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?

Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.

"Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." --Bertolt Brecht (This is hard to translate. "Fressen" is to eat, but in an animal way, to feed. The best translation I can come up with is "First comes the feeding, then comes morality," i.e., humans are, in an Orwellian way, just pigs in disguise, we worry about our own stomachs first then deal with morality. It's a cool line, though, and very Mackie Messer.)

I just got back from playing Texas Hold Em' Poker with:

2 German-English speaking Germans,
1 German-English-Greek speaking Greek,
1 German-Italian speaker,
1 German-Italian-English speaker,
and 1 English-Italian-Croatian immigrant to Italy speaker.

The Italians I met were very friendly and reminded me of America a lot. No wonder they do so well there. They were very open and inquisitive, and had questions about America and the English language. One wanted to know what Americans thought of Canada. I told him we didn't, then I said, "When I think of Canada, I think of trees.... Lots of trees."

I put my Reparienantrag for some minor repairs in my room at the Hausverwaltung yesterday around 4PM. I came back to my room today around 5:30 and found the slip on my desk, with both items repaired to perfection.

I love Studentenstadt. I'm gonna miss this Augustiner-Bier-drinking place so much, even if the food at Pot and Tribuehne isn't so awesome (I had some VERY sorry excuses for chicken fajitas the other night at Pot, and what they call "nachos" are tortilla chips with some cheese melted on top), the atmosphere makes up for it by about a thousand. Mabee Dining Hall won't have a fraction of the Cool Factor that is here.

Empathizing with Bridget Jones

Bridget Jones is a character of Helen Fielding's, made most famous by Renee Zellweger's portrait of her in Bridget Jones' Diary, and the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. She's a classic heroine because she's so relatable. She "smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother" and is told by her would-be lover, Mark Darcy, in kind legalese, that she is an "appalingly bad public speaker". There's a scene in Bridget Jones' Diary when Bridget stands up before an audience at a book launching party--an audience which includes Lord Archer, Salman Rushdie, her boss, her boss' boss, etc., as well as the author himself. She doesn't realize the mike needs to be turned on, so she says, "OY! OY! Sorry, the uh, the mike's not working. Welcome, welcome, to the launch of Kafka's Motorbike, the 'greatest book of our time.'" "Well, one of the Top 30 books of our time. At least. And here to introduce it properly is the man we all call Mr. . . . . Fitzherbert, because that. is. his name." I have had so many moments in Germany, miniscule as they may be, where I am this person who is just babbling in Ger-english. Today I was sitting in a cafe, just writing in my journal and minding my own English-speaking business, and this (somewhat attractive, if slightly older) man asked me for the time, since today (almost to my utter ignorance) marked the transition to Summer Time, and it took me a good 30 seconds of babble to understand what he was going on about. And then I babbled about how I didn't realize it until later today, and then I didn't know if the conversation was over or what?, and I just felt awkward and very Bridget Jones-esque, so I just left. Poor guy. If there had been sand outside, I would have buried my head in it.

I realize that my biggest fear is speaking to German natives who are apart from the program, real-world German natives. It's awful. I feel like a mentally and developmentally challenged second-grader when I communicate in German, and I'm someone who prides myself on a degree of intelligence. I was wondering on the U-Bahn: is there a point in someone's life, when one is so used to multi-times-daily sheepish embarrassment, where one can't be embarrassed anymore? Perhaps. If so, I should be immune from embarrassment for several years after I'm done here in Munich. I'm a huge believer in working through fears instead of building nice safety zones around them, so, I need to make a point of going out of my way to talk to native German speakers.

Like the Zen saying: the only way out is through. "Appalingly bad public speaker" Bridget Jones later became a television star for Sit Up, Britain!, right? :-)

Schoene Tagen

On Wednesday, I completed our homework assignment for JYM--a scavenger hunt of sorts. It was a crazy wonderful day. I started off in Sendlinger Tor, went inside the Asamkirche, walked up Sendlinger Strasse, over to Rosental, over to Rindermarkt, walked by the Deutsches Stadtmuseum and Juedisches Museum in St. Jakobsplatz, went over to Sebastiansplatz, walked up another street, had a delicious Schmalznudel (like a bengeit) at Cafe Frischhut, walked through Victualenmarkt, rounded the corner exactly at 12:00 by happenchance in the Marienplatz and got to watch the Glockenspiel play. I paid 1,00 Euro for the climb up the St. Peterskirche Turm---and the sky was so clear, I saw the high, high, snow-capped Alps on the horizon. I nearly wept: it was that beautiful. After that, I walked up a side street parallel to Theaterinstrasse, saw the Bayerishes Stadtmuseum in the striking Maximilian-Joseph-Platz, walked over to Odeonsplatz, went inside beautiful Theaterinkirche, walked through the whole Hofgarten grounds as a virtuoso played a deep melody on the cello in the halls and old men played games of pins, honored students gone at the memorial to the members of the White Rose, and then, around 4PM, fetched lunch in Muenchner Freiheit.

It was an amazing day. Can days be this amazing? Not really sure.

I'm doing very well so far, and enjoying this experience and what it means for my growth as an individual. For certain, the hardest part is getting accustomed to the 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, nonstop German-speaking environment. I was in a friend's room and she had her radio on--German again, even when we were (hush! tell no one!) speaking English amongst ourselves. I never dreamed it would be tempting to speak in English here, but it is. A lot of clarity in speech is lost when one converses in a language not one's own, and many conversations cannot be had, or at least not as easily.

Thursday our orientation began, and it was wonderful. The JYM staff are as helpful and nice as they come. I'm so glad I chose this small, cozy program over a large one. I was able to keep up with Sommer's nonstop, schnell gunug Deutsch as she went over our health insurance in Germany, our Anmeldung (reporting) of our address at the Kreisverwaltungsreferat, the German test we had today, etc. So I was quite proud of myself.

I've also bought a "Handy," or very small, very cheap cell phone here for use among the JYM'ers and for calling other local numbers here. I didn't have any minutes on it, so I had to figure that out, too. Sommer said there was a kiosk right on the corner from JYM where one could buy minutes for Vodafone. It's the strangest kiosk. It's one integrated kiosk, but half is for cigarettes ( you have to swipe your driver's license to buy) and the other half is for cell phones "cards." You put the dollar bill in, select how many euros worth of minutes you want, and it prints a receipt (that's your "card") which has a phone number on it that you call, punch in this super long number, and then you get to load your minutes.

After all those weeks in German 1 talking about "in der Mensa," I actually got to eat one. On Thursday we ate at the mensa, or cafeteria across the street from the TU, Technische Universtaet Muenchen. It was cafeteria. This thing made Mabee look like the Ritz. No cute little signs or choices, really. You just walk in, get a tray, slide it across in an U-formation, pick the foods you want (different foods are ranked at different levels of price: Gericht 1 is cheapest, 4 is most expensive), put them on the tray, and pay at the end with your Mensakarte. (Mensakarte must be bought beforehand, and then you can reload money on your card with kiosks in the Mensa. They only take Mensakarten.) The Mensakarte costs 10 euro: 6 is a deposit (when you return your Mensakarte you get it back), and it's called "Kaution." The other 4 is for "Guthaben" or actually your balance.
However, despite the incredibly instutional feel of the cafeteria, it was SPOTLESS. There was not a smudge on the fork or tray. Utterly spotless. Everthing was sparkling. I had currywurst (which at first I thought I was going to spit out, but made myself keep on and it wasn't that awful), DELICIOUS mashed potatoes (jeeez, those things were amazing), for which I had to pass up some scrumptious-looking broccoli, and chocolate milk. Which was really good chocolate milk. Not lame carton chocolate milk like back in the U.S. We sat down in a nice, spacious, big wide dining area.

Also on Thursday, we had a tour of the Studentenstadt with "Tutoren" here. "Tutoren" I think are actually tutors, but they have some other duties here as well. While back home there's kinda the RA and that's it for the hall, here the RA functions seem to be broken down into a lot of different roles. In every dorm there's one person in charge of the washing machines, 2 Haussprecheren (I think), who represent the dorm to the Heimat, or the sort of "student / residential life governering council" (comprised of students), 2 Tutoren, and I think that's it. Every floor has a "Stockwerksprecher," or the most-RA like position: s/he's in charge of maintaining the "Gemeinschaftappartment" (GAP), a members-only common room which costs about 50,- euro to join, but you get to use the common room, watch the TV, play games, and have access to the cheap drinks and snacks. The GAP is where student life on the hall flourishes.(They also have really funny signs on the doors. On the ground floor of Oranges Haus there's a sign that says: "MIND THE GAP," straight out of England, and there's another sign that says, "KINDER SPIELEN": kids are playing.)

I was in Alex's group. Alex is a pre-med student from Austria, and he looked textbook European: thin, rimless glasses, even-tempered. He showed us around the Studentenstadt and gave us a lot of really good information. He was harder to follow than Sommer earlier that day, but I still understood most of what he said, and I asked him plenty of questions, if only to practice with a native. Parts of the tour were super-awkward, though, for all of us, as we were trying to explain why we were studying German, etc.., to this native German-speaker in our, like, fourth-grade language to this guy our age. Language barriers are hard to overcome--which is why, I must remind myself, I am studying German, to become fluent!

My favorite part of the tour was when he showed us the washing machine in Blaues Haus, my dorm. This thing is out of the CAVEMAN days. It's a tiny door just my height that opens up to this one itty bitty washing machine sitting in a boiler room space, with exposed pipes, etc., and also the intimidating Celcius scale. Why not just "hot," "cold," "warm,"? Why bring Celcius into the equation? Why does the U.S. not use this system? It's just not that handy knowledge in the rest of the world. Did anyone guess one washing machine could proffer so many "why's"?

After the tour we ate with the rest of the JYM group and their tour guide / Tutoren, Katarina, in a student restaurant just at the foot of Blaues Haus, called Tribuehne. It was really cheap food, and I had a Seelachsfillet, and it was way better than the one I had at the Hofbraeuhaus, which is really, really sad. We talked to Alex some more and picked his brain.

There was this moment, though, when one guy in my group got some sort of German dish, brought it back to the table, and just looked at his food, then at the American side of the table and said in English: "I think I'm going to get tired of this German food pretty soon." It was a moment where we realized we had pretty much only two things in common: (a) we were American and (b) we missed a great deal about home. It's weird; one wouldn't imagine it, but one gets a totally different perspective on one's home culture when one is so far away from it. Even now, I only have 2 movies to my name on my laptop: Body of Lies, and Enchanted, so I felt more like the former than the latter (such polar opposites do they represent!), and I'm watching Body of Lies and thinking how freaking American this movie is. I've seen it a couple of times before, but never had such a reaction to it. But now I'm just like, "oh, my people! there they are!" I have never felt such an affinity for Leonardo DiCaprio (? di Caprio? ) before, but now I'm like ooooo, he's american, just like meeeeeeeee!

The most difficult thing to understand about Europeans is how staid they all seem. Most of them are quite nice underneath all that staidness, but the utter lack of facial expression is just surprising sometimes. I have seen Germans taking photos of each other in front of statues/memorials/etc and the person whose photo is being taken doesn't even twitch and maintain this resolute expression. Maybe there's a smile variation which I'm unable to detect, but it's like, if you took a picture like that in the U.S., people would think you needed help. Here: totally normal. You have to admire that, though.

Just going to clean up the room this weekend and get ready for more orientation next week! Pictures to be added very soon to this blog post, so watch this space.