New York is a State of Mind

(Author's Note: still continuing on the updates. For my visit to Switzerland and my week with my parents, please see the post below this one. Update on Vienna and Sarah and Rebecca's visit yet to come. Please check back on Monday, 15 June.)

At this point in my journey I have roughly seven weeks left until I return to the United States. It's been an interesting time. I've had, to borrow someone else's expression about his study abroad experience, the best moments of my life so far here. Seriously---the top 5 best moments of my life, 4 of them have happened here. I've also had some of the worst moments. I would say that maybe 2 of my Top 5 Worst Moments happened here, too. It's been a FANTASTIC experience so far, it really has. I've grown so much through this---in an artificial setting like school, I'm not sure that I would have faced as many realities as I have here in Deutschland.

While I was in Switzerland with my parents, my mother made an off-hand remark about one of my favorite TV shows, described as a "fish out of water" by The Wall Street Journal, Northern Exposure, and about Dr. Joel Fleischman's longing for New York City as he's stranded in Cicely, paying off his debt to the state of Alaska. It made me think about how one is so accustomed to a culture with which one clicks, for some reason. At the end, Maggie tells Joel that she'd asked herself, "If Fleischman asks me to go back to New York with him, will I go?" But, as she tells Joel, New York is his home, and not hers. (So ends the love story, the relationship that never was.) The last scene is amazing--Joel's on the Staten Island ferry, and there's a sense of homecoming, but also the sense that he's changed, and Forever Nightshade Mary plays as Joel looks out over the skyline and Maggie flips over his postcard which reads simply but profoundly, "New York is a state of mind." I had thought once I related to Joel, in a "aw, how cute, he wants to go back to New York" way, but now I get it to a degree that I didn't before. To him, New York is the center of his soul, where everything runs as he expects it run--New York understands him, he understands New York.

I relate to that now. Today I had a moment of wonder in Karstadt when I saw shelves of jewelry items branded with "NOT BEING SOLD BECAUSE OF INVENTORY." In the U.S., that's sacreligious--that's why you close business or do inventory after hours, because in opening hours the goal is actually to, ahem, make sales. The logic goes against mine. It frustrated me so much at first, but now I'm reaching a nice halfway point. Earlier it seemed so much of a grim, concrete reality: that I was locked into this place with strange people and a strange language (hahah, you think you're studying abroad and you realize you've sent yourself to Mars), a foreign culture, juggling bagging your own things and paying at the same time as the second person's items comes crashing upon your things, having to pay for everything in a roundabout way, having trouble being understood and understanding, nothing being open on holidays or Sundays, better buy everything you need before 4PM Saturday---this was the grim reality through with I trudged.

But now, at the halfway point, I smile at the German people and their quirks, I'm used to not understanding and/or not being understood, I can skillfully bag my things (and remember to bring my own plastic bags, as here they cost euros) and pay at the same time without irritating all of the grocery store shoppers, and I have just gotten used to some of the more complex things that I've come to see as part of the Germans' reality until they decide to change it, but not part of my reality. The brick walls I run up against are familiar now, so familiar they're harmless. The awareness that my time is finite (which did NOT feel finite before) has made me more understanding, more tolerant, and more aware of what the European experience has done for me, and has actually made me paradoxically wish I could stay longer, like a quote from Lolita that I love: "let her stay, let her stay. . ." I see how much I've changed in the past months and wonder what change would lay ahead if I stayed.

I've met so many fascinating people, I've done so many fascinating things, and I've realized that this is a singular experience in my life. I've realized what it's done for me, but I know America and 24-hour Starbucks and Taco Taco and Borders' open late into the night seven days a week, is back there somewhere, waiting for when I'm done, and that's a comforting thought. And New York is, after all, a state of mind.

I leave you with a quote that is very meaningful to me at this moment, from the same fabulous episode:

"Maggie: I used to think of all the billions of people in the world, and of all those people, how was I going to meet the right ones? The right ones to be my friends, the right one to be my husband. Now I just believe you meet the people you're supposed to meet."