School Daze

Being in this program is kind of like being in high school again, class days are long (from around 9 to 6, on average) and I am living with parents again, being fed and having my laundry done for me. I ride the train to school everyday, which unless I ride with Justin or Christina is usually just a half hour of people watching and trying to overhear conversations in German. After our Cinematography or Deutsch class, we have lunch somewhere around the school, being on a budget is a little tough here since most places cater to posh business crowd of the Media Harbor, but I usually have a nice meal for fewer than 5 euros. After class is over we hope on the tram back home and if it is a weekday then I usually try to go to bed early so I can try and conserve some energy for the next day, since it always seem to be in short supply with my daily schedule. One of the things I am thankful for is that I am near Justin and his extremely cool host brother. Justin and me have entered the social network of the 13^th year high school students around Wersten, our neighborhood though a few parties we have gone to. These German students are really cool and I love hanging out with them, they are great hosts, plus it is easy to impress the girls by telling them you are from LA. Adam, Justin and I even went to see the Dark Knight (In English, even!) with them one night. 

Hangover in Hanover

The first weekend I visited my old friends Robert and Alex in Hanover, who are now both successful interns at Continental Tire Company. Hanover is a beautiful city, with a modern feel perhaps because of the fact that almost 90% of the city was destroyed during the World War. We went to a nice bar that priced drinks in a stock market fashion as in the more they were bought the more they cost and vice versa. Eating a good Döner Kebap and touring the massive downtown. All in all, it was a weekend that was comforting because I had two reliable tour guides that spoke German.  

First Impressions

The Germans are firm believes in first impressions. People here live close together, brushing past, meeting once then disappearing off again, you are often defined by a few sentences and your outward appearance. I, however, find first impressions to be often less truthful or relevant than they appear, mostly because I think that I am not very good at them myself. But over the last two weeks, my first impressions of Germany seem a poor judgment indeed to the country that I am gradually adjusting to. I use the word adjusting to, because living in another country is like trying to find an identity all over again and negotiating your expectations with reality.  The best example is my host family; I had guessed that I would instantaneously bond with my host parents by simply being myself, but after these two weeks it has really yet to happen, sometimes I feel simply like a tenant living in their apartment. I tried not to compare my situation to other students (even though some may consider themselves more deserving of pity) or to the only other student that my host parents had for six weeks this summer, Jacob, whom I often wonder felt the same way. At first I blamed my host parents; they worked too much, only one of them spoke English, they were never eating dinner with me. Then I blamed myself; I wasn’t outgoing enough, I wasn’t making an effort. Yet, after 3 weeks I realize that is just the ways things are. Maybe I am a little more introverted when I can’t express myself like I am able to in America. Maybe Germans keep a little more of a personal bubble around them than I am used to. ( A friend of mine, who is fluent in German, told me that his host parents of 9 months still refer to him with the formal ‘you’ in German.) As such my experience with culture shock, despite it only being three weeks, has led me to believe a few things. This semester isn’t about what I though it was about. You hear people say that it was a “great experience”, does that mean it was 3 months of fun and wonderful times? For mean life in Germany is just like life everywhere else; it’s boring, it’s funny, it’s tiring, it’s sad, it’s exhilarating, it’s depressing, that’s what life is, everywhere. The moment I realized that was the moment I felt different about my time here. I used to see Europe as a place where living would be so much better than living in the States. But only after three weeks, after meeting Bulgarians, Kenyans, Turks, Irishmen, and the French, the hard truth is life is the not better here than in America, it’s just different, that’s all. Anyways, that was a philosophical tangent (after only 3 weeks nonetheless!)

Arrival

Düsseldorf has a beautiful ultra-modern airport, though I was too drowsy to fully appreciate it. I did visit the McDonald’s there though, noting that Pulp Ficition was accurate as a quarter pounder is actually called a Royale with cheese in Europe.  We met Stephanie, one the employees of AIB, and climbed into one of the Mercedes-Benz and BMV taxis that waited at the curb. Driving in to city I was amzed by all the lush greenery and how every few seconds we seemed to be passing some kind of park. AIB’s office are in what in a brick warehouse that had been converted into flats, located in Düsseldorf’s Media Harbor next to the Rhine river which contains a collection of Frank Gehry buildings and other eclectic architecture. All of the students arrived at AIB and were introduced to the staff. We then took a short walk around along the Rhine and admired the beautiful bridge that spans it, just north of us. Then the host parents started to arrive to pick up their students. Finally in the late afternoon I was the only one left that hadn’t been picked up feeling like the last dog at the pound not to be chosen. Finally my host mum, Yvonne picked me up explaining the she had just gotten off work. We drove to her and her boyfriend’s Peter’s apartment which was on the third and fourth floor of above a Chinese restaurant and across the street from a welcoming looking Bierhaus. Their apartment was amazing; it looked like a picture from an IKEA catalogue. My room had a few overlooking the busy Kölner Landstrasse below. Yvonne works at an orphanage in Düsseldorf and sometimes spends the night working there and Peter works the night shift as a nurse at the local hospital meaning that I will have the whole place to myself for a few days a week. Peter doesn’t really speak English, so we mostly talked through Yvonne’s translating. But I think that the situation just serves as greater motivation to learn German and learn fast. We ate dinner and watched a little German TV. Until I was finally ready to go to sleep early and hop on the tram system back to AIB. 

Leaving on a jet plane...

My flight to Düsseldorf was a mixed bag. After the complimentary two glasses of wine, a Warsteiner beer, and a gin and tonic, I was hoping to sleep through the whole journey and avoid the showing of the German classic Drillbit Taylor. But there was lady next to me from Poland who was taking her 4 year-old son back to Poland. See gulped down a few glasses of white wine and laughed that she hadn’t been drunk since before she was pregnant. In half-English, half-Polish she spilled her entire life story. Moving from Poland to become a nure, getting pregnant at 40 with a son. She was from Chicago, where the long and demanding hours at the hospital downtown necessitated the hiring of a nanny. For some reason she chose a 74-year-old woman from Poland that was distant relative and was currently homeless in Chicago. Although I couldn’t imagine intrusting a child to a geriatric homeless woman in Poland the elderly are treated with such respect by their juniors that they are often able to do and get whatever they want. The nanny was horrible through, stealing from her, charging long distance phone calls and even beating her son with a belt once in a while, yet the woman didn’t fire the nanny for another two months deciding to take her son back to his grandparents in Poland. She told me all of this while son started bored in the seat next to her ripping apart the barf bags. She told he about being deposed at her job after a woman died after giving birth to twins who had undergone three previous c-sections. She told how she thought Chicago was dripping with racism, telling me that blacks, whites, mexicans and especially the polish would never get along. She told me about how America’s health system was the most corrupt and unfair system in the world. Then she fell asleep until we landed. I, however, found that I couldn’t sleep for more than 10 minutes at a time and landed in Düsseldorf with a little over an hour sleep under my belt. 

FYI: Alternate Blog Titles

-Deutschbag: The Hilarious Misadventures and Cultural Faux Pas of Garrett in Germany

-Gullible's Travels: Musings of an American tourist in Europe

-Fast Times At Reichstag Höch

-Deustche-Romp! or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Schnitzel

-Eur-o Drivin' Me Crazy!