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!)