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.