When all is said and done

Yesterday I had a wonderful afternoon with a German friend bumming around Olympiapark. The last two days have been beautiful weather. I wanted to go up Olympiaturm, the Olympic tower, and take one last good look at the Alps--the weather was perfect for it, not a cloud in the sky, clear horizon.

It's been a weekend of Abschiedpartys (farewell parties) and packing--insane amounts of packing. I'm quite proud of myself. I need to do several loads of laundry and dutifully was there when the Getränksverkauf was open so that I could buy my Waschenmarken--otherwise I would have to wait until tomorrow evening, and that wouldn't be good. I fly out Thursday in the Insane Hours of the Morning and Wednesday is my Wrapping Things Up Day.

I'm quite shocked how much Germany has grown on me. Living in an essentially socialist society has been very enlightening for me. I wouldn't ever prefer it to the rough-and-tumble unchecked individualism of the United States, I don't think, but I can see how it appeals. (Here is a very interesting article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine which does a good job of explaining a European socialist country, and has remarkable similiarites to what I have observed here in München. Going Dutch: How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State) People here would never go so far as American niceness, but they do care about each other to some degree, as long as it does not interfere with the lives of others. Though Germany, in my opinion, lacks what I would call universal standard handicapped access, there is never a lack of hands to pull a person in a wheelchair over the steps into a store, to open a door for a woman on crutches, to call the ambulance when someone needs it. It is hardwired into small children (I have seen this collective cultural training in action) to always mind that your own things never interfere with someone else's business. When I think of something really American that would rise the collective German ire, I think of things like huge automobiles and double parking--Americans are not very respectful of another's literal and metaphorical space--probably because we have had the luxury of not having to be. But Germans are very aware where that line between You and Me is and everyone does what they can to preserve the sanctity of that line.

But socialism, for all its wonders, continuously hinges on a lot of factors that don't always coordinate nicely together: payers-in and payers-out of the system. Germany, for all its Kindergeld (the monies new parents receive per child from the government) efforts, is still growing older, and every year 100,000 immigrants come into the country. Socialism also makes what I think can be a disasterous mistake of assuming homogeneity, and can make it very difficult for outsiders to integrate into the culture and the system. These thoughts aren't clear at all, but I feel like in America it's way easier for foreigners to integrate, partly because we aren't assuming that we're all playing by the same rules that socialism demands.

I'm packing up (moving countries is no easy feat), and the room is slowly gaining some sense of Ordnung. Tomorrow will be my last full day in Germany, and I will get up at an Ungodly Hour on Thursday to catch my 7AM flight to Paris, Paris--Houston, Houston--my hometown. In Paris I will be subjected to the mandatory taking alllll my liquids out, practically undressing, and taking my laptop out and taking my shoes off while clutching to my passport and boarding pass for dear life, or, the ritual we call "Security." Oh, so it goes.

Today the JYM group flight left, taking a good chunk of the students with them. I'm trying to keep my spirits up. I'm ready to go back, I've had this adventure and feel even more emboldened to go on to new ones (after navigating daily life in a second language, everything else pales in comparsion! No more having to look up vocabularly words and explain in cumbersome, 7-year-old German what you're after). I've had quite a few San Antonio deja-vu moments, and it shocks me to think I will return to Trinity. But I'm also sad and sentimental about the time here. I think back to my arrival and I realize I didn't even know what I was in for at all, and I'm amazed how well I did, and that I did this at all.

Thanks for all your generous love and thanks for all the fun
Neither you nor I are to blame, when all is said and done. --ABBA

Photo: Lion of Bavaria holding shield which you rub for luck (glück), Odeonsplatz.

The Long Goodbye, Part II

So last weekend I had several fun things to do--celebrating the city and our friendships at night, studying by day. On Friday we went out to the Cafe Glockenspiel which is situated on the sixth floor of a building across from the famous Altes Rathaus with its Glockenspiel. First we had drinks (Sheba had a Pina Colada in the coolest looking cup I have ever seen, shaped like a Tiki face) over in the bar side, then we had dessert in the fancy part overlooking Marienplatz. It was a lovely evening shared with some great friends, and looking out over Marienplatz, the evening and then the rain falling (cooling off what had been quite a hot day).

On Satuday night, I saw Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz. Yes, dubbed in German. I haven't seen a dubbed movie since Pippi Longstocking, and, ahem, that was quite a while ago. I found it a tiny bit distracting but they did a good job keeping the audio match pace with the scene, and the voices were very, very much like the orginial actors' voices. And then, of course, another language makes it possible to slip in other jokes, for example:

Ron's Girlfriend rushes in to the hospital where Ron is lying, to see Hermione by his side.
RG: "Ich bin seine Freundin!"
Hermione: "Ich bin seine . . . beste Freundin!"

No idea what the original English is, but it's funny because in German, there is no distinction between "friend" and "girl/boyfriend". When I say "Mein Freund" (my "male" friend) and I am female, it sounds like I am talking about my boyfriend. I have to go out of the way to indicate that he is not my boyfriend and address him as "Ein Freund von mir" (a "male" friend of mine). So here, Ron's Girlfriend says "I'm his (girl)friend!" and Hermione says, "I'm his best (girl)friend."

I'm not sure why English only has this problem with males discussing female friends. I would never address my platonic male friends as "my boy friends" but "my guy friend said," etc. But a guy might have to say "a girl friend of mine..." if he wants to indicate straight-off that she's female. But if he said "my girlfriend" it would definitely sound like he was discussing a romantic relationship, whereas I am going to say "my guy friend" ("male friend" sounding a bit too Kinseyian for my taste), and it's clear it's platonic.

Also, they sell beer and wine in theaters here. Europe, huh?

On Sunday I ended up walking around a street festival on huge Leopoldstrasse for about an hour--pedestrian traffic only for a weekend!--which was wonderful. It also allowed the unprecedented view of seeing mustard-yellow Theaterinkirche through the Siegestor. I'll miss that about Europe--just wandering in and out of daily life, wandering into a festival with no intention of ever having seen it in the first place . . .

The rest of the week was study, study, study time.

After the classes came to a very good end, I began packing up. Now I am looking at the utter chaos that is my room. JYM has a great program where you can sell boxes to future program students--useful things that you don't necessarily want to take back with you, plates, coffee machines, laundry hampers, etc. So I am in the process of sorting out my belongings. I have to get the boxes ready for the next student (and haul them over to JYM sometime), and pack up my own boxes to be sent back to the United States (I am an impulsive book buyer, and also wanted to make it easy on my schlepping stuff back by sending some bulky sweaters, etc. back with the books.), and yeah, then of course through all of this there's bags and bags of trash and recycling.

I also have to get my room to German Standards of Cleanliness sometime, too, or, as Hans Peter said, they will send a 'Cleaning Team', "die so viel Geld verdient, wie ein lawyer in Manhattan."

Yesterday, I had intended to get off at Alte Heide and go shopping at Edeka for groceries, but I was so distracted I missed the stop and got off at Nordfriedhof, a stop too far. So I decided just to walk through Nordfriedhof, the city cemetery. I'm in love with it, really. It's so calm and quiet and such a great place to think. It runs parallel to Ungerstrasse (five months here and I can never spell it with 100% certainity) so I just walked through it on my way to Alte Heide.

Last night we had this huge, never-ending party at JYM. Almost all of us dressed up in Tracht and we attended a little ceremony in JYM, where the major prizes were given out, and the yearbooks distrubuted (which are GREAT! and have a great theme--Jugendstil).

HP gave a wonderful speech, as always. He quoted a student on his view of the experience. I'm afraid I'm going to have to paraphrase here. "What will I tell people about my study abroad experience? The nights spent in Pot drinking glass after glass of beer? The time I got myself completely lost in the Hauptgebäude? What will they verstehen? What will I tell them? I will probably tell them gar nichts."

After that, we went to dinner in Dietlindenstrasse, at a Bierhalle with amazing, upscale food (weird, huh?) which we had pre-ordered. I had amazing carrot soup, a grilled chicken salad--just delicious. And I ordered my first Maß. Of course, I was hardly able to finish it at all (I had to have several friends help me, who had no problem polishing off their own, whereas I had barely gotten down a quarter), but hey, I felt very authentic in my dirndl and with my bier.

After that, we had an after-party in the Rationaltheater in Münchner Freiheit, which is owned by a friend of HP's and is a cool place. I wish we had had the run of the place to ourselves, because I kept having to make sure that someone was watching after my belongings while I went to dance/talk to other people, etc, since there were a couple of random people coming in. But anyway, it was still great fun, and one of our number provided us with excellent music. I imagine that a group of dirndl- and lederhosen-clad American youths jumping up and down and yelling out the chorus of "SWEET HOME ALABAMAAAA, WHERE THE SKIES ARE SO BLUE, SWEET HOME ALABAMA, I'M COMING HOME TO YOU" must look pretty funny. The Rationaltheater was a good scene, though, and a good choice by the program. Took a while for the party to warm up but I think everyone had a good time, and some of us had to say our goodbyes, due to leaving over the weekend or on Monday.

As I looked out over the group from my comfty chair, I was torn by several conflicting emotions. How odd that we had all come together for this singular purpose and were now being scattered to the four winds again, what did it all mean? Having to say goodbye--an old hat of which I am quite weary. But sometimes things aren't as meaningful without the knowledge that there is an end. . . . Again, I thought about Russell in Almost Famous: "This is the circus, everyone's trying not to go home. No one wants to say goodbye." And I don't mean to diminish the value of this experience by comparing it to a circus or the drugs-and-alcohol fueled rock-and-roll scene, but what I suppose is meant by "circus" is the strangeness of our collective purpose, how inorganic for a bunch of American students from all corners of the country to be gathered in this one time and place in Europe for this one purpose. I was a bit sad.

On the other hand, when I went to dance, I was just smiling ear-to-ear, looking at my comrades and shouting to each other with the chorus: "DON'T NEED MONEY, DON'T TAKE FAME, DON'T NEED NO CREDIT CARD TO RIDE THIS TRAIN!" Standing there dancing, being twirled by several of my guy friends, looking at each other and grinning like mad fools we are in our youth--I was just so happy I had met these people at all, happy to be young, alive, and well, full of energy, discovering the world, having our hearts broken and our ideas changed but forging ahead regardless, to have had these amazing experiences, bizarre and weird as it is, that I had begun to discover myself --oh so happily caught in the smoky, dizzy, and heady fury of the Jugendstil.

Photos: (1) View of Altes Rathaus and Theaterinstrasse from Cafe Glockenspiel as night falls (2), Pole vaulting at the Street Fair on Leopoldstrasse (3), The sun shines over the graves in Nordfriedhof (4), The winds of change are ushering me homeward (5), The boundless sky over Nordfriedhof.

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People come and go, suprising me with their various entrances and exits, things come to pass or do not come to pass, but at the end of the day, it's me. . . . a good Jackson Browne song playing in the background to carry my spirits. . . and the road.

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life." --Jack Kerouac

Oh, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free. . . .

The Long Goodbye

Today I had my last day at my internship, where I've been working three afternoons a week for 10 weeks, since mid-May. We cracked open a bottle of white wine (only in Europe!), had some cherries, the FairTrade chocolate that I had bought as a present for the office (with some FT coffee and tea) and sat outside and celebrated, since the other interns are ending their Praktikum soon as well.

So I walked out today and took a last look around at Milbertshofen, knowing it was the first of many goodbyes I'll be making. In exactly two weeks from now (and maybe 2 hours), I'll be at the Houston airport again, stepping foot on American soil for the first time in five months and probably being culture-shocked out the wazoo. I'm hardly fluent in German, but today a lady stopped by the office to discuss a planned radio program with the other interns and I understood the entire discussion without translating in my head. Even above, when I wrote "Fair Trade chocolate, tea, coffee," I have to stop myself from writing "Schokolade, Tee, Kaffee." I have the hardest time discussing some German things with my mother without sounding like an idiot. My discussions with JYM students, mostly auf Englisch (see? not intended), have become a weird Mischung of English and German. I wrote my friend once on Skype: "Oh, it's egal to you?" The expression: "Mir egal," or "Es ist mir egal," means something like, "It's the same to me/I don't have a preference/I don't care." I heard another JYMer say, "I would have Lust auf that," from the "haben Lust auf" (would like to do, have a desire to do/have etc). I shared this with my German professor at JYM and she nearly died laughing.

Your Jackson Browne quote of the day:
I have prayed for America

I was made for America

Her shining dream plays in my mind

--Jackson Browne, For America (Please note this is one of JB's "I'm being patriotic by dissenting, because I love America so much" songs. It isn't traditionally patriotic, so if you are offended by that, please save your blood pressure.) Interestingly enough, this was performed at the Rockpalast in Berlin in the 80s. I love what he says: "This song is called 'For America', and it's for you, too."

Photo: Beautiful flowers in a lovely Englischer Garten sunset---just a stone's throw away from my apartment in StuSta, taken a couple of months ago.

you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

20 Life Lessons I've Learned Here, in no particular order:

(1) Always keep your umbrella with you. Weather changes, you know, and it is a far far better thing to have a spare umbrella than to be wet down to your socks. Don't be that sad dripping person.
(2) Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. And then you are here with this New Thing you have never had before, and invariably operational problems will arise, and you will be up a Creek Without a Paddle, because you have no procedures for handling the operational problems. Advantage: very good for you, learn to problem-solve, grow older. Disadvantage: messy, mind-racking, other people think you are an idiot.
(3) Everyone comes with Some Assembly Required.
(4) You meet interesting people everywhere, you just have to keep a weather eye out for them and ask, ask, ask, ask questions. "I met a lot of interesting people over here. Hell, I even encountered myself." --James Baldwin
(5) Dr. Kutchen's saying "If it wasn't hard, it wouldn't be worth doing" to our newly-challenged freshman Humanities course has much value in it and bears repeating. Hard things are hard for a reason. They're also very rewarding. If you want something, don't let anything stop you.
(6) I've stretched my boundaries, in many senses. This doesn't mean abandoning your boundaries, just stretching them, in a way that is beneficial for your collection of the Human Experience or, What are We Doing Here Anyway?
(7) I love the people who keep up with me from Texas. Knowing that some of my relationships back home are actually going to be stronger, not weaker, when I get back to Never-Never Land, because of people who always checked in on me and listened to me whine, is really comforting and makes me less nervous to leave. If anyone has friends out there who are studying abroad, I encourage you to try to keep in contact with them, even if they are "out of sight, out of mind." It makes a difference to them--believe me.
(8) Three musicians I love more since coming over here: Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, and Linkin Park. Bob Dylan is the musician for loners, which, hah, part of study abroad really is about.
(9) New things are only scary for a short period of time. Humans consistently overestimate how long it will take them to adapt to change. Repetition is the mother of integrating change into normality.
(10) Living alone in foreign country? Means = being nervous and afraid, and having to do it anyway, because ain't nobody gonna help you, you alone, and This Problem Needs Solving. And You are the only one who will solve it. hahahaha, I can't believe I thought some stuff in the U.S. was hard.
(12) I'll definitely seek out more challenges in the U.S. now, I feel much less afraid and more aware of what challenges can do for me as a person. Kinda like lifting weights. I'm bolder and a little more fearless.
(13) You think you are studying abroad (cue! fun! streamers! party hats!) , and you wake up one day to realize you sent yourself to Mars and actually wanted this.
(14) America's a weird place. As one German (who had traveled in America due to American girlfriend) said, "America's like a theme park. Everything's really nice but there's not much meaning behind it." I adore my countrymen, but this is true. Europeans read philosophy and think about the meaningless of life. Americans read self-help and think about how to Make Tomorrow Better, Lose Weight, Quit Smoking, Improve Their Relationship with their Parents, Children, and Small Animals! They are much more positive, though, and I'm just too attached to Happy Endings to buy the European scheme.
(15) The saddest thing about living in another culture is finding things you like about it and realizing those things are almost inherently incompatible with the things you like about your home culture.
(16) You can cross continents, but the sea won't shake off your ghosts. Only you can do that.
(17) It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. It's better to have formed those meaningful friendships, fleeting as they may seem, because you just never know. I will always, always remember the people I have met here. And I believe that I'll carry the memories and a part of them with me wherever I go, nestled right under my ribcage in my heart.
(18) Don't panic.
(19) Wherever you go, there you are. It's just you at the end of the day.
(20) Home is where you want it to be, and you can have a home with "rooms" all over the planet.

"But to me Air sounds modern and childless and single, compared to say, Dylan, who sounds old and married and burdened--who sounds like home. If Air are Conan, then Dylan is the greengrocers. Mushrooms, lettuce, and tomato, home to cook bolognese and prepare a salad--and how does it feeeeeeeeeel? To be on your oowwwn? Except I never am whenever Bob is singing." --How to be Good, Nick Hornby

Photo: The author posing with How to be Good by Nick Hornby. (Author suggests proceeding with caution, too much Nick Hornby in excess / at the wrong time can be dangerous for your health.) Photo by Amy Dyer, fasttalker, brilliant self-confessed nerd with a weakness for the adorable, your computer-fixer, excellent photographer, and engineering student at Olin College. Just one of the many amazing people I've met.

Finale B Clip from "Rent"
There is no future, there is no past
Thank God this moment's not the last
There's only us, there's only this
Forget regret, or life is yours to miss
No other road, no other way
No day but today
Sorry, I had to do the Teen Girl Geek-Out on Rent. Life is weirder than you'd think.

Another Lifetime

Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
"Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm." --Bob Dylan

I'm trying to NOT to concentrate on the fact that I just bought my last Monatskarte. It makes my stomach churn, really. I miss the US and Americans, especially--I can't wait to be in a country where I can eavesdrop on conversations and understand everything that is being said. But for some reason, I really do not want to leave. I want to go but also not go. Weird. No more weekend trips to Vienna, that's for sure. On the other hand, I do return to Taco Taco land and infinite opening hours, and to my lovely friends and my amazing university. And also mountains and mountains of work. I'm told it's character-building.

I have put up Awesome Photos from Berlin on the Berlin post (scroll down), so you should check it out.

Photo: Taken in Silberhornstr. U-Bahn. What will I do without this society?