I am (almost) a real German student

I am currently choosing classes for my upcoming semester in Tübingen, AND for my upcoming fall semester back at WashU. Crazy, right?! Let’s explore the differences between German and American universities…basically, I will be attending the summer semester in Germany – it will start April 11, and end July 23. Why am I still choosing classes though, with only a month and a half before the semester starts? That’s just how it goes in Germany. Also, there is no central system/website for registering for classes. For seminars, you must contact the professor via email to express your interest in taking their class, and for lectures, you basically just show up. Thus far, I’ve emailed 4 professors about seminars. The one I’m most excited about is “Arthur Schnitzler in the Context of the Wiener Moderne” – love Schnitzler, and a major plus is that we’ll be reading shorter works, dramas and novellas. Slightly terrifying is the fact that the professor wants us to read all 9 works before the semester starts! Here goes…

The other classes I’ve emailed about are “Reality in Realism,” “Dorfgeschichten” (Stories from small towns, roughly translated) and “Drama of the Classical Period.” Hello wonderful German literature. I’ve also inquired about taking a Russian class and received and email saying I’m welcome to do so, and I’ve found around five lectures courses in the history department that I think would be both fascinating and really enhance my understanding of German history/culture/lit/etc. But no, I’m not going to take 10 classes – in Germany, you totally just shop around classes the first week or so, and if you decide you don’t want to take a class anymore you just…stop going. No drop deadline!

So that’s the situation with classes. Until then, I’m just continuing my German language courses (and should be madly reading Schnitzler…).

And now we’ll return to that convenient division between “what I’ve done/what’s happened” and “Bemerkungen” (remarks on Germany).

What I’ve done:

Thursday: Class. Learned a wonderful new grammar construct that allows for nominalization of Nebensetze (subordinate clauses) via use of the preposition “bei.” (for those of you who speak German…Wenn es regnet, gehen wir nicht draußen OR Bei Regen gehen wir nicht draußen.) Super exciting.

Friday: Class. Then dinner with a bunch of people from the Goethe-Institut, organized by our Zivis. I finally met the girl who lives in the dorm with me – she’s Russian and totally fun. Dinner was at an Irish pub (not sure why the Zivis think that is a good cultural experience for all of us people trying to learn German…) and it was totalllllly wack to hear Irish music sung auf Deutsch. Extremely culturally confusing for me. I sat at a table with Asmik (the Russian girl), two Chilean guys, a French kid, and Swiss kid, and an Italian woman. Guess what language we spoke? ENGLISH! So frustrating…everyone’s English is about 100x better than their German (ok, not true, they’re all just wayyy more confident auf Englisch) so I find myself in Germany, wanting to speak German, but with English all around me. The extreme mix of cultures is wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but less than good for my language development.

After that we went to another bar, and then a club. The club was fun but what was most interesting was the insane amount of broken glass on the floor…and when people knocked bottles over and they broke, no one seemed to care. Not sure if that’s a German/European thing, or if we were just somewhere sketchy. I’ll keep you posted on that one.

Saturday: Very chill day, went into the city to get dinner, fun.

Sunday: Also very chill day in which I went to church (I’m really getting down the Mass auf Deutsch, which is super-cool) and the to the “Haus der Geschichte,” a museum about Germany since 1945. I learned to the joy of being dependant on public transportation when I rushed downstairs to catch the S-bahn and saw it pulling away just as I got into the lobby…the next one wouldn’t come for 30 minutes since it was early Sunday morning! Fail. Missed the 10am mass I wanted to go to, went at noon, missed going to the museum with everyone, and ended up just going alone.

Monday: Class with me and only one other student…! Which is just kind of awkward. The other student is a woman from Saudi Arabia, all of our other classmates are from Libya, and she told our teacher she thinks they got bad news this weekend (as Libya is going the Egyptian route). Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for them?

Tuesday (today!): Before class, Asmik and I went to the Poppelsdorfer Schloss (Palace) and walked around the gardens there…big surprise, it was not that exciting as it’s the middle of winter! But it was nice weather and nice to walk around before class. After class (still just me and one other student…) we grabbed dinner with some people from her class: a French guy, a couple from Romania who lives in Paris, and a Dutch guy. And we spoke…English. So sad. I also experienced my first bout of anti-Americanism, as one guy spent a good 10 minutes at the beginning of our dinner explaining to me all the things he hated about America (unhealthy, fattening food was at the top of the list). These criticisms would have been totally fine to express, of course, except he was being very rude and confrontational with me (sorry pal, I don’t run the FDA). Anyways, he went to smoke about halfway through our meal and came back much friendlier, but it was still interesting to experience.

Bermerkungen! Aka the interesting stuff:

1. A lot of stuff on the internet (tv shows, Pandora internet radio, Cleveland’s country radio station, etc) won’t stream outside the US. I am finding ways around this (hellooo country radio from Texas).

2. I’ve purchased three of my books for the Schnitzler class so far – Germany has these little “Reclam” Bücher (books) that have the TINIEST print ever (how you are supposed to annotate them I have no idea) and yellow covers. They’re super-recognizable and I felt SO legit buying them at a bookstore the other day.

3. After a few people on Friday night asked me if I was married with a worried look at my right-hand ring finger, I realized that not everyone wears wedding/engagement rings on their left hand! (The people I alarmed were Chilean, Russian, and German). I turned naturally to Wikipedia and learned that in Germany and Austria, wedding rings are worn on the right hand, leaving me with a bit of a situation: to switch or not to switch? (I wear this ring every day and it only fits on my ring fingers.) My normal rule is don’t go crazy changing myself in an attempt to blend in because 1. I’ll fail and 2. I’m simply not German and usually don’t feel a need to pretend. However I’m not entirely sure I want people to mistake me for married…or do I? Eitherway, I’ve spent the last 48 hours switching it back and forth, and have settled with leaving it on my right hand. It weirds me out less.

4. In class my very first day (not sure why I’m writing about this only now) we learned that in Germany (or at least according to this one teacher), “Herbst ist Herbst und Winter ist Winter” – “fall is fall and winter is winter.” BUT there is both Frühling (spring) and Vorfrühling (“prespring”) and Summer, lucky season it is, is divided three parts: Frühsommer (early summer), Hochsommer (high summer, which is "extrem heiß"), and Spätsommer (late summer).

5. For clarification, Germans capitalize ALL nouns. (I believe the Grimm brothers are to thank for that one.)

6. Today at dinner, people expressed real disgust over the fact that in the US we let people drive at 16, but alcohol is for those who are 21 and over. (This fact is of course not surprising, but I was struck by how they actually seemed disgusted by it, not just “oh that’s strange/different/you silly Americans.)

7. Twix (the candy) do not taste the same in Germany. (I think the American ones taste better).

8. I’ve learned from talking around with people/our Zivis that my accommodations are actually some of the nicest that people from the GI have had to deal with – although we aren’t terribly close to the city, we’re in a safe place (some people are evidently in areas that are genuinely not nice), the S-bahn gets us where we need to go, our rooms are big and clean compared to other people’s, and we have our own bathrooms. Turns out I have it really good…!

9. People at crosswalks drive me INSANE. Basically, Germans are very respectful of crosswalk signals – even if there are no cars or anything coming and they could cross the street very safely, they wait. When the traffic lights are changing and there is that five second interval before you are going to get the green walk signal…the wait. It drives me up the wall, and the only people I see crossing when they’re not supposed to are very young, kinda punk-looking guys, and people send them very disproving looks. This leads really wonderfully into what I learned in class today (good thing about having two students is you can direct class wayyyy more – when our teacher starts talking about German culture, psyche, or lit, I try to keep that going as long as possible):

10. The term “Obrigkeitsdenken” – let’s dissect (and I promise this will be interesting!). “Obrigkeit” means “authority,” and “Obrigkeitsdenken” can be translated (according to dict.cc) as “subordinate mentality,” which I think is a bit too strong. Better perhaps is “authority-oriented mindset,” as “denken” is to think, or thought/reasoning. My teacher said that “die Deutsche haben ein Obrigkeitsdenken” – “Germans have a subordinate mentality/think on authority” – see how this fits with the crosswalk issue?
Then he throws out a second word: “Obrigkeitshörig,” let’s dissect somemore: “hörig sein” means to be a slave, dependent, or submissive. “Obrigkeitshörig” = submissive to authority. He (teacher) then says “Die Deutsche sind Obrigkeitshörig” and follows that up with “Ohne dies versteht man Nationalsozialismus nicht.” Auf Englisch, “Germans are submissive to authority, without this one cannot understand National Socialism” (Nazism). Interesting, sure, earthshattering, no: what I found particularly fascinating was that I, a third year undergraduate student of Germanistik, German studies, have NEVER hear this term! (The sad alternative is that I am the worst third year undergraduate student of Germanistik ever, but I’m really hoping this isn’t true. Cross your fingers for me.) So. In conclusion this is really making me want to take the lecture course on the fascist years in the 20s/30s/40s, in order that I can compare/analyze the different ways Americans and Germans conceptualize National Socialism and its effects.

I’ve been phenomenally successful with the earrings lately.

Germany hates me.

Actually just my computer hates me....how to put the last week together ! It was an absolutely crazy one. In the hopes that you aren't bored to death, I’ve separated this long-as-all-hell installation into two parts: “What has happened” and “Fun things I’ve noticed in and about Germany.” I would recommend the “fun things I’ve noticed” section over “what has happened,” as it’s shorter and not a sob story.

What has happened. What hasn’t happened. Let’s start about 24 hours before my plane is supposed to leave Cleveland for Detroit (from which I will go to Amsterdam, and the the Köln/Bonn airport). I decide it would be a wonderful idea to back up my iTunes library, and throw a blank DVD in my computer. Crazy whirring noises, a disk that won’t eject, and a blank screen after an unsuccessful restart later, I’m frantically on the phone with the Apple store at Legacy; they can’t find a time for me until three hours late. The crisis is averted though: they pull the disk out, put in a whole new disk drive, I go home happy.

Moving on to twenty minutes before leaving my house for the airport…I decide to look up luggage size restrictions for Delta. Upon realizing they’re flat-out not going to let my bag on at its current 77 lbs, I for my mother, who rearranges everything into two bags while my father just keeps giving me looks that could kill. I figure this classic display of my stupidity will help them not miss me too much.

Three plane rides later (on the second, as the pilot announced the Super Bowl score, the Greek guy next to me asked “What are they talking about? Baseball?” Loved it.) I am IN GERMANY! Major life win. Grab a taxi, head to Bonn, discover I am still totally conversational auf Deutsch…win, win, win. Take some placement tests after arriving at the Goethe Institute (hereafter to be referred to as the GI) and then end up in a taxi with two other people; we’re headed to our accommodations. I’m chatting with the American grad student who is there, exchanging life stories and whatnot, when we realize we’ve been in this taxi for a while. And it doesn’t look like we’re in a city anymore. And then…we keep driving. Turns out our dorm is in the absolute boondocks, looks like something that was built in Cold War USSR, has no wireless internet, and there’s not a restaurant or bar in sight (although there is a tanning salon across the street). Yippee. It’s also a 22 minute ride by S-Bahn (street train) plus a five minute walk after that back to the GI. Totally not what I was expecting, but I’ve (obviously) survived.

Then Tuesday (aka Day 2 of life in Germany) happened. My computer went total kaputt – the keyboard and trackpad just would not work. I decide that plugging it in and getting it up to 100% battery will solve that, so I found my power cable and adaptor, plugged it in, and trotted off to class. (Class – fun stuff, from 1:30 to 6pm every day, there’s the usual vocab learning, my classmates are mostly doctors and other people with real careers already.) When I get home, my computer is stillllllllll not working, the computer guy/student tech guy here doesn’t know what’s up, and I’m still extremely jetlagged so I just give up and go to bed. Two hours later I wake up with some wacko sickness, and spend the whole evening being sick and having horrible nightmares about my lack of German health insurance.

I wake up at three in the afternoon on Wednesday (missed class). I drag myself to the grocery store and buy crackers and bananas. Pass out again.

Wake up Thursday, still alive. Major win. Tentatively eat a few more crackers…another win. Go to the GI where there is wireless, call my mom with a silly little ipod touch and skype, and just start sobbing in the hallway talking to her. I win lots of sympathetic looks from the people walking by. Call my dad, cry some more. Go to class. At the break, I call apple support – the guy tries to tell me there are no apple stores in Germany, which is just completely false, and advises me to ship my laptop back to my parents in the states. Cry some more because he is being totally unhelpful and really alarm the Zivi (Zividienst is “civil service;” a lot of young guys choose to do a year of service instead of the required year in the military in Germany, working at GIs all over Germany is one of the options for Zividienst). He is super-helpful, finds me an apple retailer in Bonn that repairs computers, prints directions for me, offers to walk me to the store, offers to give me his computer for the month, etc. I skip my Unterricht (class time) and go drop my computer off at the store – explaining what is wrong is really hard! But I manage and get back to the GI, still looking like I’ve been crying naturally, and the Institut-Leiterin (direction of the institute) sympathetically asks me if I have a “Liebeskoma.” I give her a blank look and from her rapid-deutsch explaination garner that this means something like “broken heart.” I want to respond that a broken heart would be 8 billion times easier to deal with than the flu and a broken computer…but I just say no.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday….walking around, museums, getting lost, go to church at the absolutely gorgeous (and huge) Basilica downtown, constantly on the hunt for coffee shops with free wireless (Starbucks is here too, it turns out), really miss having class because it’s something to do and contact with real human beings! Oh well. I get like 9 hours of sleep a night here because I have so much time.

Monday comes and is the most frustrating day of my life. In an attempt not to blow all of my cash on S-bahn tickets (€2,50 a piece. Also, Germans use periods where we use commas and commas where we use periods… ie, 1.000 is a thousand) I buy a Wochenticket (week-ticket) but can’t use it! Turns out its only gultig (valid) with some Ausweis (identification) issued by the transit authority in Bonn. The crappy directions I get from one of the Zivis leave me wandering around Bonn’s Hauptbahnhof (central train station) after Unterricht completely confused, so I decide to try in the morning.

I head to the S-bahn stop near the Apple store to head home, and realize I can check on my computer – when I turned in the computer they wanted a phone number, so I gave them the GI’s as I have no phone yet. Turns out they’d been trying to call, as my computer has water damage and they’re going to charge me €150 for the repair. How it got water damage I have no idea. Extremely angry but not knowing what else to do I tell them to go ahead and do it and mentally part with what’s more like 200 US dollars. They tell me it will take about a week and a half to repair, and I find myself close to tears again. Those of you who know me well will be impressed to learn that I did not, in fact, break down in tears on the S-bahn home.

Back at the sad, sad building masquerading as a dorm, I get better directions to the transit authority from a different Zivi (the very helpful one got stuck living here to). The next morning I find it very easily, get my Ausweis, find a Schokocroissant at a bakery, run to Karstadt (a department store) for some Stabilo pens, hit up a newsstand for a copy of that week’s Spiegel (a weekly magazine/journal in Germany that reminds me of our “Time” magazine), and then go to an exhibit about Napoleon at one of Bonn’s museums. Turns out I know nothing about him or his impact on Europe, and the museum is painfully crowded, so I don’t really leave much smarter.

Wednesday (today!) the inquiries about how I am come flooding in from my classmates, they want to know if everything is ok, why I was crying the other day, why I am always on the phone with people in the US during breaks, etc. Everytime I tell someone “Mein Computer is kaputt” they go “but is that all?” and seemed shocked that that’s what’s been making me a crazy person. Some follow up with “But is your family ok?” to which I always respond, “yes…” Interesting commentary on priorities, no? Never knew I was this addicted to technology.

One of my classmates offered to let me take his computer home for a few days until mine is repaired, another was all “let me give you my phone number, call me when you need something!” – the people here are seriously so freaking nice.

After class I decide to check back in on the computer, and to my complete and total surprise, it was ready! Which meant I had to run back into the city and find an ATM so I could pay them, but I made it before the store closed at 19.00. I LOVE how they use military time here.

Moving on to the more interesting random things I’ve noticed in Germany, and well done to those of you who skipped to this point:

1. It’s way more diverse than I thought. When I was in Göttingen vorletzten Sommer (the summer before last) I saw white people. Here there are all sorts of people – one of the first things I noticed was how many women with headscarves there are on the S-Bahn.

2. People smoking while riding bikes completely cracks me up. Hello multi-tasking.

3. The whole car situation. People park on the sidewalks. There are smart cars all over. Tonight, I watched a woman turn her car off at a red light. They are serious about conservation here.

4. There are no screens in any of the windows! Today, I watched a truck deliver a bunch of tables to the floor above the GI through the windows, with a sort of fire-ladder-esque contraption.

5. When I ordered a little sandwich from my favorite coffee shop (it’s close to the GI and has free wireless) the woman picked it up with her BARE HANDS and put in on a plate for me. So shocking to my American “lets wear gloves whenever we handle other people’s food” sensibilities.

6. Middle-school-aged kids ride the S-bahn alone (what?) and are soooo well dressed. It’s not the well-dressed women that make me feel like I have no fashion sense, it’s the well-dressed middle school kids.

7. Here’s the weirdest thing I’ve experienced so far: As I was walking from the GI to the S-bahn stop that would take me home on day two, there was a fence blocking off the railroad tracks that I usually cross to get to said stop. Shit, I think, and rummage around for my map to find an alternate route home. As I’m rummaging, I see other people walk up to this fence and just stop. And wait. And then I notice cars on the other side also just waiting. Waiting! And the train eventually comes, the fence goes up, we all go on with our lives. This has happened to me at least six times already, at various points in the city. I’ve even noticed that there is a sign asking drivers to conserve and turn of their engines when they are waiting. (Totally crazy to me, the girl who leaves her car running whenever possible in the fear that it won't start again.)

8. Dorms…where to begin. One, NO ONE in Germany keeps the door to their room open – that “open door policy” encouraged by freshman RAs in the States is totally non-existant here. I like to leave my door open though, and two people have already told me “we don’t do that in Germany” in a tone that is close to reprimanding. So funny. When the computer guy came to hook up my internet tonight, the very first thing that he said was “So, I see you have learned to close your door!” Second observation: dorms in the US have shit all over the walls: flyers, reminders, advertisements for this, rules posted from RAs, doors decorated with peoples names…not here! Totally bare hallway walls and room doors. I took a card that someone gave me and retraced “hillary” in black marker and put it on my door. It’s cute and a total sign that I’m a foreigner. Three, a major difference in dorm parties in the US and Germany: In the US, freshman are trying to hide games of beer pong from RAs, kids are sneaking alcohol into dorms, etc. Here, I saw advertising all last week in the lobby for a party in the basement on Saturday night: beer would be only €1 between 9:30 and 10:30! Hello major differences in drinking culture.

9. Further differences in drinking culture gleaned from a conversation with Nikolaus, the nice Zivi: I asked him if the concept of fake IDs exists in Germany. (In Germany, you can buy beer and wine at 16 years old, and hard alcohol at 18). He said that yes, the people who have fake IDs in Germany are 14 year old girls trying to go to clubs. Which is just outrageous considering the people I know with fake IDs are college juniors and whatnot. He followed this up with “And I just love drinking with Americans!” When I asked him why he responding, laughing, “You guys are all ‘three Bud Lights and good night!’” I gave him a look and he continued “Bud Light is like water!” and then just laughed his head off for a few more minutes.

10. People on the S-Bahn are really good about getting up and offering their seats to the old people who get on. There aren’t even signs on the trains reminding people to do this.

11. I might have made this up, but I think there is an expression something along the lines of “there is a Starbucks on every corner” in the US. In Germany, there is an Apotheke on every corner – stores where you can get over the counter medicine and such things. I literally don’t know how they all stay in business, there are so many.

For those of you who are wondering, I have remembered to wear earrings everyday except one!

the beginning !

Two warnings should front this entire blogging-operation: 1. I’m not naturally funny and 2. (as anyone who has ever sent me an email or facebook message knows) my ability to stay in contact via the internet is appalling. Nonetheless, I’m going to give this the good old college try, and you’ve been warned.

I’m going to Germany for (almost) SIX MONTHS! To study at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. And I’m jackeddddd about that. To bring you up to speed, I’m a German major at WashU who plans on applying to PhD programs for German next fall, meaning this semester abroad and a good dose of lit and history classes auf Deutsch (in German) are exactly what I need. Unfortunately for me, I’ve been chilling in Cleveland for about seven weeks rediscovering TV and novels auf Englisch, and my semester in Germany doesn’t actually start until April 11. Wish me luck on getting back into the school mode when that point comes.

Until then, fun fun fun in Germany! My favorite part of the last two months here in Cleveland has been receiving emails AUF DEUTSCH (you will learn German from reading this…get excited) from REAL GERMANS about ME BEING IN GERMANY (ie, boring paperwork stuff from the Uni). This, however, highlights one of my favorite things about Deutschland – every little boring thing is an adventure because I’m doing it in German.

Before I can be in Deutschland describing those foreign-language adventures to you, I’ve two more thoughts. First, I made two New Years Resolutions: 1. to learn German (realllllllly learn it, ie, no longer struggle just to complete reading for classes back in the States, crank out papers, discuss everything under the sun with native Germans, usw (etc)) and 2. wear earrings every day. Priorities, people.

Second, I’ve always felt as though I’ve lived in a big city, even though I just mean Cleveland and St. Louis by that. Basically these two lovely places have major airports, and the thought of having to go more than 30 minutes from home for an airport is strange. But, I’m shipping off to a little town called Tübingen (that’s south of Stuttgart in Baden-Württemburg), which doesn’t have an airport. And we’ll see how many Gleis (tracks) the Bahnhof (train station) has… scary. But here goes. Hillary tries a small university town!