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

Pictures from Bonn

Wayyy too much has happened this past few days (for example, I moved to a new city! Tübingen. Finally.) I'm not yet sure how much I want to torture you all with the details of my first days in here so I'll leave the writing for later and let you all enjoy my (honestly quite lacking) photography skills.

Cafe/restaurant/something in the main city square - it was freezing, but we grabbed a few of the handily provided blankets and had our coffee outside!

Asmik and I, the day we went to the botanical gardens.

Awesome view I saw a few times daily when walking from the Innenstadt to the GI. (You can't really see it in this picture, but there is a Schloss way far in the background. Gorgeous.)

Major university building in Bonn, with the massive lawn in front of it. Took this picture from a bench where I was working on some readings.

View out of my dorm window. Super-not-exciting.

View out the window from my classroom at the Goethe Institut - much much prettier!