The last month

I am, at long last, updating my blog. This past month has been crazy. I can't believe that it's really been four weeks since I left Germany, but at the same time, my whole exchange seems very far away.

I haven't really been experiencing any "reverse culture shock," apart from wishing they had good bread here and mire attractive street signs. However, the first couple of days back in America, I felt incredibly, weirdly disoriented. I greeted my family by hugging them and exclaiming, "This is so weird!! This is SO WEIRD!"

After a day in D.C., I met my parents, and we spent a couple more days in Baltimore, visiting Ellen's parents, and a day in Cambridge with Mana and Pop. I was really eager to get home! My house looked so different, I started running through each room shouting, "Our house is so stylish! It should be in a magazine!!" On my first day back in Portland, I had lots of visitors, including Flora, Artemis, Miss Gliss, and Enoch.

Since then, I've been keeping myself busy with spending time with friends, walking to Arabica, cooking Indian food, kombucha-tasting, going to Funtown, and absurd amounts of summer homework from the shack. I have a pretty regular babysitting job and I'm playing my uke a lot. Things are pretty much back to normal.

last day. ever.

I don't know quite how this happened, but it appears that today is my last day in Germany.

Up until a week ago (ähm, pretty much from September), I was looking forward to going home like insanely.

I find that the idea that at approximately 3 pm tomorrow I will be in the good ol' US of A COMPLETELY unimaginable. I will never live this crazy comedy-series life with my host sisters again. I will never walk past the Döner-Laden on my way home from school. I will not drink coffee in the afternoon on my porch in those little white cups with the blue rims. I will not be able to hop on the bus or train and go wherever I want to. I will not be invited to those weird parties where people play drinking games and yell at each other in Spanish. I will not be "that weird American anymore," or "that American who learned German in a year," or even generally "that American."

This is impossible to comprehend.

I don't really have a real life here. I feel like I'm practicing for something. A lot of the time I find myself thinking, "Next time I will do this and this and this differently." But then... this IS my life!! And as embarrassing or awkward as some things are -- namely, how unmusical I am in comparison to my classmates, my American accent, and the fact that people think I am naive -- I will miss this, and over the last week I've been saying to myself over and over again, "Hey, it was worth it!"

To celebrate last-days-in-Deutschland, yesterday I went with Tang and Marlene to a bar in Pforzheim and had cocktails, and someone got very drunk, and we came home and Marlene taped her to the staircase with packing tape while I filmed it. It was a lot funnier than it sounds.

See you in America.

at dinner, the conversation goes as follows:

Marlene: Do you know about star signs? Like, I'm a lion, Zoe is a scorpion?
Tang: Hm?
Marlene: Maybe you use like the Chinese ones? I think there's monkey, snake...
Me: No snake.
Marlene: Are you sure?
Me: Yes, there's no snake. There's a dragon, but there's no snake.
Marlene: Really?
Me: I'm sure. Tang, I'm a monkey, my brother's a rat...
Tang: OHHHHH! You mean like sheep!!
Me: Yes, there's a sheep too.
Tang: YES!!! I'm a sheep. Sheep is so sweet. Everyone comes and says "Awwwwww, you're so sweet," and they just look for something to eat. Marlene, you're 1990? You must be a horse. Ohhh, not so good. Horse isn't like sheep. Horse is a little stuck-up. Very proud. Not like sheep. Sheep just looks for something to eat, and everyone says they're SO sweet.
Me: I'm a monkey.
Tang: Oh! Oh, Monkey isn't so good. Monkey isn't like sheep. You don't ever listen, do you? Monkeys never listen. Monkey is definitely a lot worse than sheep.
Marlene (laughing): Not so the fan of monkeys, are you?
Me (laughing): Monkeys, Americans...
Tang (seriously): No, I don't like either that much.

The conversation turns to my day at school.

Me: We were talking about the viola. A girl in my class asked me if I know what a viola is. I said yes, I used to play the viola, but I stopped. She asked, why did you stop? I said, I wanted to play the saxophone. She said, Oh, you play the saxophone!! I said, well no, I stopped. And she said, Oh, I understand know. You're one of those people who always stops.
Tang: Well, that's true.
Me: Hey, not really. Well, yes. But not really. I felt like shit when she said that. That's my personality. It's the same with careers. I've wanted to be... (I list about 20 different careers, ranging from philosopher to marine biologist to baker.) But now I think I might want to be a doctor or a politician or something. Or an English teacher in Japan.
Tang: I have to warn you. Don't go to Japan unless you have a boyfriend. Japanese men are no good. If you marry one, you'll have to stay at home and clean the house and take care of the children all day while he works in an office.
Marlene: Do you want to get married someday, Zoe? Generally?
Me: Maybe. Maybe not.
Marlene: I do. I also know I want to have children, preferably when I am 26.
Tang: Hey! That's soon! We're all coming to your wedding.
Me: Whether you like it or not... ÜBERRASCHUNG!

last day of school EVER

Today, on my last day of German school, I gave a little presentation in English about New England and Maine. It was weird. I felt a little unprepared, especially when it came to the actual speaking. It's normal for my English to be a little awkward, but today it was just bizarre -- I felt like I literally could not form a sentence. It was also just somehow awkward to talk about home in front of my class -- I felt like they thought I was being somehow critical, when I'm really just excited to go home.

After school, my class had planned a surprise party for me, which was really, really sweet. We sat by the Nagold River and ate cake. They got me such great gifts: a class photo and these absolutely amazing, cool shoes. One of the girls in my class has the same ones, and she remembered that way, way at the beginning of the year, I told her I loved them and asked her where she'd bought them.



Shoes. They're sailing shoes -- sneakers for sailing.

can you believe...

...that THIS is Tang, sitting in the back row with the glasses?




And here she is now??




CRAZY, or? She suspects that at the airport, her own family will not recognize her.


Yesterday we went to Marii's "good-bye party" in Freiberg, and then afterward we went to Ludwigsburg, my new favorite charming little town in the world. As we wandering around its charming streets, I kept remarking, "Ludwigsburg is so cute!" We spent three hours admiring the statue of Schiller, going to the mall, and sitting in a cool cafe, and then we went to a big music-and-fireworks festival by the palace. We were there for almost five hours, until one in the morning. It was really, really fun. The band playing was pretty bad, but I love outdoor concerts where everyone brings picnics and blankets and sits on a lawn. We didn't have any picnic, since we'd come directly from Freiberg, so Tang bought a Bratwurst, and since there was no vegetarian option except fries, I was extremely German and bought a Radler, a beer with lemonade.

Marlene came later to meet up with us, but since she spent almost an hour looking for a parking place, she missed the fireworks. We stayed around a while anyway and listened to music and ate Brötchen. And completely randomly, I burst into tears. I don't even know why. Tang and Marlene were talking about the Abi-Move or whatever it's called, where the recently graduated German students get drunk and ride around their cities on floats wearing bikinis, and suddenly it hit me that I will be gone in a week, and with the approaching end of school (Monday is my last day), going home is started to sound less and less appealing. I have realized that I despise school, but I love Germany, and I love my host sisters too. Tang tells me sometimes, "I don't even notice you. You're so normal. But next year, I will miss you so much." Although the first time she said this, I was kind of offended, I think I feel exactly the same about her.

Anyway, as I am crying, this conversation ensues:
Me: Crying.
Tang: What's going on? Are you crying? I don't understand!
Me (hugging Marlene): I love you so much, Marlene.
Marlene: Oh Zoe, I love you too.
Tang: I don't understand! Are you drunk?
Me: Crying.
Me: No... I had one beer... three and a half hours ago!
Marlene: Laughing.
Tang: I don't understand!!


Today we're going to Martha's good-bye party in Karlsruhe. In case anyone's wondering, my "good-bye party" is on Thursday and will consist of eating Raclette and playing 6 Nimmt with my host family.

Some funny videos are on the way. Well, maybe if you spoke German, they would be mildly funny, but for most of you they will probably just be me talking for five minutes while Tang does some spastic camerawork.

some things to note

1. Yesterday my ethics teacher told our class that Buddhism is not a religion.

2. Today my math teacher said that he still has my test (which the rest of the class received two weeks ago) and has come to the conclusion that I haven't understood anything all year.

3. Yesterday I went over to a girl from my French class's house and studied for our French quiz. It was, surprisingly, really fun.

4. Today my class teacher loaned me a big book full of beautiful pictures of the U.S. to use in the presentation I'm giving on Monday. On the cover of the book is a photo that turned out to be of Portland Head Light. When I saw it, I got really excited and said, "I think this picture is of NEW ENGLAND! Wait, I think it might be of MAINE! It looks excactly like where I live!"

5. If you want to see videos of me in my kitchen or in the Brothers Grimm garden, click on the vimeo link I added.

6. I'm so excited to fly home in NINE DAYS!!!!!!!!

according to my calculations

It seems that tomorrow I've officially got three weeks left in Germany. Isn't that, as they say, extreme?

I will miss Germany terribly, but mostly I am just really, really ready to be at home. It's not Germany's fault. I think in a lot of ways I wasn't ready for this year abroad. I definitely didn't take everything I could from it. I meant to, but in a lot of cases, I waited for stuff to come to me instead of reaching out and grabbing it. Tang tells me, "Your problem is you always look up. Sometimes you need to look down, too." By this, she doesn't mean that I'm overly optimistic -- she means that I always want to be better. I look at the people who are better than me instead of realizing how much I have or have accomplished.

So this explains why I've got such weird mixed feelings about going home. A lot of people, including Martha and my host sister Marlene, say that they feel/felt conflicted about leaving behind lives they'd worked so hard to create in their host countries. But I feel like I didn't have time to create my new life -- like maybe that would take two or three years instead of one. I like it here, and I love my host family, and the other exchange students are wonderful, but I still have this overwhelming feeling that this is not me. I'm just a temporary person. I don't know if this is because I didn't try hard enough, or coincidence, or because of how closed-off I can be with people sometimes, or what. I just know I am leaving with a little regret.

But it's not that I am regretting everything, or that I'm miserable, or anything of that sort. I am happy! I feel like I tried something new and I got out of it what I could. Sometimes I start going over in my head everything that's happened in this last year and it's incredibly overwhelming. I want to grab my journal and write everything down exactly the way it happened so I will never forget. Only then, I realize that I'd never have enough time, and I feel that limited feeling that I get all the time at home when I attempt elaborate art or film projects -- the things I can do feel so finite!

Other pieces of news:

1. Right now my German and Thai host sisters are deciphering my practice worksheet for my math test.

2. In Music we are studying something called "tonality" and "Kadenz". It's something with chords, under them are Roman numerals I II IV V VI V V VI VII, and the chords change to other chords, represented by m and another letter. In other words, something that my five years of piano lessons as a child did not cover. More proof that I, a self-taught ukeist, should not be on the track with all the musical prodigies. As my music teacher (who kind of resembles Daniel Johnston and is nice, but also one of those rock-music-isn't-actually-real-music folks) wrote this on the board, he declared, "This is easy! Even a monkey could do it!" A monkey, perhaps, but not the American exchange student.

3. Today I officially gave up my career in jogging. For a while, I was really enjoying it, jogging three times a week, and feeling better about all the crap I eat. But I really think it is just not for me. I've gotten way way worse all of a sudden, and it's frustrating, and I think I out to stick to physical actvities that I enjoy instead of ones I have to force myself to do.

4. To replace my career in jogging, I think next year I am going to learn to swim and learn to ride a bike. This has been my goal for roughly as long as I can remember. I have been learning to ride a bike for approximately three years, but somehow I just can't get the hang of it. As for swimming, that's just really necessary -- I want to learn to sail, but before I can do that, I need to get over my fear of water, and learn to swim.

5. I don't have any idea what I'm doing.

summary of the last few weeks

Well, first of all, check out today's how-to. I especially enjoy the line: "When a flag is no longer in good condition (e.g. if it is torn, ripped or badly soiled) it should not be raised or displayed. It should be disposed of in a dignified way (such as a private burning.)"

I picked a dumb day to forget my camera. Today I was very sad to be unable to take any photos in Pforzheim's wonderful DDR museum. It completely exceeded my expectations! It turns out that there really ARE worthwhile things to do in Pforzheim. This museum is really, really worth a trip. It's only open from 11:00-3:00 Sundays, but it's got a great collection of photos, newspapers, posters, books, food, money, etc. from the DDR. The tour guide was really nice, gave me a bunch of free booklets, and talked to me for a long time about how the Luftbrücke and the support of America after WWII and how it was "really not anything like Iraq; they helped us out." Which is something that I hear really often from older people here. When she was a young woman, her parents immigrated to West Germany, and she was not allowed to visit them. She wrote letters to her parents telling them that she would go over (to visit) as soon as she could. The Stasi read them and arrested her, and she was imprisoned for 6 months in a tiny room with "other political prisoners and murderers." I guess the murderers were very spiteful towards her because they had life sentences and they knew the political prisoners would be leaving pretty soon.

A lot has happened in the last few weeks. The last week of May, I was in Hamburg for a few days, and then in Berlin:

Hamburg:

We were there visiting an old friend of Ulrike's, who has three children. Svea, in the picture below, is Marlene's age and is studying fashion design in Hamburg next year:








Indian food! (A special gift for me.) I impressed people by eating a lot of spicy red sauce that was really not all that spicy.




Cocktails. Mine is a White Russian!




Berlin:

Berlin ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY exceeded my expectations. I LOVED it. It's by far my favorite city I've visited since getting here and perhaps my favorite city in the world. in contrast to Bonn, the AFS folks were extrememly flexible. We had TONS of free time and were allowed to wander the subway system by ourselves. Unfortunately I failed to take any particularly good pictures:






They've got Muji in Berlin too!







Rebecca looks concerned because we went to an international market with five people and we kept losing them:



We ended up getting caught in the rain a lot; it was really fabulous. Me with some nice girls:




The first week of June, Tang moved in with us. She was having problems with her host family in Karlsruhe, and she stays with us every weekend anyway, so my host parents said it was okay! So now we are five kids. It's been a LOT of fun; she goes to my school with me (although she's not in my class) and it's never, ever boring here. I think every weekend before I go home, I've got something planned. Last week of school, we wrote our first "Zentralische Klassenarbeit", (which are big tests we have to take at the end of 10th grade in Germany, and for the Realschüler are final exams), in German. I was pretty pleased; I probably won't be getting a passing grade, but it was an essay in German. Next week we've got them in English and Math. I probably won't even pass in English, and I'll probably accomplish two or three problems in Math -- in 2 1/2 hours. Failure. But I'm trying (like I have been for this entire year) just to forget about all of it.

sansibar

I did it! I finished the endless Sansibar oder der letzte Grund! This post proves that I really have been reading this book for almost four months. Eh.

I enjoyed it! It was really lovely and dark and poetic, plus I find it fasinating that this book is on almost every German teenager's reading list -- if you google the German title, you find a million study-help websites and essays written by pupils -- and yet, the English version is (in my completely unimportant and possibly wrong opinion) weirdly translated, and if you google the English title you find almost nothing. My favorite character was Gregor, the young communist director. I spent much time enjoying the description of the "bicycle clips" on his trousers and wondering what they were. I also liked a couple of lines at the very end of the book -- SPOILER ALERT -- right after Helander shoots the police. To paraphrase, something like "He didn't notice the fire burning inside him anymore. He stopped and felt alive."

encounters with strangers

Have I told you yet that Pforzheim's insane-person-ratio appears to be very similar to that of Portland? There are days where I walk down the street and every single person I pass appears to have something serverely wrong with them. Yesterday, for example, I skipped my 7th-grade English class (because I don't do anything there except read Sansibar and I could do that outside) and bought a Schwarzwälder Muffin at the bakery. I sat by the Enz to eat it, and I thought I heard somebody speak, but I wasn't sure, so I just continued to eat. Then I thought I heard somebody speak again, so I turned around, and there was a extremely creepy-looking man there, dressed all in black, with large dark sunglasses (even though it was a dark, rainy day) and a HUGE grin on his face.

Me: Uh, excuse me?
Man: Guten Appetit!!
Me: Thanks!

Although not in the crazy person category, I had another funny encounter with a strager on Wednesday, at the cafe where I go sometimes after school to get a cheese/butter/tartar sauce sandwich and a coffee. I was reading, and since I still kind of need a dictionary to get through my book, I had one in front of me as well. A pretty normal-looking, middle-aged man came up to me.

Man (in English): Are you trying to improve your English?
Me: Nein, nein, eigentlich nicht. Ich komme aus Amerika.
Man: Are you trying to improve your English so you can go to America?
Me: No, I'm from America!
Man: So am I. Where are you from?
Me: Maine.
Man: I'm from the other end: Florida. So, how long are you here for?
Me: A year. I've been here since September. I'm an exchange student.
Man: So your German must be getting pretty good. What are you studying?
Me: I'm in high school.
Man: Great! Well, good luck to you. Oh, if you want to pay, do you just say "bezahlen"?
Me: Yeah, "bezahlen, bitte." (As opposed to "die Rechnung," Adam!!)
Man: Goodbye.
Me: Goodbye.

It was nice. Meeting other Americans pleases me, strangely. This encounter also made me feel so, so German. "I gave advice!!!" I thought excitedly afterwards. "I am not the idiot!! I am a person capable of giving helpful advice!!"

das leben der anderen

i am kind of in love with this movie?






i watched it yesterday afternoon/evening. i was home alone, so i made some coffee, tore out my knitting (because i messed up sock number two again, alas), and WATCHED THIS MOVIE IN GERMAN. that is to say, no subtitles. it's not an easy movie, so i was pretty proud of myself. it was amazing.

one of my favorite scenes was the shot of the stasi man reading a bertolt brecht poem out loud. i googled "bertolt brecht schönen sommerhimmel" and managed to find it:

1. An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September

Still unter einem jungen Pflaumenbaum

Da hielt ich sie, die stille bleiche Liebe

In meinem Arm wie einen holden Traum.

Und über uns im schönen Sommerhimmel

War eine Wolke, die ich lange sah

Sie war sehr weiß und ungeheuer oben

Und als ich aufsah, war sie nimmer da.


I think yet another factor contributing to my apparent nerdyness is the fact that I really like Bertolt Brecht. We read a poem by him in German class called "Tannen": (Yes, my dear mother, as in "Tannenbaum".)

In der Frühe

Sind die Tannen kupfern

So sah ich sie

Vor einem halben Jahrhundert

Vor zwei Weltkriegen

Mit jungen Augen.


This one I feel I can sufficiently translate: "In early morning, the pines are coppery. I saw them so a half century ago, before two world wars, with young eyes."

I love German poetry. I think German is really an amazing language for writing, probably due to its unique grammatical structure. I cannot wait to comtinue to improve my German in the next couple of years. I have much enthusiasm partially because of so many pieces of German literature I can aspire to be able to finally read.

Starting with my dear Sansibar. Only ten pages left!!

wooden things

Here are some things that my host brother Tobias made in school.

This knife is actually very, very cool.

dirndl

the last month in photos

I made Indian food for my host family (a long time ago.) It was quite good, although I ended up using way, way too much corriander in everything. That's what happens when you follow the recipe.








Afterwards we had chai in this adorable tea set from the fifties. I am in love with it. I try to invite girls from my class to come over and have tea with me, but they keep turning me down.



We went to a soccer match. It was a fabulous experience.









Me with my Bundestag person (and my book!)

hello

I feel like things are still just so up and down. My mind is a constant back-and-forth between enthusiastically loving this country and absolutely unjusting hating it. Take, for example, last Wednesday. I started out my day by deciding that when I grow up I will live here when I noticed the red thing attached to the window of the bus is for smashing the glass if you're stuck inside it during an accident, and the amazing illustration demonstrating how to use it. When my French teacher humiliated me in front of my entire class and then handed me a test with a grade of 5-6, the entire country of Germany was to blame. But my faith in it was restored when I visited my Bundestag person Katja Mast, and before I departed, she handed me a big stack of papers about her and the SPD and the Bundestag, including one that stated exactly how much money she makes. That would just never happen in the U.S.!

I had a great weekend in Munich with Alisa. (Pictures coming as soon as I receive my replacement camera cord in the mail.) The first day, we visited one of the castles built by King Ludwig II, Linderhof. The king was a little crazy and built these crazy scenes based on Wagner's operas. We visited one that was underground. He built a huge artifical cave with a lake in it, wave machines, an orchestra played there -- it is so extravagant, and has absolutely no purpose other than the king's aethetic pleasure. On the second day we visited Neuschwanstein, and then headed to Munich.

I love Munich, and I would very much like to live there someday. Munich has everything you need, including Muji, lots of great vintage stores, and old buildings.

And I have a Dirndl.

And guess what.

It's mustard yellow.

stephin merritt

i'm sure most of you have seen this video before, but this is incredible:




i love watching him play all those different instruments at once. it makes me remember why playing a musical instrument is fun. when i get back from germany, let's all get together and make stuff up like stephin merritt.

i also learned how to play this one. on my uke today. it's the first finger-picked song i've learned, and i think after a couple more hours i'll have it down. it's really incredibly easy.

when i get my camera cord from my parents, i'll post a picture of me with my bundestag representative here in pforzheim, katja mast. -- i visited her office today! there's also going to be an article about me in the pforzheim newspaper!

me not being witty

I don't know how this happened, but suddenly it is 9:00 pm.

All I have time to say is that this week sucked. It was a flashback to October. I cannot do a sommersault for the life of me, my name was decidely NOT put on a "class list," I seem to have become invisible over April break, and I do not understand any of this music theory shit at all.

I feel like I've been waiting since September for my exchange to become fun. Maybe this is my problem. Maybe I should have just gone after the fun and made my own fun, but to have fun I really require other people, and people here (even the sweet ones) are generally not interesting in things like discussions and DNA-inspired quilts, or basically anything that I think is fun. Oh man. I do not want to be one of those awful people who only want to go home, I wish I could say that I never want to leave, but I DO want to leave. I will not even cry at the airport. In all honesty, I will be ecstatic. I am such a loser.

Even so, some of the people here are nice, and I am inviting two of the nice exchange students over tomorrow to play Risk with my nice host brother, and hopefully eat nice food. And Risk with nice people is really a close third to anything philosophical and science-inspired crafts.

I am just waiting for this to be over. Not my exchange (well, in this minute, yes, but hopefully not for long), but this unhappy spell. I think that after I ecstatically come home, I will rave about Germany, and I will miss it. We tend to remember the good things.

Prague

This past weekend (Wednesday to Sunday) was spent brandishing Bohemian wit with Kayla in Prague, and it was probably the most fun I have ever had in my life. I also think I laughed more than I have my entire year abroad. Of course it was nice to speak English, be with a friend, and generally feel like my normal self again, but it also felt so spiritually healthy, or something. I did so many things I've never done before. Like:

moutain bike (almost eight kilometers)
eat meat
roast Wurst on a stick over a huge fire
attempt to converse with non-english/german speaking people
successfully find my way through the prague metro alone
be spat at on the street for speaking english
attend a czech sing-a-long
be stung by a poisonous plant
skin both my knees

My Student Agency Bus departed from Stuttgart at 10 am Wednesday. This bus is awesome. I got my two-way ticket for 70€, there's free hot chocolate and coffee, and movies play the entire ride (in Czech, with English subtitles). None of the staff spoke German, so I began my weird English/Czech immersion immediately. After a nine-hour bus ride, I arrived in Florenc Bus Station, and as soon as I saw Kayla I burst into tears, something that I would never, ever do under normal circumstances. I was just overjoyed to see her.

We took the subway back to her appartment, where I met her host parents Dana and Jirek. After a nice cup of tea, I exclaimed rudely in the middle of the living room, "I HOPE you told them I'm a vegetarian!!" Kayla got a worried look on her face and informed me that, no, she hadn't told them I was a vegetarian, because she'd thought that I'd switched to meat-eating while in Germany (something that I did consider.) I didn't want to eat the meat, but I'm glad I did -- otherwise I would have been a huge inconvenience, and probably very rude, and there appears to be a lack of vegetables in the Czech Republic. It was okay. I also feel new enthusiasm for vegetarianism now that I've tried meat and discovered that I really, really don't like it.

Thursday, we spent the entire day in Prague. In the morning we went to a lovely park overlooking the river, went in the Church of St.Peter and St.Paul (a really, really beautiful little church), and Kayla showed me her school.

Then we had vegetarian Indian food for lunch, which was awesome.





We wandered around more, I exchanged my money and paid her back for the metro and lunch, we visited some statues, and went to Prague's touristy Old Town. Then, Kayla told me about a street that she loves with the Prague Center for Performing Arts on it ("I always hear the strangest noises coming out of there!") and also a cafe called LITERARY ARTISTS CAFE that she's a little scared to go in alone. I will go with you, Kayla! I said. We were pleased that we'd faced our fears. And basically iced coffee = love. Introducing iced coffee is one of the ways I would like to improve Germany (or perhaps just Pforzheim? Perhaps they have it elsewhere?)

Kayla attempted to improve my Czech. When I told her I only knew how to say hello, yes, and no, she responded, "When I came to the Czech Republic, I only knew how to say the words 'neck,' 'wolf,' and 'trout'!" I have now extended my vocabulary to a series of semi-helpful nouns and phrases: "I don't speak Czech," "Do you speak English?," "Germany," "German," "dog," "Wurst," "water," "pretty," "good," "thank you," "please," "I'm sorry." During our little language-lessons, this dialogue seems to ensue:

Kayla: Prosím.
Me: Prosím.
Kayla: No, Prosím!
Me: Prosím!
Kayla: Just give it a normal R! It's better to say it with an American accent than a German one.

We took the subway to the cemetary where Kafka is buried, but sadly it was closed for Passover. So then we went back to Prague-center to a really expensive, disappointing vintage store and a horrible, teenagery, cheap one, where we found a shirt that said "I wouldn normally rock thi gs." What does this mean? Why is the N from the word "things" stuck on to "would"? And the phrase itself sounds weirdly apologetic, like "I would normally rock things, I'm just not rocking them right now."

Other highlights:

We went up to the top of a very tall bell tower, where we got to watch them ringing the biggest bell in the Czech Republic!



Later I climbed the tallest escalator in Central Europe. We went to a teahouse for a while, and then to a bar called "Jeep Bar", which is located in someone's house, in a residential neighborhood, and there were kids' tricycles in the yard. The place was tiny and filled with bizarre WWII memorabilia. We went home.

The next morning I was awakened to a neighbor BLASTING "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." I got up and Kayla translated something her host mom said to her friend: "TEN HOURS in the bus from Stuttgart, and then Kayla drags her for TEN HOURS around Prague!!" We departed for Kayla's family's little house in a village near Pribram, south from Prag. The countryside is incredibly beautiful. The next three days were spent doing leisurely things like bike rides, playing croquet and pool, sitting in the sun, eating cake, and drinking tea and coffee.

On Saturday Kayla and I biked through the Czech countryside to a little chapel on a hill. It took me a while to get used to the mountain bike I was using. I got frustrated with it, but Kayla reminded me, "You can tell people you learned to ride a bike in the Czech countryside." We stopped to walk our bikes up the huge hill, but it was absolutely exhausting. Still, at the top, it was amazing beautiful, and definitely worth it. We passed lots of little catholic shrines on the way, which was cool.




On Sunday we took a longer bike ride through the FOREST with Kayla's host dad. I fell down three times, skinned both my knees, and once I fell into a poisonous bush that gave me a painful rash all over my arm. The host mom of Kayla's friend Nick, who lives in the same village, had informed us just that morning that one could eat this particular plant "as a spinach," even though it's poison if it pricks you. The bike ride was terrific! We rode through picturesque hills and accross bridges and past horses grazing and everything.

Afterwards we walked to a pizza restaurant where we got funny pizza with ketchup on it. Apparently this is normal in the Czech Republic! I couldn't really enjoy it because I was terrified of returning to Prague the next morning -- Kayla and her host sister Vera put me on a bus, which I'd have to get off of, find my way to a metro stop, take the metro to Florenc, and find my Student Agency Bus. Luckily everything worked out, despite me almost walking away from the bus driver without my 400 crowns change!

In May I might get together with Kayla again, in Europapark. I'm hoping that works out. It was fabulous to see her.