David im Deutschland

In Which I See a Drag Show and Das Rheingold in 24 Hours

2010-10-10T21:35:00.001-07:00

My story starts, where many good stories start, in a parking lot at 9:30 Friday night. One of my friends, A certain Kalila Z, was born twenty years ago this Friday, and in honor a large group of cool people were planning to go to a gay bar in Dayton. Never fear, there was no underage drinking involved: they let people under 21 in, but first they must receive the Black Spot on their hand that marks them as forever dead to all bartenders. But that wasn't such a big deal. Any homophobes who might be reading this: you're missing out. This place was one of the best places I have been since Germany. Good music, more flashing lights than the NYPD, and plenty of space to dance.

But, the real reason we were there was the drag show. I didn't really know what to expect: I had the usual stereotypical image of drag queens: sarcastic, flamboyant, and wearing enough makeup to cover a small zoo of test animals. But I didn't really expect the stereotype to be fulfilled. It was, and then some! The Mistress of Ceremonies, who between dance routines called up those with birthdays, looked like Miss Piggy, talked like a chain smoker, and sparkled like a fiber optic Christmas tree. It was pretty awesome, and sure worth the trip.

Back from that, I was dozing comfortably at 11:00, when my cell phone started vibrating. It was a call from my section leader, asking me where I was and if I wanted to go to Das Rheingold. I had completely forgotten that I was planning to go see that this afternoon! Hastily, I grabbed the nearest pieces of clothing and dashed out the door and across campus to drive back to Dayton. The location of the production was the New York Metropolitan Opera, but a movie theater in Dayton was screening it live in HD on the big screen. It was great: sure, it wasn't truly live, but opera houses tend to frown on eating popcorn during the show.

And Wagner is truly fascinating: For those unfamiliar with the work and unwilling to sit through an uninterrupted three hours of melodramatic German, the plot is as follows:

A German god has a midlife crisis, and takes out a mortgage to build Valhalla, his dream house. But he can't make the payments, and the ~~Giants~~ Repo Men come, and take his daughter as collateral. Meanwhile, a ~~jew~~ gnome steals some gold from three mermaids, and renouncing all love, forges it into The One Ring. He then uses the ring's power to force his fellow ~~jews~~ gnomes to make and hoard gold for him, planing to use it to take over the world. But the portly god finds out about this, and storms down to the underworld, to steal the gold he needs to ransom his daughter back. he captures the ~~jew~~ gnome, and takes the ring along with the rest of the gold, but the ~~jew~~ gnome curses the ring, saying that whoever has it will be forever paranoid, and whoever doesn't will be forever envious. The middle-aged god, of course, poo-pooh's this, and would have kept the ring even at the price of his daughter, were it not for the words of a strange lady who shows up for no discernible reason to warn him against it. In the end, the Repo Giants leave with the cursed ring, and the family of gods is reunited in their happy home.

To be fair, the Met did their best to tone down the antisemitic undertones: Alberich, the gnome, was cast as a black man. However antisemitic Wagner may have been, though, the score and libretto are wonderful: I wasn't able to understand all the german, because there were a lot of archaic and just plain operatically mangled words. But I caught enough to hear the poetry in it. And the staging of this production was... well, check out this video and see for yourself:

All I could say was...wow. If you find yourself in a position to see this, either live or recorded, take it. It's a wonderful show.

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and College Students

2010-10-05T21:51:00.001-07:00

I still don't know what to do with "David im Deutschland", now that David is no longer on exchange but instead a boring old college student. I feel so self-indulgent writing about myself now, now that my situation is shared by so many other people. Before I was given voice simply by the uniqueness of my situation: bad or good, I was charting a place that had not been explored. Now, my writing is leveled with the masses, open to comparison on its integral merits, and I doubt that comparison is a favorable one.

Not that the college experience suffers from a dearth of writing topics. On exchange, I comforted myself with the image of my return to the states as a worldly and experienced young man, far above such childish things as homesickness and peer pressure. I have never been more disillusioned. College is an entirely different experience from exchange. I arrived in Germany into the arms of a waiting support structure. I lived with families inside their preestablished web of routine and love. Here, there was no such network; instead there was a steaming broth of young adults, with barely preestablished mealtimes to lend order to the chaos. Germany was an exercise in forming connections, breaking routines to try to forge a place for oneself. College, it sometimes seems, is the exact opposite; the nemesis isn't boredom, but overstimulation, not wasted hours but overcommitment. And in this hot soup of people and events, it is even harder than before to make and maintain lasting connections. Some days I get back to my room, exhausted and realize that I did not have a single meaningful interaction with a person I care about.

Those are the worst days. But there are plenty of better ones. College, like exchange, concentrates awesome people. The criteria are different: Less emphasis on an outgoing personality, and more on smarts, obviously. But the effect is similar: the concentration of interesting people reaches a critical mass, where the actions of the group become non-deterministically awesome. Some weekends I party and some I watch nerdy TV and some I don't do anything in particular and it is all intensely fun. Come to think of it, the modifier "Intense" applies to pretty much everything that happens here. And that's intensely awesome.

Anyway, watch this space, I guess. If I have anything I want to write, it'll end up here.

Scotland

2010-06-21T16:11:00.001-07:00

I am sure, faithful readers, that you noticed the absence of posts last week. You probably shook your heads like you always do and thought "David's too busy off having fun to write us even a few measly words this week... he probably spent all his time on Facebook chatting with those exchange girls he always talks about and forgot completely to write us poor people back home a few measly words to brighten our lives..." But this week you would only be half correct. True, I was too busy to write anything for your enjoyment, but I wouldn't have been able to post it anyway, because I was in the wilds of darkest Scotland, and didn't have any internet access. So here's how the week went:

Monday:

I got to Köln/Bonn Flughafen at 9 Monday morning. The airport brings to mind a Douglas Adams quote: "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, ‘as pretty as an airport'." It does its job efficiently, though, and in a couple of hours we were on a plane to Edinburgh. I didn't even have to take off my shoes! In Edinburgh, as a non-EU-citizen I had to jump trough a couple of extra hoops: they didn't give out the card with trip length and other information that travelers are supposed to fill out on the plane, because there's barely anyone on a flight from Germany to England that needs one! Germans don't even need a passport to travel in the EU; the Personalausweis that everyone is issued at 16 is enough ID for just about anything.

I have dubbed Edinburgh the City of Chimneys. Everywhere you look, the old stone buildings sprout cylindrical smokestacks, relics of a day when the heating source was coal. the skies of the city must have been disgusting then; but now everything's nice and pretty; the old storefronts are well-preserved and painted brightly, and the only sign of pollution is in the dirty black stone of the old buildings.

My first meal in Scotland was also a memorable one. We were given free time to wander the Old Town, and I looking for something typically Scottish and/or delicious to eat, I saw a pig head in a shop window. The rest of the pig was there too, and available to eat! The shop, cleverly called "Oink", was selling "Scottish hog roast rolls", essentially pulled pork with delicious thyme seasoning in a bun with a piece of "crackling" on top. Crackling is the glazed skin of said pig, a little crunchy square of fatty goodness which, if you are lucky, still has a few bristles sticking out of it! Combined with a ginger beer, it really hit the spot. England may be renowned for its bad food, but its colonies produce some pretty good stuff!

The rest of Monday was a walking tour of Edinburgh and, perhaps the smartest move of the trip, a stop in a used bookstore (I have never seen a German used bookstore. I wonder why...) where I bought for £2 a paperback by Larry Niven that was my primary entertainment for the rest of the trip. I have been starved for science fiction this year, so it was good to sink my nose into a really good work of genre fiction.

Tuesday:

We got up bright and early on Tuesday and met the other class from my school that had decided to come to Edinburgh over breakfast. They had elected to come with a ferry from Holland, and were quite a bit the worse for wear. There was apparently a bar on this ferry, with beer at tax-free prices, and quite a few of them had apparently been keen to exploit the bargain. Pleasantries exchanged, we went our separate ways. Our first stop of the day was Edinburgh Castle, perched on top of an old volcano in the middle of the Old Town. To get there, though, we had to walk a gauntlet of bagpiping tourist shops, selling all varieties of tartan- and kilt-based tourist junk.

While we are on the subject of commerce, let me say right up front that the English pound makes NO SENSE. To start with, there isn't even a common pound note! Some of my classmates, wanting to exchange money before we arrived, were confused when they were presented with a choice between English and Scottish pounds. Apparently there are some from the Bank of England, some from the Bank of Scotland, and a few from something called the Clydesdale Bank, which makes me think of racehorses and wonder what the UK's monetary policy is really based on. All of these notes have different designs. The Clydesdale Bank's look nothing like the other two, don't have the Queen on them, and are far more colorful. The Scottish notes have more Scottish things on them; castles and lochs and stuff, and the whole system is extremely confusing.

Fortunately, there is, as far as I could tell, only one set of coins in the UK. This doesn't mean that things make sense, though. The sizes of the coins seem to have been chosen seemingly at random. The one pence coin is tiny, but the two pence (why do the euro and the pound seem to think that both a one and a two cent coin are necessary?) is the largest coin they have. The one pound coin is really thick and heavy, and the 20 pence and 50 pence coins are not round, but a strange rounded septagon shape. It's pretty much a madhouse trying to figure out what all the coins are all valued.

After our view of the castle, (we didn't get to go in, because it cost money and Germans sometimes out-Scotch the Scotch) we walked down the Royal Mile, back through all the tourist shops, to a museum called The People's Story, which was free. There I learned that, in medieval Edinburgh, there was a guild for everything. Butchers bakers, candlestick makers, even beggars had to be registered, for heaven's sake! We also visited an old churchyard, which was something very special to my teacher; apparent Germany doesn't have any truly old graveyards anymore, because after a few generations they just put new graves over the old ones. Very space-saving, I guess...

From there we walked back up the Royal Mile, provisioned ourselves, and boarded our bus, highland bound! Scotland is renowned for many things, but one of them is definitely not it's efficient road system. It took us three hours to cover the 100-odd kilometers between Edinburgh and our hostel in Aviemore, a tiny little place known as a ski village in winter, and more or less a ghost town in summer.

The next thing on the agenda was to hike a short way though the highlands. I had worked with some of my friends to plan the hike, looking through directories of Scottish hiking paths to try to find one that would be pretty but not try the endurance or patience of my classmates. I had decided on one that appeared good, but upon consultation with the locals, another one was suggested, and we went off in a completely different direction to hike around a small loch. It was a nice flat hike, and pretty, but the only distinguishing feature of the loch was a small island, upon which some crazy Scots had at one point built a mini-castle.

After out highland hike, we went to a nearby pub/restaurant to eat. Here I, with no small amount of trepidation, decided to order haggis. I didn't know anything about the renowned dish, not even what animal was involved in its preparation, but it was archetypically Scottish, and I was in Scotland, and I wasn't going to leave without trying it, dammit! A few minutes later, the waiter brought me a plate of brown ground-up... meat? yes, meat, and it tastes... Hey! it tastes great! Haggis will never win any beauty contests, but, like Scotland, it's simple and hearty, the sort of food that shepherds crave after a cold day in the Highlands.

Wednesday:

On Wednesday's agenda was a visit to Inverness, Callodon battlefield, and a driveby of Loch ness. In Inverness, all the signs were bilingual: in addition to English, Inverness has a small and proud community of Gaelic speakers. This surprised me; I had only associated Gaelic with Ireland, but it makes sense that it didn't stay there.

I spent too long in the museum in Inverness and lost the rest of the group. This wasn't a problem; afterwards was free time anyway, but it meant I was on my own to find lunch. This was also no problem. The Scottish have good specials: I lunched on haggis and mashed potatoes (they seem to call them "tatties" or something) and washed it down with a dram of sherry for just £5. While eating, I heard the table across from me speaking German. No, it wasn't more of my group. German tourists are everywhere!

Callodon Battlefield was a wide flat field; I've never really understood the fascination with and pilgrimage to battlefields; of all the sites of history, they are the ones that show the fewest signs of what took place. Nor was I able to really grasp what this battle was about. Some war of succession or something, I believe. That or a war of Scottish liberation.

I don't have much to say to Loch Ness. We stopped once, to take some pictures. There is a famously ruined castle on one bank. But they want money for it. The owners planted a high hedge to block the view from the parking lot. So we just walked further up the road, to where the view was unobstructed. Take that, hedge.

This evening, we decided to cook for ourselves in the hostel's kitchen in order to save money. This was at first a massive stressful mess, with no one sure how many wanted to or how much to make or who should front the money for ingredients. But once we got back and the cooks got cooking, it turned into quite a delicious pot of spaghetti with tomato sauce, and even though we made way too much, it cost only a fraction of eating out, as well. Our aspirations towards a room party, though, were foiled by the fact that the hostelers kept coming around and telling us that no boys were allowed in the girls room, and by the simple physical fact that a small one-window room containing ten people can quickly become a bit tropical. But a pleasant night was had by all.

Thursday:

There was one thing on Thursday's agenda: whiskey. We went to the Glenlivet distillery, where they showed off the various stills, and, best of all, the aging room. I do not think there is a better smell than that which comes from hundreds of casks of whiskey in one building. I'd wear it as perfume, but then people would think I was a drunkard.

After touring and tasting, we piled back in the bus, and took a very long scenic detour back to Edinburgh, through some very beautiful highlands. I don't think we saw a tree for hours; just low-growing bushes that covered everything, and the occasional sheep. It's an absolutely beautiful country, and I would love to see it from something other than a bus; perhaps a bike or hiking tour across Scotland, one of these years...

Nonetheless, everyone was happy to get back to Edinburgh, and we headed out. I went with a group in a pub nearby to eat some student-price burgers and watch the World cup: France against Mexico. As we came in, we noticed a table in the corner being held down by one girl about our age; we went up to her and asked if we could possibly sher the table. She said sure, but her friends were going to come soon as well, and as we would not then have comfortably fit, we demurred. But the incident stuck in my mind. She seemed friendly, I thought, and I had been in Scotland for a week without actually having a conversation with anyone native. That's no way to see a country, I thought, and at halftime, went over to the three girls and asked if there was room.

As it turned out, they weren't from Edinburgh, but from Paris, students at the Sorbonne up for a weekend. We watched and talked as France played miserably and lost, and then had a round to drown our sorrows and talked some more. In one of those wonderful little coincidences, one of them, Julie, had been in Boston for a semester or so and was also a red sox fan! After a while a band came in and covered a lot of songs we liked, and then we walked home and talked, and all in all it was the best evening of the trip. And before this year, it never would have happened. I would have never gone up to three strangers and said "hey, can I sit with you?" And that is the best thing to come from this exchange; not a new language, not a better understanding of two cultures, but the confidence to jump into perhaps precarious social situations with both feet. It just makes life a blast.

That's SO Germany! issue two: Signs

2010-06-09T08:00:00.001-07:00

If there's one thing Germans are known for worldwide, it's being precise. As I have written about before, the German roads reflect this to a stunning degree. At a construction site, where in California a man in an orange vest with a sign saying "go left", and perhaps a row of cones would be the only markers, German highway repairmen construct elaborate systems of new, taped lines on the road to direct traffic, sometimes complete with portable streetlights. On one especially bad section near where my first host family lived, they went so far as to pave massive detour between the fields so that they could rip out the whole street at once!

This exactitude extends to normal street signs too. The most common sign in Germany is round and white, with a red ring, and means "Don't drive here". It's on almost every street, but, confusingly enough, rarely means what it says. Instead, it is almost always modified by a small sign under it saying "Blahdeblahdeblah Frei", which means that a certain type of vehicle or driver can use this road, but the rest of you had better KEEP OUT. This notice can come in basically any form. A common one around here is "Land- und Forstwirtschaftsverkehr Frei", which is a stunning example of the beauty of the German language, and means "Farm and Forestry Traffic allowed". Another common one is "Anlieger Frei", and means that unless you live or have business on that street, you shouldn't drive there. Of course, this is not easy to control, and has caused my host dad to joke that it should be "Anlügner Frei", "Liars Free"

Of course, it doesn't just stop here. There are almost infinite variations on these signs... here are some of the best I could find.

"While we're giving out beer, only residents allowed." You think they'd let just anyone have free beer?

"No Mofas". Some sort of anti-gangster law?

"Green wave"? Okay, Germany, what does this even mean?

Eww... Just ew.

My personal favorite, seen in Dresden:

Because the trains would otherwise never follow the tracks into the station; it'd be against the law!

That's SO Germany! issue one: Schinken

2010-05-07T08:42:00.001-07:00

That's so Germany! Is my attempt to make up for being a lazy and neglectful blogger all these months. It takes every week (or so... you know me.) as subject a new thing that's SO uniquely or interestingly German.

Schinken

I was taught in German class all those years ago that "Schinken" was the German word for ham. At the time, I visualized a big baked ham like shown in a cartoons as the object of some poor dog's lust, complete with crisscross pattern and a large anatomically incorrect bone sticking out. Nothing could be further from the truth. That would be a kind of schinken, for sure, but the German word encompasses far more preparations of pig than the measly American "ham".

Though I didn't realize it at the time, one of the first things I ate in Germany was Schinken. My flight got in to Frankfurt at about 7:00 in the morning local time —the middle of the night, according to my circadian rhythm. The first thing my host family did after getting home was to sit down to breakfast, and so I sat myself down for a midnight snack. There are many unusual things about German meals, which I will write about in a further installment, so I just did what everybody else was doing: took a roll, cut it in half, spread butter on it, and put a piece of strange, paper-thin meat on each side. It was really good! Salt, and meat flavor, and fat... all the good things about meat without the mass to chew.

Schinken, as I found out later, is not cooked, simply smoked or salted and then cut really thin. This explains the lack of this delicacy in America: My first reaction to the idea of uncooked meat was disgust. For some reason, we view uncooked meat with extreme suspicion. Everything must be, for German standards, cooked to a cinder before it is declared safe to eat. And keeping meat, raw or cooked, just sitting in the fridge like all my German families? Unthinkable. How have they not all died of salmonella?

But, like most German meat products, the stuff is too good to be grossed out by. Schinken is one of those things I'm going to miss back in the US, for sure.

The Deutschlandreise Files: Koblenz, Bad Ems, Heidelberg.

2010-05-05T07:31:00.001-07:00

It's been a long, long time since I last wrote one of these! A number of factors have conspired to keep me off the blog, including fun with other exchangers, orchestra rehearsal, the impending Rotary presentation, and my school's 150th birthday festival. This means that my school here was founded at about the same time Eureka was. There's a reason they call it the "old world", isn't there?

Okay, where was I... right. barreling down the highway back into Germany, then south past where I live and down to the where the Mosel river meets the Rhine. Here in Koblenz, exactly at the point of confluence, there is a massive and puzzling monument. Called the "Deutsches Eck", the "German Corner", it is a paved triangle between the Mosel and Rhine rivers with a giant monument to Wilhelm dem Großen, consisting of a massive statue of him astride a horse, accompanied by winged Victory. It's kind of strange, and really big. Being Exchange students, the first thing we do is take pictures of them. The second thing we do is take pictures of them with our flags. And the third thing we do is climb on them, and have people take pictures of us. Surprisingly, no one told us to get off one of Germany's national treasures. That relief there, though, the one with the eagle and snakes, puzzles me. It would seem more at home in an Aztec ruin. And the writing above: what kind of script is that? It looks nothing like I expected old German to.

Our time to puzzle and photograph is cut short, however, by a sudden shower. We jump back on the bus, and after a couple of hours of driving, some hefty detours to avoid low bridges, and a frighteningly steep ride up and down a mountain, we reach the youth hostel in Bad Ems. Well, not actually in Bad Ems, more like in the middle of nowhere. Well, I guess we won't get to experience the famous Bad Emsian nightlife! What a tragedy! But a bus of 60 exchange students is essentially a rolling party, and we had quite an evening in the hostel's basement bar.

The next morning is an early one: we lever ourselves out of bed, eat a quick breakfast, hide some rolls in our pockets for lunch, and hit the road. First stop: the Marksburg, one of many, many castles ahead of us. It's a pretty typical medieval castle, and I quickly get distracted by some moss between the stones. After that, it's off to Heidelberg, where the primary attractions are the lovely old architecture and Kyleen's girlfriend, who studies there. After another frightening bus ride up the hill to the ruined castle (Hairpins in a double-decker can be extremely hair-raising), we get out and walk down into the old city. Heidelberg was one of the nicest cities I saw on the trip; old, historical architecture, but a population where one in five are students. I think these posters summarize the attraction: where else could you find a poster for dubstep (an electonica subgenre) right next to one for Bach?

After a bit more creative driving (apparently our bus driver "doesn't trust" his satnav...) we found our way to the hostel; a spiffy place, clearly only recently built. The hostels on the trip ranged from serviceable to excellent, and Heidelberg was one of the high points. Of course, having arrived at the hostel, the first thing on our minds was "when are we going out again?" After dinner, the rotex crew made the announcement: we would be getting on a bus back into Heidelberg and spending the evening in a bar that they knew from the last group.

As it turned out they hadn't reserved the place, but it didn't matter: when 60 loud exchange students crowd into a restaurant, it clears pretty quickly on its own. The place was advertising "Bier in Sitefel", that is, a liter-sized, boot-shaped glass. This is, of course, an irresistible photo opportunity for such as us. There was quickly not a boot left on the shelf. Nor beer left in the boots.

One of the few groups who did not flee at our entrance was a pair of buzz-cut, muscled men. It turned out they were Americans, and in Heidelberg for a couple days returning from "a trip in the middle east." They didn't say as much, but I'm pretty certain they were soldiers. in any case, we were happy to have our group or English-speakers increased by two, and a good time was had by all.

All except the poor people who shared the last bus with us on the way home. Having your normally-quiet night commute suddenly filled by tons of loud, foreigners cannot be a pleasant experience. I must say, though, the rotex did an excellent job of getting us home. I don't think any of us had any idea what buses we were taking, or when, but we didn't need to; their people-herding skills were excellent.

This trip home was also the start of what would be come an important diversion in days to come: the invention and singing of songs. It all started with this off-color but extremely topical ditty that Kyleen and I invented on the way from the bus station to the hostel:

Splash splash splash,

I really need to pee.

Splash splash splash,

My bladder's getting full.

It was extremely catchy, I theorize, because it encapsulated perfectly the Zeitgeist of that particular time and place. But even the most wonderful moments must end, and we reached the hostel, snuck as quietly as we could through the halls, and collapsed into our beds, to sleep away the few hours until morning.

The Deutschlandreise Files: Brussels

2010-04-15T13:30:00.001-07:00

Alright: First day. I wake up early, barely able to contain my excitement. Everything packed already, I fiddle restlessly with the stuff I am leaving behind. I won't be in this room for much longer anyway; one day after we get back is the third and final host family trade. Final. Even as the days get longer, everything about this year is getting shorter. But I've got two weeks ahead of me; two weeks with my best friends traveling thousands of kilometers around Germany!

Bonn: Around the corner from the bahnhof stands a massive green and white bus, ringed by exchange students. I dodge in, slide my suitcase to the packers, and dash up the tiny staircase. Bingo! I am the first on the bus, and the best seats are ripe for the picking. I take the seat right up front, upstairs, looking right out over the road.

First stop: The Haus Der Geschicte, a museum of German history going from the end of WWII up to today. It's a fascinating museum, but I and most of the others from here have seen it already. We spend the time catching up with each other and making excited plans.

After the quick tour, it's back in the bus for the long drive from Bonn to Brussels. The front seat doesn't prove as useful as I thought it would be; the window is very dirty, and my camera seems to think that's what I want to take pictures of. But it's fun to watch the landscape drift by. From really close to the glass, you can almost make yourself believe you are flying down the Autobahn towards Belgium.

It's easy to miss a border in Europe these days: at first we just thought the town names had gotten really strange. Belgium, though, looks subtly different: somehow, the villages, the fields, the trees are slightly more... Belgian. Brussels, however, is extremely cosmopolitan, almost aggressively so. I lost count of the number of EU flags. Every hotel has an extensive collection of flags over the door.

The old city is a different story altogether. Here, on the Grand Square, the city's medieval and intricately carved town hall rears its distinctive spire. There are some beautiful buildings around it; old guild houses with gilded tools of the trade, palaces, all the architectural treasure that old rich cities seem to collect.

Our tour guide for the day is an old guy who is a little put out by our tendency to favor talking with each other over listening to him. He talks about all 17 times that Brussels has changed hands in the past couple centuries, about the tension between the Dutch-speaking Belgians in the north, and the French-speaking Vallons in the south, and how Brussels is (because of being invaded, natch) a little francophone island in the Dutch-speaking north. He talked at length about Belgian beer, and Belgian kings, and Belgian this and that... I barely knew there was anything other than Belgian waffles!

But you know who else is from Belgium? Tintin! Apparently Hergé was a pen name for Georges Rémi, a Belgian! Brussels is apparently a very important city in European comics history: I saw many murals like this one, depicting other comic characters throughout the city. I think of "comics" as having come from superheroes and a largely American thing; it's weird to think that Europe was developing its own style at the same time!

The hostel is exactly as I expected it would be: bunk beds and a couple of sinks in the room, everything else down the hall. We eat, then quickly freshen up and head downstairs; tonight is our only opportunity to try Belgian beer!

Of course, with 60 people in tow you can't just walk into a bar and order a couple. We do quite a bit of walking before we find a place that can and will take us all. But it's a nice place. Belgian beer is different, and good; we talk and trade each other sips until the Rotex round us up at twelve.

Next morning: The word is up and out: we have a long way to go. I perform the miracle of getting everything back in my suitcase in record time, and am one of the first on the bus. Unfortunately we have to wait for the last; this results in a chill half an hour of miscellaneous exchange student conversation.

Eventually the bus lurches into motion, and we are on our way to the Atomuim, a strange construction built for the 1958 worlds fair. It's recently been restored, so it's shiny, but still covered in zeerust. The old man from yesterday had showed up while we were taking pictures, and he wheezed facts over the bus intercom as we drove around and continued to talk to each other. I felt kinda sorry for him; he did a good tour, but we were far more interested in each other. But we dropped him in the city, and then we hit the road, saying goodbye to Belgium and heading southward to the Mosel... But that's a story for another day.

Wow... I'm amazed how much came out there! I didn't even know I remembered all that! Anyway, there's a lot more to come; I'm not going to do things exactly one day at a time; I'll just cut it how I feel it works best. But if this post is any guide, I'll be writing these until I leave!

Here is my Flickr album, and here is another take on the first day by the inimitable Kaya.

The Deutschlandreise Files:

2010-04-14T13:52:00.001-07:00

It's been a crazy couple of weeks; first two weeks in a bus with 60 other exchange students, then a host family change the day after I get back! But the trip was amazing; I can't think of a better way to tour Germany. It was exhausting, for sure: party every night, and then breakfast at 7:30 isn't a comfortable schedule. But by the last day, we were all sick and tired and the best friends in the world.

I knew you would all want to see some of the trip, so over the 14 days I took 6.6 gigabytes of pictures. Over the next two weeks, I will try to write a series of posts, each on one of the cities we visited, and accompany it with a photo album on Flickr. The album for Brussels is already up; I should have the post written tomorrow. Watch this space.

Deutschlandreise!

2010-03-24T07:03:00.001-07:00

Just so you all know, in just TWO days I will be on the road in a bus jam-packed with exchange students for our two-week-long trip all over Germany! A rough sampling of the destinations:

Bonn
Brussels
The Marksburg
Heidelberg
Strausbourg
The European Parliament
Stuttgart
Dachau
Munich
Neuschwanstein
Prague
Dresden
Berlin
The Reichstag/Bundestag building
Potsdam
The VW factory
Hamburg

As you can see, it's a whirlwind trip. In a couple cities, we will barely have enough time to run through taking pictures. But it will be nonetheless fun; two uninterrupted weeks with other exchange students can't be anything but fun!

As to wether you will hear anything from me during the trip... I don't know. I will be taking all the necessary gear with me, (I'm not sure if my 8 gigabytes of camera memory will suffice for this trip!) but whether or not I have internet access on a given day is luck of the draw. Auf jeden fall, at the end of the trip I will post one heck of a photo album!

High-quality advertising

2010-03-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

German advertising is subtly different from US advertising. Well, sometimes it's not so subtle: Kaya wrote a great post about some of the ads that are run here that would probably never see airtime in north America. But there is a more subtle bias to German advertising I have noticed: german ads often stress the quality of their products much more. It is a rare comestible that does not advertise itself as "spitzenqualität" (top quality) and many even bear the grade they received in a consumer-reports-style product test.

See? both at once: "Spitzenqualitat" at the top, and a prize sticker at the bottom for being the best... cooked ham. they've got me there, that's for sure!

But these appeals seem to work: Bittburger Pils, the most popular beer in Germany, runs an ad campaign based almost exclusively on emphasizing the purity of its ingredients. Anything I don't need to tell you that German auto companies do the same.

The whole attitude reminds me of those old ads in National Geographic. You know, the ads for stuff like Rolex and Cadillac that were more text than picture. This is an extreme example, but this style of "persuasive" advertising, that attempts to sell something by giving a pitch, instead of just associating it with a good feeling, like most advertisements these days, is basically gone in the US, but lives on in Germany.

Bonus best line from the Rolex ad: "On its clasp, you'll recognize the Rolex crown. So will other people."

Snow! (again)

2010-03-07T10:29:00.001-08:00

IT SNOWED! in MARCH! This isn't supposed to be happening. Going into this exchange, I wanted to go somewhere where I could experience a real winter. I seem to have gotten my wish!

The weekend started out with snow. I went skiing indoors for the second time! It was tremendous fun. Hubertus, my host father, is a ski instructor, and a really good one. I went in two days (evenings really, from 5 until 11) from not knowing the first thing about skiing to a decent skier! Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from that.

Friday night, though, came real, outdoor snow. A good inch of lovely, powdery snow!

And lovely clear skies to boot!

More pictures from the last two days on Flickr here.

An advantage of being an exchange student

2010-02-28T16:10:00.001-08:00

So, the US just lost the best game of ice hockey I have ever watched to Canada. I watched it with my host family. They were moderately interested, but the real excitement was in the Internet: Facebook was going CRAZY. I spent most of the game chatting with Kaya about the game, hockey in general, (Did you know you can't elbow another player, but you can charge into them at full speed and knock their feet out from under them? Strange but true.) and the respective merits of each other's countries. Her enthusiasm for the whole thing made what would have been for me a mediocre game into a fascinating one, and shows one of the best things about being a Rotary exchange student: With the whole world just a friend away, nothing can be distant or uninteresting anymore.

Karneval!

2010-02-19T12:18:00.000-08:00

Whew! Wednesday marked the end of the Karneval season, and I have never seen anything like it! Karneval is crazy. Imagine a combination of Mardi Gras, Halloween, and Oktoberfest, with a bit of vaudeville thrown in. Mix with lots of intensely catchy dance music and more than a bit of alcohol, and you have Karneval, when the normally rather sensible folk of Köln (Cologne, for the latin-influenced out there) and the surrounding territory erupt in happy, colorful madness. It was confusing, disorienting, exhilarating, and utterly awesome.

To understand Karneval, you have to understand its origins, which is far from easy: everybody has a story, and they're all different! Some say it is, like Mardi Gras, a kind of Going-out-of-business, everything-must-go sale on sin before Lent. Others say it is a festival for the driving out of the winter. (which didn't seem to work this year: it snowed all last week!) Still others say it was in the middle ages a time where anyone could speak their mind without being relieved of their head, or credit it as a kind of protest against the occupying French. I have no idea which of these are true, and I suspect they all are. But it really doesn't matter: Karneval requires no rationalization. It just happens, kind of as a safety blowoff of the year's tensions, a sort of societal new year's cleanout.

What was my place in this wacky week? My job was simple: march through the streets of various towns and villages with my fellow Panikorchester members and bang on a bass drum, preferably in time. You see, the chief attractions of Karneval are the numerous parades featuring marching bands, floats with themes from politics to pears throwing candy, and often a "Prince" and "Princess" of the whole thing, with quite extravagant costumes. There are a lot of these parades, due to a quirk of German geography: unlike in the US, where even in rural areas people are mostly clustered into towns surrounded by farms and quite far from each other, Germany is laid out in a more medieval plan: there are tiny "dorfs" scattered everywhere, each maybe a quarter hour of walking from each other, all with their own names and, often, fiercely defended individuality. Practically every one has its own Karneval parade, sometime in the roughly week-long season, and thus there was plenty of walking and drum-banging to be done.

But do things stop when the parade ends? by no means! School lets out for the week of Karneval, and so it is undisputedly the biggest party week on the German calendar. And here I come to another strange and unusual aspect of Karneval: Karneval music. Karneval has a large tradition of traditional songs that are played in the parades and, naturally, repeated for the dancefloor at the parties. Many of them are in Kölsch, the dialect of Köln, making them very hard to understand. Thankfully they are also all very catchy and repetitive. These songs, I think, were all written with one goal in mind: for drunken people to sing along to. Their simple rhythms and catchy choruses mean that the everygerman (who is an incredibly enthusiastic singer with the addition of alcohol) can easily sing along. Further reinforcing this theory, some of these songs have lyrics so utterly senseless that no sober person could stand them. (One popular dance tune has one line of lyrics: "Light on bicycle, light on bicycle, DY-NA-MO!" It doesn't make any more sense in German.) These songs have an amazing sticking power: I awoke most mornings with a clear head, except for the songs from last night buzzing back and forth incessantly.

In short, I don't think I have had more fun in a week here than I had last week. Certainly, I have never seen my German friends and acquaintances so happy, or so crazy. I don't think I would recommend karneval as a vacation destination, because it's so utterly confusingly crazy, but I'm certainly coming back!

SNOW DAY!

2010-02-02T06:19:00.000-08:00

Well, half-day. But apparrently, though there is as of now no sign of it, it is supposed to snow a lot today and tonight. In some higher-up parts of the eifel the buses carrying students had to turn around, and thus thay sent us all home after lunch ahead of the snow. So now I am home, hoping it's really going to dump so I don't have to worry about tomorrow, either!

A weekend in the life.

2010-01-31T12:51:00.000-08:00

I did a lot this weekend, and I took a lot of photos of it, too. Then I made a nice flickr album out of it! Here it is, I hope you enjoy it, and your comments are welcome!

Weinachtskonzert

2010-01-03T14:27:00.000-08:00

I preformed in my village band's (it sounds all quaint, but Lantershofen really is too small to be called anything else) Christmas concert. I even had a solo, (well, a soli, with the other oboist) in which we played the part of... bagpipes. If you can get past the German at the beginning, (I wanted to put subtitles in, but I couldn't find a good way to do that) it's mostly music afterwards.

Dinner For One

2010-01-02T08:40:00.000-08:00

A curious tradition of German New Year is the yearly showing of Dinner for One. Every year since 1972 German television runs a short, english stage skit on New Year's Eve. It is arguably the most popular thing in German television: in 2003, it was broadcast 19 times on various channels on New Year's, and has been broadcast in total more than 230 times, making it the most frequently rerun television program in the world. All this despite being in in English, presented without subtitles, and being totally unknown in English-speaking countries.

My German host family knows the dialogue by heart, and was highly confused when I hadn't heard of it.

SNOW!!

2009-12-19T13:17:00.000-08:00

A lot has happened in the last week: I moved into a new host family, had Thanksgiving, played in three concerts (two on one day), and last but definitely not least, IT SNOWED!

This is what I saw when I opened the window this morning. In the night, it snowed about 15 cm.

Now if it only didn't have to be so cold out for it to be like this...

More photos here

St. Nikolaustag & Aachen Weekend

2009-12-08T13:26:00.000-08:00

I don't know how this happened; I sat down to write about St. Nikolaustag and the differences between the German christmas season, and ended up writing this. It just all came out.

"Saint Nick" in Germany is not an alias for Santa. St. Nikolaus has his own day here in Germany, and that was last Sunday.

But I want to back up first. Here's how my weekend went: Friday I got up at 8, feeling a bit sick, but needing to get ready for Vedashree's birthday party and the long-awaited Rotex weekend in Aachen. I packed all my stuff in a big backpacking backpack, which was good, because I had to run to the bus stop. The Pfeists, (where I am going to be living from next Saturday on, btw.) have laid out a big breakfast, from which I eat sparingly, because I am really beginning to feel that kind of everything-hurts sick and tired that forebodes a nasty cold, or even the (dun dun dunnnnnn) Schweine Grippe. But I grit my teeth, because I have resolved not to miss the chance to see all the other awesome exchange students, come hell or high temperatures. German friends of Vedashree's show up, including some I don't know- it's good we all have some different friends.

The party starts at 11, and by twelve it is in full swing, but so is my immune system. I mostly sit on the couch and take pictures. Vedashree gets a package from her family that was amazingly coordinated to come on her birthday, and everyone does some kind of embarrassing stunt. Good fun. After the germans leave, Vedashree and Signe (who had stayed the night at the Pfeists) dissapear upstairs to pack for Aachen, and I disappear downstairs to sleep; I'm not going to get much the rest of the weekend, and my body is demanding it.

Some time later, we load everything into Marcos' hostmother's car, and hit the road to Aachen. I try to nap, but no dice- Vedashree keeps getting birthday calls from India, and talking loudly to my left in Hindi or something similar, punctuated by english words and german place names. I try to read my parallel-text book, but the short stories turn out to be flat, with no recognizable plot or end, no action, no catharsis. My objective for the weekend has become to tough it out as long as possible, show willing and smile a Rotary smile for as long as I can stand.

As we approach Aachen, I am called from the reserve as a navigator. This is something I like to do, plot a course over strange roads using directions and logic. We find the Bahnhof with barely a hitch, and meet with a crowd of others. I get a water, and start to feel a little better. It's good to see all these great people again. We joke abut me having the "Schweine Grippe", and get our family assignments for tonight. Same deal as last time- first night with Rotary families in groups of three or four, second in a gym all together.

My host mother for the night picks us up. She is incredibly nice, and serves us a wonderful dinner of chicken, which I eat without a hint of reluctance. The father and daughter show up after we have eaten from their field hockey games. The program for the evening is decided: The other three exchange students want to go out on the town with the host parents but I decide to stay home, play a board game with my temporary host sister, and go to bed early.

This turns out to be an excellent decision. I have fun, and the extra sleep is apparently exactly what I needed. Come morning I don't feel sick at all! A nice, if hurried breakfast (there is nothing that annoys Germans more than running late, unless it's being made late by slow-to-wake exchange students) and we head off to the school that will be the base of operations for the rest of the weekend.

First order of business: The Aachener Cathedral's Schatzkammer (treasury, literally, but many old treasuries in Germany are now museums.) Lots of gold, and bones. Charlemagne is all over the place, literally. Here a femur, there a tooth, it seems that the highest honor that could be bestowed on someone on the Middle Ages was to desecrate their grave and scatter their bones about for public display. Our tour guide seems far more enamored with the various relics than we are. The real attraction for them seems to be what comes after.

After the tour we are let loose upon the Aachener Weinachtsmarkt for two hours. I end up with three canadians, an Australian, and a New Zealander, and we spend most of our time standing around talking about Germany in the cold. We are generously allowed to drink one (and only one) Gluhwein (a warm spiced wine that is the German drink of the season), so we drink that, and wander a bit more. I buy some gingerbread cookies, which taste strongly of anise but are good, and worry about my toes falling off. It's a wonderful 5° Celsius out, and I really should have packed thicker socks.

Somehow, in all this, we miss going into the actual Aachener Dom. It's smaller than a lot, (The Kölner Dom, for instance, is absolutely towering. Germans build cathedrals pretty simply, but imposingly massive.) but supposedly amazing inside. I'll have to go back for that. But we are all counted, and put on a bus (Rotex transportation procedure here is to use public buses with a group ticket- efficient, but I pity the others taking their daily commute when thirty loud exchange students get on the bus occupy every available space, talking raucously in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and even German.) going out on the outskirts of Aachen to an ice skating rink.

There are already plenty of people on the ice, mostly beginners and kids with parents, so things are slow. But I have barely skated before, so I like it that way. I had worked out beforehand how skating should work using my memories of roller skates, but am unprepared for the roughness of the heavily-skated ice and the fact that ice skates have no brakes. Nonetheless, I give it the 'ol college try, and manage to get effectively mobile, only falling four times. Some people are amazing, though. Reeta, the girl from Finland, for instance, literally skates circles around me. And then skates backwards in front of me. "Canada" (there are three Canadians, but only the guy from Quebec gets called that, go figure…) skates interestingly, accelerating quickly and breaking by scraping one skate perpendicularly behind him. Is this some hockey style?

Our time at the ice rink is lengthened on account of Zamboni (here's a riddle: if a watched pot never boils, does watching an ice rink make it freeze over quicker?) but eventually the fun comes to an end, and we head, exhausted, back to the Gym for abendessen and the traditional dancing and generally avoiding sleep. I hurt in places I didn't know there were muscles, so my dancing is short-lived, and I find in a corner pretty much the same group from the Weinachtsmarkt. We talk about everything: Canada, Germany, exchange students, life in Germany, the sadly impending departure of the group from the southern hemisphere, etcetera. I never seem to run out of interesting topics around other exchange students: we all share so many experiences, like being exchange students and outsiders to the German culture, that we could talk about it for days. Eventually, though, Kaya and Reeta end up getting up and starting an insane game of basketball with a football. This looks like fun, and so I join. When an American plays basket-football against a Canadian and a Finn, who wins? Everybody, that's who.

Eventually we get tired, go outside, find a mouse, and return to the talking circle. We talk some more, and it's suddenly three in the morning and everyone else has basically stopped, and our voices previously loud in order to talk over the music have become the loudest things around. This is about where I drop off to sleep, in the traditional sleepover method: waiting for someone else to show signs of going to sleep first, so you aren't the only target for whatever might seem fun after 3 in the morning.

Sunday morning is just cleaning up. We wake comfortably at nine to "Michelle" by the Beatles. (Much more comfortable than blared showtunes or metal, 5130 Rotex.) We pack up remarkably efficiently, and hang out until my host father comes to pick those of us from Bad Neuenahr up.

But I wanted, I started to tell you about St Nikolaus. I got home from this amazing weekend, showered and rested a bit, and was informed that it was St Nikolaustag, and the Großeltern were coming for dinner.

Of all the things I am lucky to have here, I am perhaps luckiest to have a wonderful first host family, complete with "Gastgroßeltern". They have been wonderful to me, helping me with my German, taking me to and from Rotary meetings (Grandfather is the Rotary member in the family) and most importantly, making me feel welcome at family gatherings. Even though I am abut to switch host families, I intend to keep visiting them on and off. They came by Sunday with another Jahnen sibling, who lives in Berlin normally, then took her to the airport and came back for a light St. Nikolaus abendessen. But before dinner came gifts from St. Nikolaus.

This is the way St. Nikolaustag works in the Jahnen household. Plates are placed outside the door, then everyone goes back inside and the readings and other festivities happen, then the kids look outside, and suddenly there is candy on the plates! I have no idea how it happens. I was able to see my hostmother and father the whole time. There must be some kind of contract with the neighbors or something.

I was pleasantly surprised by the candy assortment I got. I was expecting milk chocolate, things I don't like to eat, another unappetizing pile of generic sweets like usually happens on Halloween. But I got dark chocolate and some coconut things; candy I really like. And it dawned on me: My host mother (or father) picked those because they knew what I like. I have new family.

More Graphiness

2009-11-11T12:46:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am doing it again: Inspiration struck tonight, and I put together another quick illustration of my language progress before it could slip away from me.

Fall Foliage

2009-11-09T06:16:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm trying something new. I'm not going to write up anything lengthy here, but this is my new flickr album, with comments on most of the pictures. It follows a walk I went on with my family a week ago, when the forests were at their goldenest. Enjoy.

David Loring: Halloween expert.

2009-10-31T05:26:00.000-07:00

So, a couple of days ago, at a Pfadfindern (kinda like boy scouts but with girls and continuing membership after 18... I've been meaning to write something about them.) I was asked by one of the guys if I wanted to do an interview for radio about Halloween in America. I said "yes, why not" in the reflexive manner I have developed here, and so last Wednesday I asked my host mother to drive me to the "Haus der Jungend" and made a live interview for Radio 1ahr. here it is:

Now the disclaimers: Radio 1ahr is not a radio-waves radio station, but a little internet-radio site, really more of a show. They do a two-hour show every two weeks on wednesday, with music, news, a couple of dj-types who talk nervously, and sometimes special topics. It starts at 18:00 local time, I believe, if you wanted to listen. This is just my interview, but I have the whole thing, and if people want to listen to it, just comment. In fact, comment even if you don't want to hear two hours of low-bitrate music and talking, because I like getting comments and they keep me posting new stuff to this blog and that's good for everyone, right?

2009-10-25T12:18:00.000-07:00

A test of an new way of displaying images using some pictures I took.

Edit: I removed the widget because it starts automatically, and the idea of a page full of slideshows, all loading automatically and lagging everything within sight is just too horrible to contemplate. Anyone know a good system for embedded slideshows that doesn't load automatically like that? Or a way to get blogger to hide stuff on the main blog page?

Here is the flickr album, for those interested.

German Customs Law and Peanut Butter Balls.

2009-10-20T03:44:00.000-07:00

So, some weeks ago, my parents sent me a package of various things. Top of my list was reeds for my oboe, which are ridiculously expensive in Gemany, and my reed-working kit, which I don't really know how to use, but would in theory allow me to make them better. My mother added to these some random things, like gloves and my nice Rotary sweatshirt, which I had forgotten, and yet more pins for exchanging. I now have over two hundred pins for a district of maybe 75 exchange students. I'm making friends, but not that quickly!

The best thing by far promised in this packet, though, was the peanut butter balls. Peanut butter balls are a strange snack made of peanut butter, oatmeal, and honey mixed together into a sort of dough, than rolled in coconut flakes. Very simple, and absolutely delicious. Strangely, though, I hadn't had any in years. They were a common feature of my preschool days, but had been somehow forgotten about as the years went on. Now that I'm in Germany, my mother seems to be remembering all sorts of cool stuff.

This is all great, but instead of a package arriving punctually last week, we received an envelope telling us that the package was in Koblenz, and would be returned to sender if we did not visit it within the week and pay a tariff of 19% on it's stated value of $150. What was up? Are peanut butter balls a restricted substance in Germany?

A phone call (made, thankfully, by my host mother) cleared things up. My package was supposed to be considered a gift, but due to the high labeled worth, the customs people had a look inside. Inside, they saw the pins. "Hmm..." they thought to themselves "who gives 100 identical pins as a gift? This David Loring fellow must want to sell these California pins without having to pay import tariff, and undercut good German california-pin businesses!" and so they held on to it.

All was not lost, however. My host mother was able to explain the concept of a rotary blazer, and pin exchanges, to the customs man on the phone, and he agreed that it sounded like a real gift, and would look inside with us when we got there and re-estimate the value, probably under the 45 euro tax-free threshold. And today, I drove with my host-Grandparents to the office in Koblenz, and retrieved my booty.

Rheinishces Freilichtmuseum

2009-10-15T03:30:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that's a mouthful. Basically, this was a bunch of typical traditional houses from the Rhine regions of germany organized into "villages" by area and spread out on top of a forested hill. It was a lot more interesting than it sounds.

The houses were all this "fachwerk" construction, some whitewashed, some not.

The interiors were really dark, and really small. I wasn't able to take many good pictures of them, but the were what you's expect: unfinished, irregular, and, above all, tiny. Winter must have been a pain.

This is a house form further north on the Rhine, where it gets flatter and wetter and the wind always comes form the same direction. I admire the way these houses were transplanted. They even planted the traditional tree windbreak (left, out of the picture) for this house.

Some of the other intrepid adventurers, presented in tryptich.

Here, from right to left we have Vedashree, who just kinda jumped into the pretty window picture I was photographing and made it even prettier; Johanna and the french girl who stayed with us for two weeks, and whose name I can't remember, together with Vedashree; and signe, uh... scratching her nose. With her middle finger. She doesn't like getting photographed.

More pictures for your enjoyment

P.S: There are more things I have photographed in the past month. I have vacation these next two weeks, so you'll be seeing more of this.

Pictures From Grafschaft

2009-10-13T04:18:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered Germany is really pretty. At least where I am. I just went out one evening on a borrowed bicycle with my camera. By sunset I had a flat tire and many megabytes worth of photos, some of which are good.

There are a lot of horses here.

Also, lots of power poles, which is not a problem because I think they make interesting subjects.

It was a good sunset.

Here are the rest of my photos.

Mark twain on German

2009-09-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

I found this the other day. Mark Twain is incredibly hilarious:

Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language, and should have been left out. For instance, the same sound, sie, means you, and it means she, and it means her, and it means it, and it means they, and it means them. Think of the ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work of six -- and a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that. But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey. This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

Here's the rest of the essay.

Progress Report

2009-09-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

This is a little thing I wrote more for Rotary back home than the blog, but it's no secret, so I'll put it here too.

The honeymoon is definitely over. Summer is over, and the rapidly shortening days have shut the door firmly on further warm weather. My German, though adequate for the purposes of everyday conversation, doesn't allow me to really read the book in German class or give me voice in a discussion in Ethics. My throat hurts, and I hope it isn't the swine flu. In short, every day has ceased to be better than the last. You warned me this would happen.

But don't worry too much. Even the darkest days are shot through with little moments of brilliance. Maybe it's some combination of song and scenery on the bus ride to school, maybe a beautiful configuration of the ever-changing clouds. Some days it's a good conversation, another word, another piece of the German jigsaw puzzle. Whatever it is, I seem to catch a lot more of it here than before. Being in a foreign land really gets your brain going on new directions, changes the way you think. That's another thing you told me.

Thanks for everything,

David Loring

2009-09-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

This is a passage from the book I am reading in German class, Der Sandmann by E.T.A Hoffman.I have in general had a lot of trouble with this book, because it's old, thick German prose, but it is pretty dang awesome. Take this passage, where the Sandman fable is told. I did the translation, so sorry about that.

"I asked the old lady, whom my youngest sister waited on, who this Sandman was. 'Oh, child,' said she 'don't you know? He is a bad man, who comes to children who don't go to bed and throws a handful of sand in their eyes, so that their eyeballs jump bloodily out of their heads, which he gathers in his sack and takes up to the half-moon to feed his children, who sit there in a nest and who have owl's beaks, with which they pick the disobedient childrens' eyes out.'"

Awesome, oder?

Observation From Weinfest

2009-09-05T07:04:00.000-07:00

The only difference between a drunk German and a sober German seems to be a slightly increased proclivity to sing.

First Amendment Instincts

2009-08-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

I had figured in advance that I would have to suppress a few habits and instincts here in Germany. My instinct to speak the language I know best was the obvious one, with my tendency to be slightly shy around new people and to speak up without thinking also being considered. But you can't predict everything. And an instinct I didn't notice existed has become the largest creator of bitten tongues in my life here.

You probably haven't noticed it either, but chances are, if you're an American and at all politically conscious, you have what I have. I call it my “First Amendment Instinct” and it activates whenever I see or read about a breach, of letter or spirit, of the first amendment to the US constitution. It elicits in me an immediate raising of the hackles, and a warming of the rhetorical bombasts that, in the US, would be used to knock the offending idea back into the stone age. Fortunately, here in Germany the language barrier reminds me not to speak my mind, so no real outbursts have occurred.

But this reflex is being called into action more often than usual here. This is because Germans have no First Amendment Reflex. They have the freedoms allowed by it (mostly... but more about that later) but they don't have the prickly, defensive, slippery slope mentality about them that most Americans do. They don't view the government in the same what-could-go wrong light that Americans of both parties do. (though often on different issues)

An example: Every German has a “Personalausweis”, or personal identification card, that is used much like a driver's license, for alcohol age control, but also a bit like a Social Security number: It identifies you for all your interactions with the state and banking system. Systems like this have been proposed from time to time in the US. One may be moving forward now, for all I know. They are incredibly controversial, seen by the civil-liberty minded as an unforgivable attack on privacy. Yet German 16-year-olds are extremely eager to get one, because it means they have the ID necessary to go to bars and drink. “Why don't they see the danger too‽‽” the civil libertarian part of my brain keeps screaming, thankfully in English

The example that finally got me talking to my host family is more central, though. There are in Germany, like every western European country now, extreme right nationalist anti-immigration parties that advocate all sorts of dumb things: Closing the borders to immigration, reducing freedom of the press, racial discrimination, etcetera. In Germany, of course, several of these have taken on the trappings of National Socialism, taking up the forbidden(ish) symbols of the bad old days, the “Hakenkreuz” and such. There are people who talk the exact same nonsense in the US, probably a good deal more, but they never get to say anything because our two party system keeps all but the most mainstream out of power. In a parliamentary country like Germany, (or pretty much the rest of the democratic world) though, they have maybe a seat in the parliament, and thus a (small) seat at the table.

Now, in the US, I, and certainly some of you derive a sort of masochist pride reading their tracts, because though it's complete filth, and I oppose it completely, they have the right to say what they want, and I'm proud of that. That's not the feeling in Germany, according to my completely representative sample of a conversation with my host mother and the elder sister, who's back from Madrid. There is a process of some sort in Germany for banning a political party, and they wish that the government would get on with it and ban these intolerant apes (not their words) for advocating the removal of constitutional rights. People in Germany seem to have the freedom to say anything – except to advocate curtailing that right. This is an interesting concept: In the US, do you have the freedom to advocate the removal of freedom? In the US, this has never been seriously tested, since we have never had room for enough parties for those types of bigots to form their own. But my First Amendment Sense is tingling, and it says: Yes! Freedom of speech cannot be abridged without clear and present danger – and I mean clear and present!! Step away from that book pyre!

So how do the Germans do it? How do they live a free and happy life without continuous protective bombastic volleys against the encroachments of the state? It talked a little bit to Ryan Knight about this, and his response was this: Having seen Fascism nearly within living memory, and though opposing it totally, they can comfortably give their government more power without worrying. they know what fascism looks like and this isn't it.

I like that explanation, thought I think there's more to it: I will leave you with my succinct observation on the German people, one that I think I will be coming back to in subsequent posts: Germans do less stupid shit.

Goodnight and good luck,

David Loring

Burg Eltz

2009-08-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

Edit: I forgot to link my Flickr set: here.

Burg Eltz is a castle. A Real castle, that sits on it's hill with an "Go on, try and invade me, just try" look on it's massive stone face. It's in a valley, with excellent vantages over the castle, which confused me at first as to how it could be a useful fortification, until my host father told me that it was beyond the effective range of most medieval weaponry. Which is apparently pathetic. That didn't stop someone from trying, though. On a commanding promontory above the castle is a
crumbling wall-all that remains of a fortress built as part of an unsucessful seige of Burg Eltz.

This reminds me. German students take note: "Schloss" is only the right word for fancy-schmancy "castles" like Neuschwanstein. The word, at least where I am, for real, medieval fortresses is "Burg". Frau Bird, is this not true in Peine?

I have some photos of the outside, but they wouldn't let us take pictures inside. This was really a tragedy, because the inside was amazing. There was all kinds of original furniture, and the celing and walls were painted in most wonderful ways.

But the craziest thing was that the castle is still in family ownership. That's right. The family Eltz, which built the castle, and lived in it through all the sieges and stuff, still exists and owns it thirty-three generations later. Longer than the history of the US, than even of western presence in America. Insane.

Shameless Publicizing

2009-08-22T13:26:00.000-07:00

The other american exchange student, Signe, also has a blog now: She even mentions me! Read her well-written and -organized post as an instructive contrast to my unformed blob of words down there.

Here, a link: http://amiexchanger.blogspot.com/

Edit: I forgot my pictures: here.

A day in the life

2009-08-20T13:13:00.001-07:00

Today was insanely hot, 36 degrees! (Celsius, of course. Who's this Fahrenheit you speak of?) I spent the morning doing nothing much, eating breakfast, then retreating to my room to not-be-on-a-cultural-exchange for a few hours. Then, 'round when FOMO* kicked in, it was time for lunch, then german lessions with the Frau Pfeist. Nothing new, really basic stuff, but it's fun to hang out with Signe, the other American and the only other exchange student here at the moment, and I learn stuff just by talking German to Frau Pfeist. Then, Signe and I got a ride from Frau Pfeist (everyone here is so nice about being our personal taxi service while we are getting things together!) in to the old walled part of Ahrweiler. Beautiful old buildings, an almost complete old city wall, delicious marzipan gelato... But Signe doesn't yet speak german nearly well enough to get by, so I spoke english and we played the american tourists, in our own little language-bubble. At about five we had the bright idea to walk down to the school, kind of between Bad Neuenahr and Ahrweiler, and check it out. My, was that a long walk! But the Ahr is pretty, and it was enjoyable despite the heat. We had told Signe's host father to pick us up at the school, and when we got there he invited me over for dinner. My new SIM card came today, so I called my host mother and cleared everything. (in german, of course. I'm actually pretty proud of that.) the family Gaudian has an amazing house, with all sorts of art in it, and i'm going to enjoy living there in six months or so. (they're my third family.) The father is fascinating. He is a representative in the Stadtrad, a kind of city council except with more people, I think, and is part of the Green party. The ride there was devoted to a long spiel, the kernel of which was that the Germans were dumb to tear down all their old buildings in the 50's and 60's, and that, because the german population is decreasing, there's no reason to build more single-family homes. For the benefit of Signe, mostly, we spoke english, and he speaks excellent english, so after dinner (which really is small in Germany, just like another breakfast), I was able to engage in some serious conversation. We talked about the environment, about the "cash for clunkers" program and it's ancestor in germany and how they weren't really ecological, because they created so many new cars, and about how we fit into the world in general. It was fun to really discuss things for the first time in weeks; I spend all my time right now on just being understood, and relish the small victories, but it isn't the same as a good conversation.

By the time I got home, the heat had brewed up a thunderstorm somewhere to the west, and so we cleared the terrace and watched the lightning as it rolled lesiurely towards, and eventually around, us. It was a great day, not so good for my integration, but really pleasant. Things are really interesting here.

*FOMO: Fear of Missing Out

Next up: Some pictures of a cold-water geyser I visited, but have been to lazy to deal with. Yes, a cold-water geyser. All will be explained.

Conversation Graph

2009-08-18T03:15:00.000-07:00

I have been seeing a lot of my extended host family this week. For some reason, the Jahnen family has a huge number of birthdays in August, so I have met all my host-aunts and -uncles and cousins and grandparents and etcetera. It's been pretty fun, but occasionally stressful on my German- actually, forget occasionally, all the time! So, based on my experiences, I present the highly scientific conversation-graph!

Just click to read, folks!

Picture Time!

2009-08-14T01:25:00.001-07:00

DSCN0562.JPG
Originally uploaded by David T.H. Loring

My Host family!

The rest of my pictures from ther Rhein valley are here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidthloring/sets/72157621904362331/

Daily Difference: Highways

2009-08-13T07:38:00.000-07:00

(these probably won't be daily, but the title has Added Alliterative Appeal.)

The first and most obvious difference between the German Autobahn and our own battle-scarred highway system is the famous lack of speed limits on it. This is, like so many famous facts, not technically true. There are parts of the Autobahn that have no speed limit, but also parts with strictly enforced limits. But there are other differences between the two. First, the highway is not the only way to travel around Germany. In places the trains parallel the Autobahn. This means that teh Autobahn is not filled with random drivers just trying to go to the next town like in the US. There are three main classes of drivers on the Autobahn: First, and most numerous, big freight trucks, carrying stuff that the freight trains aren't efficient for, like fresh fruit and vegetables. Then people, like my host family, with stuff to transport or a big family. Third, but by no means rare, are the middle-aged men with good cars who drive places because they like to drive. Often the fast lane is filled with these fellows, and occasionally someone in a black Mercedes or convertible will blow by at insane speeds.

Also, the Autobahn isn't quite speed limit free because of the sheer amount of road work that goes on. From Frankfurt to Vettlehoven, a drive of an hour and a half we passed more than five repair projects. These don't have nearly the effect on traffic that they do in America, though, because the Germans are incredibly clever about rediriecting traffic. They will paint new yellow lines over the white ones to divert traffic from one lane to another, put down little portable stoplights to control traffic, and to provide a route arund one project on a street by my house, they paved a gravel farm road, complete with little paved cutouts so that cars can pass each other! I don't know how much all this costs, but let me put it this way: if they can afford to keep their roads looking like this, it's no wonder that they're not worried about the cost of healthcare!

The David Has Landed

2009-08-13T07:36:00.000-07:00

I got on the plane in San Fransisco at 7:00 in the morning, local time. I got off another plane at 8:00 in the morning, local time. It was the shortest and longest trip of my life. When I got to Vettlehoven, after an hour and a half drive from Frankfurt, my family sat down to breakfast, and, more than a little confused, I sat down as well, and ate my first german "Fruhstuck", with my body telling me it was a midnight snack and the morning sun shining.

But things here have been excellent. My four years of German mean I can understand what people say to me, and even hold up my end of a conversation, albiet haltingly. Thank you Frau Bird! All the funny things that you say, like "Klein aber Fein" that a thought were just Frau Bird-isims, people actually say! My accomdations are also excellent. My room here is bigger than my room at home, actually, and my host family, Thomas Jahnen, Andrea Jahnen, and Fransiska Jahnen are incredibly nice, and considerate of my very basic german. I met the son, Mathias Jahnen, but the day after I got there, he went off to his own exchange in Syracuse, New York. Nice and symmetrical.

Yesterday, after another trip to the airport in Frankfurt, we took a long senic detour and came up the Rhein valley at its narrowest area. Now the Rhein is never narrow, and even at its narrowest it is wider than any river in Humboldt. But its valley is quite impressive. And on either side of the Rhein there are old castles. We saw more than a dozen in the whole trip. Everything here is so old! I was talking to my family about the Carson Mansion, and how it is a really historic building in Eureka, and I said that it was built in the 1860's or so, and they laughed, and pointed to a random building that said "im 1600 Gebaut". Europe is so old!

I met the other exchange student from america that is going to be in school with me. She's from Getteysburg, Pennsylvania, and she's named Signe, but I didn't ask such personal questions as "what's your last name?" She sings, and plays four instruments, so we will likely have many of the same classes. But she has only one semester of german, so this is a lot harder for her. Talking to her as we went and got our bank accounts and visa papers, I discovered something: It is really hard to switch from English to German. When I speak one or the other only, it's easy to remember words and grammar, but using both is really confusing and tricky, and I forget which one I am using to whom. I have installed german on my laptop for that reason, and I will probably not speak much to you english-speakers, not because I don't want to, but because it's becoming difficult!

Bis Später!

"My bags are packed, I'm ready to go"

2009-08-07T08:18:00.000-07:00

So, this is my antepenultimate day in eureka. Yes, that's just a fancy way of saying"the day before the day before the last day". I have a decent idea of what I need for Germany, and I have most of it. I also have a decent amount of money, thanks to the painting I have been doing. But I barely know who my host parents will be. I have emailed them, and they seem nice. The mother runs a daycare form the house, and the father makes machines to control the world. (At least that's what the email said.) But I haven't seen any pictures of them, and have only satellite pictures of where I am going. Should I have to parachute out to their house, I could do that easily, but I don't know who's picking me up at the airport. This it actually kind of fun. Am I crazy?

Pertinent web accounts

2009-07-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

Apart form this blog, I have a flickr account at www.flickr.com/davidthloring, where the lion's share of the pictures will be going. Blogger's 1gb storage limit chafes at me.

2009-07-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

This is a great picture I took in Trinidad at night, uploaded as a test.

First Post: Is this thing on?

2009-07-20T16:36:00.000-07:00

SO... I have a blog. I can put stuff on it. You will probably see many posts from Germany, as that is where I will be all next year. Photos, as well. TTFN!