam, sadly two full hours later than I was supposed to. Such is life. Happily the weekend only got better after that.

Amsterdam is freaking beautiful. I absolutely love the canals and the buildings all packed really close together – it’s beautiful really early in the morning, it’s beautiful during the day, and it’s even more beautiful at night, when street lamps lining the canals illuminate the water. I also loved how after every five minutes of walking in a new direction the city had a slightly different vibe – sometimes it was unlike anything I’d every seen, sometimes it had a slightly German-Altstadt feel, sometimes it was purely sketch (aka Red Light District) and sometimes it kinda reminded us of Cleveland! I loved the variety.

One of my favorite things about the canals were all the boats lining the canal…banks? They are all super old and run down! I loved the contrast between the old, beautiful, wealthy looking buildings and the total crap boats that were still adorable – they definitely intensified the whole canal feeling. I was also really amused by the fact that some boats were clearly just poor, de-masted sailboats that looked pretty funny and awkward.

On the red-light-district: Chris’s guidebook said something along the lines of “Amsterdam might box your Puritan ears with it’s free-expression-ness,” and it was totally right. My ears were quite painfully boxed, and I was not a fan of the prostitutes in windows and sex shops and crass, graphic advertising all over. Not my scene (shocking, right?).

Although my favorite part of the weekend honestly might have been all the time we just spend walking and watching, we also got a healthy dose of touristy-activities:

· Van Gogh Museum – not my fave art museum ever, but enjoyable for 2 hours

· Heineken Brewery Tour – awesome. Completely hysterical, cheesy, only in English, and concluded with some free (well, aside from the part where admission was 15 Euro) beer at the end. I would totally recommend it, it was a really light few hours between art and…

· The Anne Frank House – an incredibly strange experience. First, I never realized that that Otto Frank’s business and the Secret Annex were literally smack in the middle of the city. The location truly astounded me; it didn’t seem secret at all as we were just a 10 minute walk from Amsterdam’s main square on one of Amsterdam’s main canals. In a way, that really intensified the sadness associated with the Franks story – they smack in the middle of a huge, beautiful city and unable to access any of it. Secondly, I was really weirded out by the experience of walking through the Secret Annex – you go through the former business-rooms and read the exhibits, and suddenly you’re through the bookcase-door and up some really steep stairs and bam, in the Annex, and you go through each room, and then suddenly you’re done and keep going through a museum built into the adjacent buildings. On the train home I couldn’t put my finger on what had been so weird, but realized Monday that it’s the way everyone just snakes through each room in a line, spending less than 60 seconds in each bare room (Otto wanted the rooms left unfurnished). The extremely quick little trip through the rooms is, I imagine, the anti-thesis of what the Franks lived through for over two years – not that any amount of well-though-out museum curation or innovative presentation could in any way replicate what they lived through. I feel though that my framework for understanding Anne’s diary has been distorted or altered in some way, in that today, in a free Amsterdam in the year 2011, we just were able to just walk hurriedly and freely through what was her home in an occupied, 1940s Holland.

· Canal-boat-tour – definitely my favorite touristy activity, even though I thought it would be kind of silly! It wasn’t at all – it’s a completely different view of the city when you’re on the canal, and I learned awesome random stuff. For example, all of the houses along the canals have furniture hooks built into the gables/roofs/whatever they are, because the staircases are too tight for any furniture to be taken in through doors – it gets hoisted up outside of the building and sent in through the windows. We also learned that approximately one car per week falls/accidentally drives into the canals. Ridiculous.

Add to that lots of walking, coffee, eating, and a decent amount of sleep, and that was our weekend!

Final note: languages. I heard wayyy more English/Spanish/Italian than Dutch all weekend, I’m pretty sure. But, it was cool to see how Dutch really is similar to English and German – when I saw, for example, street signs in both Dutch and English, the Dutch was usually decently intelligible with my knowledge of German. And on the boat tour, when the info was presented first in Dutch, then German, then English, it was fun to see how much I could get just from listening to the Dutch first.

Perhaps later this week I will update on my real life here in Germany…

Until then, some proof that I was there:

Canals!

Sailboats!

Heineken!

More canals!

Tübingen Tübingen Tübingen!

First things first: clarification on my thoughts about the term “Obrigkeitshörig:” I don’t believe and didn’t mean to imply that this term/concept explains National Socialism by itself. My Zivi put it best, and I requote him here: “Yes, you cant understand the coming-up of the Nazis without it BUT this is a result of German politics before WWII and goes much further than just we Germans are regularly Obrigkeitshörig.” I’m in full agreement with him, and feel bad that I may have implied that “Germans are regularly Obrigkeitshörig, therefore, National Socialism and WWII.” Because that’s, quite simply, untrue.

Instead, what I found most interesting about this chat with my teacher (who, for clarification, is a teacher of the German language, not a student/professor/researcher of German history/culture/lit) was that I had not heard the term before as a student of Germanistik, and wanted to replicate what he had said/how I dissected the term.

Secondly, I essentially need to update on both my last days on Bonn and my first days in Tübingen – Thursday the 3^rd of March I moved to Tübingen, a small town south of Stuttgart, where I will take another Sprachkurs (language course) during the month of March, and where I will (finally!!) actually attend university from April 11-July 23.

I’m going to steal an idea from the amazing Chris Hughes and update you on the last few weeks in bullet points. And use lots of bold so you can skip around and read about what you want. And leave “Bermerkungen” for another post. So user-friendly, no?

Also, I promise there will not be any further posts with a rundown of what I did everyday – but I think the first days in a new place are always amusing and interesting.

Last days in Bonn

· Decently uneventful but fun

· Hit a few more museums (I really enjoyed the art museum)

· Some dinners, bar hopping, the usual

· On Wednesday, the last full day I would be in Bonn, I finally went and walked along the river, which was beautiful and made me sort of sad that I was leaving Bonn, as I’d just started to like and get used to the city, meet people outside of my way-too-small class, and appreciate my lovely room in the dorm! But, onto Tübingen…

Thursday, 3. March 2011, aka, I’M FINALLY IN TÜBINGEN!

· Wake up really early

· Drag my shit to the Bahnhof

· Receive help from lots of friendly Germans with my massive suitcase

· Get on a train

· Get on another train in Stuttgart

· Get picked up at the platform at the trainstation in Tübingen by Thomas, the coordinator for WashU-Tübingen study abroad, and Christy, a WashU PhD student who is living here and writing her dissertation. It was awesome and I totally felt like a 6 year old kid getting picked up after school.

· Go to my dorm

· Haul stuff up to the fourth floor

· Go over some paperwork with Thomas, he and Christy peace

· Start to unpack

· Realize my room is filthy

· Go to the supermarket and buy food and cleaning supplies (please be impressed mom??)

· Clean my shelves and Schrank

· Unpack

· Head to the Altstadt with Christy

· Wander around

· Get dinner at a great Italian place

· Meet up with Christy’s roommate Aaron, a graduate student (from Ohio!) who has been living in Germany for two years already

· Hit a bar

· Hit another bar

· Hit an Irish pub

· Realize this is wonderfully different from my first night in Bonn

· Catch a bus home at like 1:30 – the bus system here runs late on weekends!

· Go to bed so, so, so happy to finally be in Tübingen

Anddd break from the bullet points to update you on two things:

Room/living situation: Turns out I am once again living out away from the city – slight sadness there. But, I’m in a dorm that is one of maybe 15 in this area, so tons of students are also up here, and the bus stop is a 55 second walk away. The University building where most of my classes will be is apprx 9min away by bus, and the Altstadt is 11min away. So really no big deal. My room, location aside, is great, and by that I mean really big with a desk (which I don’t have in my room in St. Louis!).

I am in an apartment-style dorm, with 6 single rooms. There is a shared kitchen/common area, and from that space branch off two separate areas, each with three rooms and a bathroom. And we have a balcony. So cool. But filthy…not that I’ve really worked on that.

I’ve met three of the roomies so far, all real Germans!! Ellie, Anna, and Mauritz. Evidently it’s totally normal for guys and girls to live together in student, university-sponsored housing. I’m going to roll with it. The other two Mitbewohner (roommates) are supposedly going to show up at some point during the semester: one more German guy, and one Greek guy (I think).

Major win that I’m living with four real Germans. And Ellie and Anna have promised to speak only German with me. Their German is crazy rapid and I love it.

The Altstadt: Translates as “old city,” aka, where all the fun happens. Three thoughts on the Altstadt right now: 1. It’s GORGEOUS. Totally picturesque little German town. I’ve been here a week and still get overwhelmed by how beautiful it is and how different it is from anywhere I’ve ever lived. 2. It’s confusing as all hell; see the finding church story below. After a week I’m only just beginning to get a feel for it. 3. It’s going to get me in very good shape – very steep hills, lots of up and down, etc. Overall, I’m already a very big fan of the Altstadt.

Friday, 4. March 2011, aka, the extremely frustrating day

· Wake up late

· Realize most of the places I want to go are already closed, because it’s a Friday, and I’m in Germany

· Go to the place where I’ll get a code that allows me to use the internet in my room – it’s supposed to be open till 4

· Learn that the secretary leaves at noon, because it’s a Friday, and I’m in Germany

· Wander around the Altstadt

· Decide to buy a phone

· Go to the phone store and sign some forms (no idea what they say, but I’m taking comfort in the fact that the store doesn’t have my credit card number. Yay for having to pay cash everywhere?)

· Buy another Schnitzler book (“Reigen,” it’s a play, Wikipedia it…the premise is pretty funny) because I’m facing an internet-less weekend

Saturday, 5. March 2011, aka a moderately successful day

· Hit the Bahnhof for some passport photos which I will need to enroll in my Sprachkurs Monday

· Wander around looking for a Catholic church

· Finally realize that one I’d seen yesterday is Catholic, but confusingly has the word “Evangelisch” in the name.

· Find an Apotheke

· Successfully converse with a pharmacist about the slight cold I’ve got

· Leave with what he tells me is just the right medicine

· Buy a lamp for my room! Because it’s actually very poorly lit, and I anticipate doing lots of schoolwork/reading/writing papers/being studious…

· Go home

· Hear doorbell ring – people! Excitement!

· Answer…and it’s our “Umwelttutor” (environment-tutor) and he was coming to basically make sure we keep the place clean. Which we absolutely don’t.

· Practice my listening-to-rapid-German skills as he tells me we’ll have to pay for a professional cleaning service if we don’t get it together

· Clean the sinks in our bathroom (and ignore the kitchen)

· Make rice for dinner. Delicious (not really).

Sunday, 6. March 2011, aka the day I get really lost and almost miss church

· Get really lost an almost miss church

· Go home after making it to church at the last minute

· Nap.

· Finally do some reading

· Finish “Reigen” (hat’s three of Schnitzler’s works down, 6 to go!)

· Make pasta for dinner (more delicious than yesterday’s rice)

Monday, 7. March 2011, aka the day I realize how much I despise rules and bureaucracy

· Wake up at 8 am. So ready for this day.

· Visit the Hausmeister (house-master…not really sure what the US equivalent is. Not an RA, not a student, but a real adult person who deals with all the dorms)

· Explain in broken German that our shower doesn’t drain

· Learn how to fill out a maintenance request form

· Walk to the internet-code-giving place – takes a good 35 minutes, but it’s all downhill and a gorgeous day

· Learn from the secretary that I absolutely, 100% cannot have a code until I’ve matriculated at the Uni

· Ask for a temporary code, show her some paperwork that Thomas said would help, give her Thomas’s number

· Get slight frustrated when nothing

· Get extremely frustrated when I learn that even after I matriculate, it takes 3-4 days for all the paperwork to go through to this particular office, and then they send you your code via post (what the hell. A few days later someone in my Sprachkurs said “With all this bureaucracy I think I understand Kafka a lot better now” haha)

· Go to Thomas’s office

· Explain the internet situation (thinking he will pick up the phone and say “Let’s see what I can do”)

· Get frustrated all over again when he says “oh, that’s really unfortunate. Well, just try to check your email frequently at the library as that’s how I’ll be staying in touch with you.”

· Slowly start to realize that the concept of “pulling strings” doesn’t exist here. This is the point where I realize I DESPISE rules and regulations. Really what is the point.

· Go to the Deutsch-Kompakt Sprachkurs registration

· Wait for like 40 minutes, as there are only 3 people checking us in

· Hear English all around me (joy)

· Finally get to check in!

· Fill out lot’s of paperwork

· Ask the girl how I can matriculate today because “It’s killing me not to have internet!” (that I say in English)

· Learn that basically, I can’t. Because I need a residence permit first (that’s why I’d just filled out all that paperwork). And that won’t be back from that particular office until Thursday. Which is why we won’t matriculate until Friday. Again, I’m desperate for someone to say “But let’s see what we can do for you.” Instead, they are very fond of saying “It just can’t be done.” (Das geht überhaupt nicht.)

· Go to the library.

· Learn that they won’t let me in until I’ve matriculated either. (Will someone please break one rule for me!??!) To anyone still reading this…please be impressed that I haven’t burst into tears yet.

· Give up on the internet thing for a bit

· Go buy some handsoap for the bathroom

· Buy some Döner for lunch. Delicious.

· Make one last attempt to find internet at an internet café that the Deutsch-Kompakt people told me about

· Learn that that was a bad tip – no internet still.

· Try the city library for internet

· Learn they’re closed on Monday

· Give up

· Go home

· Nap

· Clean some more – major vacuuming and mopping

· Finish unpacking and 100% move in, aka, the suitcases are empty and stowed under my bed!

· Ellie the super-nice roommate lets me use her computer to email mi madre

· Dinner. Rice again (but I’ve purchased some soy sauce. Win.)

Tuesday, 8 März 2011, aka, the day I make some friends

· Wake up, get ready, go to Deutsch Kompakt!

· Take a really boring written test

· Take a slightly less boring mündliche (spoken) test

· Hit up the Altstadt with the two Americans and one Ecuadorian I’ve just met

· Get ice cream!

· Walk up to the castle!

· Spend the whole time chatting auf Deutsch! (Major win and I’m so impressed with these guys that we spent like 2 hours auf Deutsch when we soooo easily could’ve done English)

· Go back to Deutsch Kompakt

· Visit the Mensa (inexpensive student cafeteria)

· Munch on some food and meet some more people: a Slovenian guy, two Brazilian girls, another American girl, and a guy from Taiwan who speaks freakishly good English

· Take a tour of the city with our tutor

· Learn where the post office is (very important)

· Learn where we can purchase a month-long-valid bus ticket (even more important). It’s slightly frustrating that the semester ticket won’t be valid until April, when the semester starts, but again, I’m rolling with it. And dishing out the Euros.

· Visit a bar with the Deutsch Kompakt program

· Tell a Korean gal that “it depends” when she asks another American and me if it’s normal to start drinking at 3 in the afternoon

· Spend the next few hours chatting with the super-nice Slovenian guy who speaks great German, and an Israeli-German guy who speaks like 5 languages

· Go to dinner with Thomas and Christy

· Chat chat chat

· Go home

· Fall in bed EXHAUSTED from the first real day in Germany that I’ve been speaking non-stop auf Deutsch with people I really want to get to know

Wednesday, 9 March 2011, aka, the first day of Unterricht (lessons) for Deutsch-Kompakt

· Wake up, running late as usual

· Get on the bus 10 minutes before class is supposed to start

· Don’t miss anything since we don’t start on time

· Do some getting to know each other – the class is quite small, like 12 people

· Pause (break) – head to the “Clubhaus” where students meet/hang out

· Sit outside in the sun and chat

· Unterricht part 2 – boring and overly simple grammar review. Yuck.

· 90 minute Pause – hit up the city library to use the internet

· Check my email

· Become frustrated all over again that I can’t do this in my own room

· Tutorium – not really Unterricht, but we’re in a classroom doing German-related things; it’s led by a current student at the Uni

· Listened to and discussed a German song

· Run into a girl from class in the city

· Trek out to some random store away from the Altstadt in search of clothes hangers

· Find clothes hangers! And buy other random things like Tupperware and a coffee mug

· Meet another Mitbewohnerin (roommate) when I get home, Anna – she’s super nice and offers me dinner, which I can’t accept as it’s Aschermittwoch (Ash Wednesday).

· Watch TV with the roomies for a bit (hard to understand auf Deutsch!)

· Head back to the city for a “gemeinsames Abendessen” (dinner together) with the people from Deutsch Kompakt

Thursday, 10 March 2011, aka, they have bars in German dorms!?

· Go to Unterricht, coffee break, go back to Unterricht, lunch break

· Eat at the Mensa (student cafeteria type thing) in the Altstadt instead of the closer one on Wilhelmstraße – it’s much prettier

· Go to Tutorium

· Wander around the city for a few hours with another Deutsch-Kompakt person

· Grab dinner in the Altstadt

· Go home, where the Anna has an Irish friend over who doesn’t speak great (any) German

· Am really amused by hard it is for me to switch back to English after a full day of speaking German

· Watch “Germany’s Next Top Model by Heidi Klum” with Anna and Ellie – soooo funny

· Go to the student bar in the dorm-administrative-building-20-seconds-away-from-us where Anna works

· Continue watching Top Model

· Learn that Ellie loves country music too – WIN!

Friday, 11 March 2011, aka, international evening of fun

· Unterricht, pause, Unterricht, lunch break

· Go to the Bahnhof (train station) and buy my train ticket to Amsterdam!

· Tutorium – we all talk about stereotypes of our respective countries, a pretty fun/funny class

· Go buy shoes (because naturally I didn’t bring shoes that are good for a day walking around on cobblestone streets)

· Receive a compliment on my German from the really nice old woman working at the store – she then says “It’s so nice you speak German so I don’t have to speak English!” Adorable.

· Grocery store (carrots!)

· Home

· Dinner

· Go back to the city at 10pm to meet people from Deutsch Kompakt

· Go to a phenomenally cheap and mildly sketch bar

· End up at a party where people are mostly (only?) speaking Spanish

· Party with the Spanish-speakers

· Catch a bus home at 2:30am

· Run into more Deutsch Kompakt people on the bus home

· Go to the student bar together

· Don’t go to bed until 5am