Tagesexkursion in Marburg: Endlich Unterwegs

Three weeks after arriving in Germany, I finally feel secure enough here in Frankfurt to begin venturing elsewhere, and this Saturday I made my first Tagesexkursion (day trip) to the city of Marburg.

Marburg is a university town nestled in the hills of Hessen about an hour’s train ride north of Frankfurt. It’s a city very much in keeping with the idea of “German town” that prevails in the American cultural imagination: medieval castle, narrow cobble-stoned streets, traditional timber-framed houses known as Fachwerkhäuser. You wouldn’t know any of that, though, judging only from the Marburg-Lahn train station. In fact, when I first got off the train from Frankfurt on Saturday, I thought there had been a mistake: either I’d got off at the wrong stop, or I’d misheard or misunderstood C. when I thought she’d recommended Marburg as a nice city for a day trip. The station is currently undergoing renovations, so it’s a mess of spray paint and plywood; when you step outside you’re immediately assaulted by the stench of construction and the racket of highway traffic passing overhead. And there’s nary a cobblestone to be seen.

Elisabethkirche

Round a couple of corners, though, and get past the initial, uninviting layer of takeout restaurants and vacant office spaces, and you find yourself face-to-face with Elisabethkirche, a fine example of Gothic architecture—apparently one of the first instances of the style outside of France. Because it’s an upstanding evangelische institution, the interior of Elisabethkirche is not quite as ornately decorated as you typically find among its Catholic cousins—(“That would be a fun game,” I observed to J., the fellow ETA I met up with in Marburg, “looking at pictures of church interiors and trying to say, based on the picture and nothing else, whether they’re Catholic or Protestant.”) But the stained glass windows are second to none, and the church still beats almost anything you can see in the U.S. hands down.  

A street in the Altstadt.
J and I had coffee at the cafe on the left.

From the church, it’s only a few more minutes zu Fuß before you get to the Marburg Altstadt (“Old City”). Here is where things get fun: the Altstadt is where you find the maze-like grid of narrow, cobblestoned streets lined with Fachwerkhäuser housing cafes and restaurants and bookshops. Because the Altstadt is built on a hill—in fact, it’s also called the Oberstadt, or “upper city”— a lot of the cafes and restaurants offer views of the city below and the hills beyond while you drink your Milchkaffee or eat your Pfannkuchen mit Hünchen (pancakes with chicken—sound strange, but that’s what I had for lunch, and it was super tasty). The Oberstadt is also exclusively a Fußgägerzone (pedestrian zone)—one of the first such zones in Germany. There are elevators that will take you from the foot of the Oberstadt to the top of it, but J and I made the whole trip through the Altstadt to the Marburger Schloss on foot—in the grand scheme of things maybe not the most impressive of climbs, but my glutes are feeling it nonetheless.

Atop the hill, then, standing sentinel over the Altstadt, sits the Marburger Schloss. Originally built as a fortress in the 12^th century and in ensuing centuries serving as the seat of the Landgraf of Hessen, today the Schloss doubles as an event venue and the University Museum. Fun fact: in early October 1529—483 years ago almost to the day that we were there—the Marburg Colloquy, a meeting of important Protestant thinkers, including Martin Luther, meant to resolve a question about the Lord’s Supper, was held at the Marburger Schloss. The view from the castle was definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me: overlooking the roofs of Marburg and the outline of hills on the horizon, I experienced a moment of “presence,” of simple consciousness of where I was, when I was, what I was doing. It may seem like a silly, hippy-dippy-modern-dance kind of observation to make, but I’ve spent so much time in the last few weeks feeling out of body and out of place, it was a huge relief to finally feel so grounded again.

On the whole, I am quite pleased with how my first day trip in Germany turned out. It was very much a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of situation: I didn’t buy my train ticket in advance, didn’t read up too terribly much on the city or what there was to do there. While this approach definitely would not work out for me on longer trips—like the Herbstferien adventure I’m currently trying to plan—for a daytrip it worked out just fine.

Of course, no venture for me—whether in Frankfurt or elsewhere—has been without some mishap or other, and Marburg was no exception. A few days before, I’d Facebooked J. to let him know I was coming up, and we’d agreed to meet at the Marburg Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and spend the day in the city together. My train from Frankfurt let me off at Marburg-Lahn about an hour before I was set to meet up with J., so I promptly set out to find my way to the Hauptbahnhof—not exactly understanding why a train from Frankfurt would not go through the Hauptbahnhof, but not thinking enough about it to stop and ask someone either. An hour of aimless wandering and one very ill-advised bus ride later, I was completely and hopelessly lost. I got a phone call from J wondering where I was, I told him that I was looking for the Hauptbahnhof, and he promptly explained that Marburg-Lahn was the Hauptbanhof. Once I knew the place I was looking for was a place that I’d already been, it was easy to retrace my steps, and once I found J, the day proceeded without incident.

In the scheme of potential travel catastrophes, a small misunderstanding and a little disorientation is pretty minor, and I’ve become so used to being lost in the past few weeks that my impulse is no longer to panic, as it was the first few times it happened, but rather just to laugh at myself. I’m choosing to see the fact that I no longer disintegrate into a puddle of panic the moment I’m not sure of where I am as a definite sign of personal growth. Who knows? I may even get to the point where I enjoy the challenge, having lost myself, of having to find myself again. 

View of Marburg from the Schloss

On the Job

As of about 3:00 PM on Monday (or 15 Uhr, as it’s known here) I at last have a concrete Stundenplan for both of my schools. I do not possess adequate words in any language to describe what wonders this knowledge alone has done for my mental health.

At the same time, though, it’s become clear that my job as an English Teaching Assistant is going to be very different from what I thought it was going to be, and I can’t help but be a little disappointed. I know that I’m very fortunate that nothing I’m being asked to do is genuinely outside of my comfort zone—I’ve heard so many horror stories of ETAs who were completely in over their heads at the beginning. But still, it’s hard to let go of the dream of teaching entire classes independently, discussing books and poems and current events that I’m genuinely interested in—especially when I know that there are other ETAs elsewhere who are getting to do exactly that.

As far as what I am actually going to be doing in these various classes, it’s a surprisingly mixed bag, and a lot of it is still up in the air. For myself, I’ve found it helpful to split my various responsibilities into the following categories:

Elsa-Brändström-Schule (or “the Elsa,” as I will probably refer to it from now on)

v Classroom assistant—4te und 2te Klasse (Tues., Wed., and Thurs. 5 hrs.)

v English Enrichment (Tuesday and Thursday, 1 hr.)

Bettinaschule (or “the Bettina,” siehe oben)

v Classroom assistant— 5te Klasse und Q3/Leistungskurs (Monday, 4 hrs.)

v English Conversation—5te and 6te Klasse (Wednesday, 2 hrs.)

For anyone who’s interested (and I promise I won't be offended if you're not), I’ve included more detailed descriptions regarding each of these subcategories of ETA-ship below.

“Classroom assistant”

What this entails depends largely on the level of the class. At the Q3 or Leistungskurs (advanced course) level, the students are preparing to take the Abitur, which is the graduation test that will qualify them for university admittance. The Abi kids already speak and understand English at a level that is, to me, astonishingly sophisticated—seniors in most American high schools certainly don’t speak or read Spanish as well, for example. My job with the Abi kids is to push them farther—to speak more clearly, more readily, and more idiomatically—and also to introduce cultural topics that are relevant and interesting to 17-to-18-year-olds. This part of my job is closest to what I thought going into this that being an ETA was all about, but it actually comprises the smallest portion of my overall class-time. As such, these classes will probably be my “easy” classes, requiring the least preparation and the least mental and spiritual energy. And, I’m not going to lie, they will probably be the classes I most look forward to—to begin with, anyway.

As anyone could probably imagine, the younger grades—Klasse 5 at die Bettina and Klasse 2 and Klasse 4 at the Elsa— are at the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to language ability. English instruction is obviously at a lot more rudimentary level, consisting mostly of repetitive drills, listening activities, and vocabulary practice. My job at this level, from what I can tell, is just to give the children the opportunity to hear a native speaker, so they know that English is a language that people actually speak in the real world, and not just some tedious task they have to do in school twice a week.

I’m still not completely clear on what my role in the classroom is supposed to be: it’s not very common that ETAs are placed in Grundschule, and there was next to no mention of it at orientation. Frustratingly, the teachers at the Elsa don’t seem to have all that clear of an idea of what they want me to do, either. But I’ve decided to take this complete lack of guidance as an invitation to forge my own path: right now what I think I’d like to do is take small groups out of the class—maybe between five and eight students—and work with them on a small activity, like reading a picture book aloud and having them put the events of the story in order, teaching them a song, or playing some kind of game. Right now I feel like the beginner-level-classroom-assistant portion of my job is going to be the area for which I struggle most to keep up enthusiasm. But at the same time (let’s think positively here) it might be the part that requires the most creativity and resourcefulness.

“English Conversation”

As part of their English instruction, students in the 5^th and 6^th grades at the Bettina attend a bi-weekly two-hour-long “English conversation” class. From what I can tell, the 5^th and 6^th grades serve as a crucial transition between Grundschule (primary school) and the upper grades, where students are expected to generate language more independently. The sole purpose of “English Conversation,” then, is to encourage the students to speak English as much as possible. With this goal in mind, the structure of the class is pretty loose and casual— the students need to be comfortable enough that they feel safe speaking in a language that doesn’t come naturally to them and that they may feel incredibly self-conscious about speaking.

This is the class in which I think my prior experience both as an apprentice language teacher at Kenyon and as camp counselor will be most helpful: there will be lots of games, lots of role-playing, and I will need to bring lots of energy and enthusiasm in order to get as much English out of these kids as possible (I know from experience that sometimes getting foreign language learners to actually speak the language can be like pulling teeth.) Additionally, this is the one class where it seems that I am working completely on my own, without an overseeing teacher, although one teacher has offered to discuss my lesson plans with me in advance to make sure they’re on the right track. So I guess, upon further reflection, this portion of my job description is also pretty closely aligned with my original impressions of ETA-hood.

“English Enrichment”

Because Frankfurt is such an international city, there are a fair number of students at the Elsa who have at least one native English-speaking parent, and who therefore speak English as well if not better than they speak German. But the school lacks the resources to provide any alternatives for these students when it comes to English instruction, so they usually end up sitting in the twice-weekly introductory English classes alongside their non-English-speaking classmates. Obviously, this is problematic. Last week, for example, I sat in on a third-grade class that includes a boy whose mother is American. At one point he was corrected by the teacher for saying “Yes he does” instead of “Yes he has,” out of the understandable concern that the different sentence construction might confuse all of his British-English-learning classmates.

So for one hour on Thursdays, I will take native English-speaking students out of the beginning-level English classes and work with them on activities that are more appropriate for their language ability. When I first brought up this idea at the English department meeting at the Elsa on Monday, the teachers with native English speakers in their classes were so enthusiastic that I worried I might end up spending all of my time at the Elsa with the Muttersprachler. But a few of the teachers agreed to switch up what time in the day they teach English, so I will be able to work with kids from multiple classes at the same time and still get plenty of face-time with the English-learning kids during my other five hours at die Elsa. Even though this falls outside of the typical role of “English Teaching Assistant,” I’m really excited about it, in large part because I will have a lot of freedom as to what I decide to do with the kids. My working idea is to bring the American culture element in (a lot of these kids have British parents) by reading some Tall Tales (Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, Slue Foot Sue, etc.), and then having the kids prepare a retelling or maybe even their own tall tales, which they would then read aloud or perform as a skit for the rest of their class. That way, the native-speakers can take a sort of leadership role in English-speaking while still being part of their class, and the non-native speakers can receive linguistic and cultural enrichment as well.

“Sonstiges”

There are a few other possibilities for involvement at my school beyond my mandatory twelve-hour commitment: I might lead an AG (Arbeitsgemeinschaft, like after-schoolenrichment in the US) at each school, something hokey and American like Country Line Dancing or Pop Music Club. At the Bettina, I might just hold “office hours” after school once or twice a week, where students can come in and just practice speaking English in a completely casual setting. In connection with the PEAK1 program (Projekt Englisch ab Klasse 1, more on that in a separate entry), I think I’m supposed to collaborate with teachers in Klasse 4 at the Elsa and Klasse 5 at the Bettina to organize some kind of collaborative project between the two schools. But for now, I’m going to focus on my classroom commitments, and make sure I’m completely comfortable with what I’m doing there. 

I’m determined not to let the fact that my job is somewhat different than I expected interfere with how well I do that job. It may not be my dream to be an elementary-school English teacher, but dammit, as long as I am one, I’m going to be the best elementar-school English teacher EVER.

I Fell Off A Bench In Offenbach and All I Got Was This Lousy Epiphany

Yesterday I went to Offenbach, a small city right across the river from Frankfurt, to meet up with a couple of fellow Fulbrighters for the evening. I was sitting on a bench in the Marktplatz waiting for them when a pack of teenage German boys, shoving and laughing and generally goofing off, made their way over and took up residence on the bench as well. Trying to be polite, I slid down the bench to make room for them. This may not have been a good move—I think it showed weakness, or something—because the pack of teenagers, all of them larger than me and dressed like wanna-be thugs, then decided it would be a fun game to keep scooching, forcing me farther and farther down the bench. The next thing I knew I was on the concrete, the German hooligans were all laughing hysterically, and it was all I could do to stand up and walk away before the little bastards saw me cry.

As I meandered around the Marktplatz and the streets surrounding it for the next twenty minutes, doing my best to look tough and purposeful so as to avoid further bullying, I couldn’t help but think about what a perfect analogy this encounter was for my second week in Germany. I’m me in this scenario, of course, and the bench represents my “life” here in Frankfurt: the job I’m supposed to be doing, the connections I’m supposed to be making, the experiences I’m supposed to be having. The hooligans, then, play the part of all of the worries, uncertainties, self-doubts, self-reproaches etc. etc. etc. that, over the past week, have been crowding me closer and closer to the edge.

Yesterday I hit the concrete—literally and metaphorically. 

I’ve heard it said that travel abroad is as important for what it teaches you about yourself as it is for what it teaches you about other places, and I’ve certainly learned some things about myself over the past two weeks, most of which can be conveniently summed up in the observation that I am a very “young” twenty-two-almost-twenty-three. In my life up to this point, I have been fortunate enough that there have been very few things that I have had to worry about, and very few things that I have been responsible for. Now, in the space of just two weeks, all of that has completely changed. I now have complete responsibility: for myself— for my finances, my food, my shelter and my health— and for my job as an English Teaching Assistant.

In other words, I have come to the realization that I have a lot of growing up to do and, unfortunately, essentially no time in which to do it.  It’s like I’m a juggler who has only ever juggled with two or three balls and now has to learn how to keep six or seven bowling pins in the air. As of right now, I have managed to drop every last one of those bowling pins. 

So here I am, flat on the concrete, tailbone bruised, surrounded by bowling pins. The question now, of course, is what do I do next? Do I give up juggling altogether? Run away and hide from the jeering hooligans and vow never to go near that bench again? Or do I pick the bowling pins back up and start throwing them again—maybe adding them in one at a time this time as opposed to all at once, at least until I get a feel for the rhythm? Do I pick my self up and sit right back down on that bench because screw those teenage assholes, I was sitting there?

Clearly, the correct response is both C and D. But I would be lying if I said A and B weren’t tempting possibilities. I have a credit card for use in emergencies—from my parents, a reminder that I’m not actually as on my own as I like to/hate to think I am— and there was a moment last night when I gave very serious thought to using it to buy a plane ticket back to Ohio. There were several moments, actually, a long string of them. It was a vertiginous experience, coming that close to cashing out / pulling the plug / pressing the self-destruct button / whatever other metaphor you can think of for giving up. And then, at what seemed like the last possible moment, changing my mind.

As I said before, I have some growing up to do, and some mistakes that I need to take responsibility for. I haven’t been proactive enough about getting started at my schools, I haven’t asked questions or sought advice when I should have. I have let the fear of doing something wrong cow my into doing nothing—which, in this context, is maybe about a hundred times worse than doing something blatantly wrong. The teenage hooligans didn’t just push me off the bench, I let them push me. And now I’m going to stand up, brush myself off, and sit right back down again.   

Who Are You Calling Tourist, Tourist?

Even though Frankfurt is supposedly overflowing with native English speakers, it’s by no means the first language you expect to hear on the street here. When I do happen to overhear English being spoken as I’m wandering through the city, I experience a strange and totally involuntary phenomenon: my ears perk up, my head immediately snaps in the direction of the sound, and my eyes scan the array of unfamiliar faces behind me, searching for the source. Again, this whole process is completely involuntary, like a reflex: my body physically reacts to the language it’s most accustomed to hearing.

I wish I could figure out how to switch this English-detector in my brain off, or at least set it on “low.” It becomes awkward: more often than not find myself having to avoid eye contact with whatever stranger happens to fall in my line of vision. It’s not as though I’m jonesing for some English conversation, either. Quite the opposite: there’s been a great deal more English in my diet over the last couple of days than I’d really like.

On Sunday I was walking through the Freßgass (literally, food alley), which is a street near the Alte Oper crammed with restaurants including a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, AND a Starbucks, when I realized that someone behind me was calling out—in English. “Excuse me, miss?”

Ears perk, head snap, eyes scan. Behind and to the right of me appeared a guy my age or a few years older, carying a backpack slung over one shoulder and—hilariously, to me, because I associate them with early-aughts pop stars like Mandy Moore— wearing a newsboy cap on his head. Tall, blonde hair, blue eyes—I thought for sure he must be German, but since he was the only other person within a hundred feet or so (Freßgass on a Sunday evening is not the most happening of places) he had to be the speaker. And he had to be speaking to me.

“Are you a tourist?” Australian, then, judging by his vowels. That other place that churns them out sandy-haired and statuesque.

I pondered the question for what to him must have seemed like a longer time than was necessary. But for me, especially given the mindset I’ve been in over the past couple days, it was an important, borderline-existential question. The longer I continued to self-identify as a tourist, the longer I would feel like one, right? In the interest of affirming my new life as a German resident, I said, “No.”

“Do you know of a place to stay around here?”

Dismayed, I answered in the negative. I’d been hoping the question would be something easy, like the one about the Alte Oper I’d fielded a few days before. I explained, apologetically, that I’d only been in the city for about a week, which garnered the response, “Oh, so you are a tourist.”

In the process of this exchange, we came upon a crosswalk, and while I waited for the little green man to appear, I found myself explaining my stay in Germany and my job in Frankfurt to this total stranger. I wanted to object to the “tourist” label, to say, “Hey dude, as of Friday I have a piece of paper that says I’m officially a Frankfurt resident.” But judging by the size of his Rucksack, the jaunty angle of newsboy cap, and his general carefree attitude, I took him for an experienced tourist himself: one of that strange breed known as the backpacker. It seemed to me that he was more qualified to say what did and did not qualify as a tourist than I was.

And, really, would it be so bad to regard myself as a tourist, at least for a little while? Using this guy as a model, being a tourist means being easygoing and friendly, not worrying overmuch about anything, and letting mistakes roll of your back—all of which are qualities I could use right now. Maybe, if I approached Frankfurt more from the perspective of a sightseer, trying to see and do and learn as much as possible in a limited time span, I could trick myself into feeling more at home here, more like an Einwohner (resident).

When the green man finally appeared, Australian Newsboy Backpacker made a huge show of walking alongside me and asking where I was headed. I knew enough about the city to tell him that, if he was looking for affordable accommodations, he definitely wasn’t going to find them in Westend. He seemed confused for a moment, like he’d forgotten that he’d originally come up to me looking for directions to the nearest hostel. I made it abundantly clear that he was under no circumstances to follow me any farther, and we parted ways.

Afterward, I felt kind of bad about not offering to help him find a hostel, or going with him to grab a bite to eat, as he suggested. After all, if this were a movie, this chance encounter would inevitably lead to grand adventures: we’d meet up with ANB’s ragtag troop of fellow-travelers, gallavant about the city, encounter obstacles, overcome those obstacles, and in the end learn Life Lessons and become Friends Forever. But sadly for me, ANB, his hypothetical ragtag troop, and you, my readers (all six of you), my life is not a movie. So I did not throw caution to the wind; instead, I went back to S’s apartment, put on my comfy pants, and watched Youtube videos until bedtime. After all, I had to go to work in the morning.

No spontaneous, adventurous tourist here. Just a plain old, domestic Einwohner. 

Wie sagt man "growing pains" auf Deutsch?

As of yesterday, I have officially been in Germany for a full week. It’s strange to realize that—I didn’t, actually, until S pointed it out. Time has been very strange for me since I’ve been here: sometimes moving very quickly and sometimes very slowly, so at times I feel as though I’ve been here a month already, and at other times it seems like I just got off the plane two days ago.

In addition to marking my first week in Germany, yesterday also marked my first official Fulbright meltdown. In the early afternoon, I left S’s apartment to get some air. I made it as far as Rothschild Park, sat down on a bench, and without further ado started to cry—openly, unabashedly, and in full view. It was such a relief to finally release some of the stress and worry that had been slowly building up in my system over the previous few days, I didn’t even care that I was drawing glances from passers-by, outright stares in the case of children. The reality of my situation—that I’m in Frankfurt, alone, trying to construct something at least resembling a life out of basically nothing— suddenly overwhelmed me, and in that moment it seemed like there was nothing I could do but cry. This is becoming a recurring theme in this blog, and I don’t know what to think about that, but I felt like I was about five years old, lost in the mall and waiting for my mom to come find me. The problem with this mindset is, of course, that I’m not five years old, I’m twenty-two; and my mom is definitely not coming to find me, she’s four thousand miles away.

I did talk to my mom later, thanks to the miracle that is Skype. I didn’t even think about what I was doing: it was late, the apartment was empty, and before I knew it I had dialed, my mom’s face was there on the screen, and I was crying again, this time convulsively and with gusto. Because this is what inevitably happens whenever I talk to my mom, all of the fears and doubts and self-recriminations that up until then been lurking unexpressed in my mind came tumbling out: I don’t think I can do this. I’ve already screwed everything up. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m scared, I’m lonely, I’m so unhappy that when you ask if I want to call the whole thing off and come home I’m sorely, sorely tempted to say yes.

It took about an hour for my mom to talk me down off the crazy-ledge. But eventually she did, as she always does, and now that the storm— a “level 4 meltdown,” as my family calls it when I have these kinds of freak-outs—has more or less passed, I’m able to see the sense in a lot of the things she told me, even though at the time they seemed absurd and impossible.

v Sense Nugget #1: I need to have more patience with myself. Again, I’ve only been here for a week now, and I can’t expect everything to magically start making sense and falling into place. I’m in a foreign country for the first time: things are going to be confusing, and I have to stop beating myself up when I don’t get it right away. If I take things one step at a time, assign myself one small task to accomplish in a day (Today I’m going to get my cell phone operational; Today I’m going to apply for my visa; Today I’m going to look into getting a subway/bus pass; etc.) it should make the whole endeavor much more manageable. 

v Sense Nugget #2: I need to focus on what it is I’m here to do. Specifically, I need to focus on my work at Elsa-Brändström-Schule and Bettinaschule. This is pretty much the one thing about living in Frankfurt that I’m not worried about: I know kids, I get kids, I know I can do a good job with kids. But that doesn’t mean I can blow it off because I’m more worried about the blankness of my social calendar. I need to get oriented at my schools, figure out what my responsibilities are going to be, what my schedule is going to look like, etc. Once that’s in place—and it should start coming into focus very soon—I will feel more grounded and more confident.

v Sense Nugget #3: I need to be okay with asking for help. This one is tough for me because 1.) I do expect myself, unrealistically, to be able to do everything on my own and 2.) I’m terrified of talking to people, especially when it involves asking them for something. Unfortunately, as far as that’s concerned, the only thing I can really do is get over it.

v Sense Nugget #4: I need to make the choices that are right for me. This is a BIG one. Specifically, I think I may need to abandon the idea of living in a WG (Wohngemeinschaft, a communal living arrangement) and look for a one-room apartment instead, even though it is more expensive and cuts down on my opportunities to meet people. Because I am an introvert, because social interaction exhausts and intimidates me under even the best of circumstances, I need to be able to have space that is MINE where I can retreat and completely recharge and not worry about what people expect from me. Otherwise I will be crazy, unpleasant, or downright mean, and people won’t want to be friends with me anyway.

v Sense Nugget #5: I need to stop comparing myself to other people. This means I may need to stop reading the blogs of other Fulbrighters for a while, at least until I’m more comfortably situated. When I hear about how other people already have their living situation figured out, are already meeting people and making friends, are deliriously happy in their schools and with their lives and isn’t everything just so wonderful and fantastic—I compare myself and my experience with them and theirs, and this inevitably results in me hating myself because I’m not in the same place they are yet. The fact of the matter is it may take me more time to figure everything out than it takes other people, much as it pains me to say so. In fact, it probably will, because everything I’m going through is new to me, not just living in Frankfurt specifically, but living in Germany as a whole, living in a city, living on my own—most Fulbrighters have some experience with at least one, if not more, of the above. On the bright side, my learning curve will in all likelihood be a lot steeper than theirs. But the number of mistakes I make and the amount of time that I need will be a lot greater, as well.

I wish I could fast-forward to a month or so from now, when I’m settled into a routine and I have a place to live and I’m starting to be more familiar with the city and the schools and the people here. I’m sure that month-from-now Katie is probably a much happier person than right-now Katie. Or I hope so, anyway. But unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to be had, no way to get from right-now Katie to month-from-now Katie without existing in all the scary/frustrating/uncomfortable/discouraging moments that stand in between.

Close your eyes, take a few breaths. One day you’ll look back on this. Everything happens. 

Adventures with Deutsche Bahn

Two days after my arrival in Frankfurt, I encountered the first true challenge of my living-abroad experience: successfully navigating the German train system.

I’m not going to lie: there are certain elements of German life about which I have formed unrealistic and idealized expectations. Train travel is definitely one of these things. It’s not entirely my fault: as an American, I’m heir to the idea of the “romance of the rails,” since travel by train is for the most part something out of an earlier time, associated with the Wild West and soldiers being seen off at the station by their sweethearts and so on. Out of this backgroud, plus stories collected from friends who had been to Europe, I concocted this fairy-tale image of Deutche Bahn: a travel-by-magic public transportation system that enabled one to go anywhere, anytime, almost just by wishing. The reality of Deutsche Bahn is, needless to say, eine ganz andere Sache, as I have now found out from experience.

Frankfurt am Main Hauptbahnhof

On Saturday, S took me to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station) to buy my ticket to Köln/Cologne. I bought my ticket from a Fahrkartenautomat, or ticket machine. While part of me feels guilty about this—as a visitor in Germany whose express goal is to improve her German, don’t I have some kind of responsibility to myself, if no one else, to speak with as many Germans in as many different situations as possible?— the opportunity to get my card from a machine, and shield my fragile ego where my language ability is concerned just this once, was too tempting to pass by. And I ended up having to talk to someone anyway, after the machine took my money and did not produce a ticket like it was supposed to.

The ticket I ended up choosing was for an IC (Innercity) train that was scheduled to leave the Frankfurt Hbf. at 11:42 and arrive at the Cologne Hbf at 2:10 (14:10, actually, since they rock military time here, at least for official things like train schedules). I needed to be in the Cologne Hauptbahnhof by 2:30 PM on Monday in order to meet up with the other American ETAs— from Cologne, we would be bussed to the orientation location in Altenberg. It was a snug fit, time-wise, but I chose the cheapest ticket possible, because, even though my travel costs would ultimately be reimbursed by Fulbright, it seemed like the fiscally responsible thing to do. Also I wanted a ticket with no Umstiege, or changes, because I was sure—for reasons that will shortly become clear— that the minute I got off the train at any station other than the Cologne Hbf all hope would be lost.

On Monday, I arrived at the Bahnhof at around 11 o’clock, fairly serene but not wanting to leave anything to chance, and promptly realized that I had no idea what Gleis, or platform, my train was supposed to leave from. Suddenly panicked, I looked up at the Departures board overhead and saw exactly ZERO trains that matched the information I had. This realization was followed by around ten minutes of pacing and panicking before, finally, I got up the nerve to go up to the Information desk and ask an attendant whether the train I thought I was taking did, in fact, exist. In precise but very fast-moving German, he told me that mine was the IC 2024 train (Cologne is only one among many stops, which is why I didn’t see it posted anywhere on the board, although the IC 2024 was there), that it was leaving from Gleis 6, and that it was currently running ten minutes late.

So I made my way to Gleis 6, where I promptly resumed panicking. If the train was running ten minutes late—as a computerized voice reminded me every couple of minutes via loudspeaker that it was—it would get me to Cologne with only ten minutes to spare. Unsure of whether I could find another train to Cologne that would get me there in time, not knowing how to go about exchanging my ticket even if I did, and lacking the time to figure it out, I decided to stick to Gleis 6 and hope there were no further delays.

The train did arrive, finally, at about 11:55. At 12:05 it had still not left the station. In the meantime, I boarded the train, hit several unsuspecting passengers with the baggage that I had thought was so admirably compact and travel-friendly, and sat in a seat that turned out to be someone else’s by reservation. And all the while the minutes ticked by and my chances of getting to Cologne in a timely fashion dwindled away to nothing. Then, at 12:05, a voice came over the PA system to announce that there had been further mechanical difficulties with the train, that it would be underway as soon as possible, and that, if we were going to directly to Cologne or needed to be there before a particular time, we could take a different train, which was departing from the Gleis next door in approximately five minutes. All of this information was delivered very quickly and very indistinctly, over a loudspeaker, and in German, and the combination of these factors caused me to wonder if I had understood correctly, or if the tiny voice in my head telling me to get off the train might just be a manifestation of panic, to obey which would be a catastrophic decision that would destroy any chances I had of even possibly getting to Cologne in time. So I hesitated for a few moments, got off the IC 2024, got back on the IC 2024, asked someone sitting nearby to repeat what the loudspeaker had said about going to Cologne, and then got off the train again—barely in time to jump on the train next door, which was set to arrive at Cologne Hbf. at 13:30, before the doors closed.

My new train was an ICE (Intercity Express) train—a faster model making fewer stops and costing around one-and-a-half times what the CE cost. This last nugget of information convinced me that, having gotten on this train with nothing but my original CE ticket, I was now a stowaway or a joyrider. Consequently I spent the first twenty-five minutes in a cold sweat, sure that, when the conductor came by and asked to see my ticket, my cover would be blown and I would be flung unceremoniously from the train or, at best, deposited at the next stop, which would definitely not be the Cologne Hbf. I started rehearsing my explanation in my head: “Ich war auf einem früheren Zug, aber es gab mechanische Probleme damit und wir wurden davon informiert, dass wir mit diesem Zug fahren durften, wenn wir direct nach Köln gehen wollten…” (“I was on an earlier train, but there were mechanical problems with it, and we were informed that, if we wanted to go directly to Cologne, we could take this train…”) All of which turned out to be unnecessary: the conductor was (to me) astonishingly uninterested in how I came to be on his train. I presented my ticket, he gave it a cursory glance, punched it, and handed it back to me. The whole interaction lasted a total of five seconds, tops. I spent the majority of the remaining train ride asleep, exhausted from a combination of residual jet-lag and the sudden relaxation of extreme stress. As a result, I missed out on most of the scenery between Frankfurt and Cologne, which, according to G, is very nice.

Thus, after much Ärger and Angst, I arrived at the Cologne Hbf in (approximately) one piece. Identifying the Fulbright meeting spot, which had caused me some anxiety the night before, turned out to be a matter of walking into the lobby, looking around, and noticing a clump of people with large suitcases who, upon closer inspection, were all speaking English with American accents. After the exertions of the morning, it was a relief to be able to attach myself to this blob and know that, for the next few days, people who knew what they were doing would be telling me exactly where I needed to 

go and when. And in English, no less.

The return journey from Cologne on Thursday morning was much less eventful. Again, I bought the ticket with a Bahnkartenutomat, and learned from a fellow Fulbrighter that I could in fact print my travel information—Gleis number and all— through the same machine. I had planned to spend a few hours seeing the city before I returned to Frankfurt, but the it was overcast and rainy—far from sight-seeing weather. Also, due to circumstances that I had not foreseen, I found myself bringing a suitcase back to Frankfurt for another Fulbrighter who suddenly had to return to America due to a death in the family. So I ended up taking a 9:50 train that, as it happens, several other Fulbrighters were taking as far as Mainz. We sat together on the train and chatted (in English, of course) about the coming year and our various experiences in Germany before now, and I even got a glimpse of the lauded scenery, including the Lorely, a beautiful rock outcropping on the Rhine with a suitably romantic legend attached; and the picturesque city of Koblenz, which is now definitely on my list of cities to be visited.

After the Mainz stop, it was only half an hour or so before I arrived back in Frankfurt. Between the Frankfurt Airport stop and the Hauptbahnhof, light-headed with the relief of having made it there and back again without any major catastrophes, I found myself in conversation with a couple of Germans, sharing my (unsolicited) impressions of the German train system. “It’s so much less complicated than plane travel,” I pronounced blithely—by which I meant only that there are much fewer formalities and nary a security checkpoint to be seen. The older of the two, a woman with glasses and a sensible German haircut, smiled indulgently. But the younger, an Asian guy about my own age traveling with a guitar case, laughed at me outright. I don’t remember exactly what he said to me, but the gist was, “You really must be new here,” and, “You’ll find out otherwise soon enough.”

I have found out otherwise, of course. One trip and it’s already clear to me that trains run late and break down, stations are fast-paced and hectic, fellow passengers are preoccupied and sometimes impatient. I’ve written in a previous post that airplane travel, when it runs smoothly, is a meditative process. At it’s best, train travel appears to be anything but. Still, it can’t be denied that train travel is incredibly valuable to someone like me, who would like to travel a lot— within Germany as well as outside of it—but doesn’t have access to a car. (Another possibility is mitfahrgelegenheit.de, which is in essence organized hitch-hiking. I don’t know yet if I’ll be brave enough to give that one a try.)

Convenient, but not necessarily efficient—that’s Deutsche Bahn in reality, from what I can tell. Hopefully, the system will become more intuitive for me the more I use it. Perhaps, in the end, I will be one of those seasoned train-travelers who laughs at the naïve newcomer, or maybe tells the story of her first train ride: “I was new to Germany and had to get from Frankfurt to Cologne...” 

Erste Tage in Frankfurt: "gutbürgerlich" und "komplett Deutsch"

Vocabulary fun fact: gutbürgerlich (roughly, good-citizeny) is an adjective used to describe foods, places, activities, and even people that exemplify German culture—it reminds me of my father, extolling the importance of “good midwestern values.”

On my first day in Frankfurt, I experienced a couple of gutbürgerliche things, starting with a typical German breakfast complete with Speck (bacon), Fisch (fish), Brötchen und Semmel (rolls and more rolls), Sahnemerretich (creamed horseradish), und saure Gurken (pickles). Then for dinner (most gutbürgerliche activities, I’m noticing, involve food and/or drink) we went to Atschel, a prototypical German restaurant in the super-touristy district south of the Main called Sachsenhausen. We drank Apfelwein (apple wine, more like cider) poured from a stoneware pitcher called a Bembel, and I ate Frankfurter schnitzel with grüner Soße. Apfelwein and grüne Soße are both ganz hessisch (very Hessian).

Also at the restaurant, there was a group of men on what is called Junggesellabschied or Junggesellfeier, the German equivalent of a bachelor party. The Kellner carried trays upon trays of drinks out to the backdoor patio for these guys, and as they drank, they started to sing: the drunker they got, the louder and more jovial the singing became. My Betreuungslehrerin S and her daughter G (there's also a son, M, 25) seemed mildly annoyed by this, but, as I told them, “Das finde ich wahnsinnig toll” (“I think that’s insanely great”) because it’s so typical of a certain image of Germany that we have in the States. Additionally, when men get together and drink to excess in America, they rarely sing, and if they do, it’s nothing as cheerful as a German beerhall song. Going in die Kneipe (to the bar), drinking and singing: also gutbürgerlich.

After dinner, G, who’s twenty-four, was going out with some friends, one of whom was just back from Jakobsweg, a six-week religious pilgrimage of Catholic origin. G asked me if I wanted to come with, so in the interest of adventure, I tagged along. When we got to her friend’s apartment and G explained who I was, one of her friends asked me if I speak German, and G said, “Ja, sie spricht komplett Deutsch.” And I glowed with pride (inwardly, of course).

The bar we ended up going to was in Westend-Süd and was called Bar ohne Namen (Bar without a Name). It was extremely small and extremely full, and there was only one toilet for women, which meant a tortuously long Schlange (literally, “snake,” the German word for line/queue) when one needed to access it. We sat at a picnic table on the patio and enjoyed the “retro” early-2000s R&B pumping through the sound system. One of our group was A, the younger sister of one of G’s friends, M. Incidentally, A looks exactly like a girl I danced with at my studio in Mason; M looks like the mean girl from Zenon: Girl of the Twenty-First Century. The point, though, is that A is only sixteen, but she was there at the bar and absolutely no one cared. There was no carding, nothing—although M did order her drinks from the bar for her. Apart from the non-sensationalized presence of a teenager in a bar, and of course the ubiquity of German, drinking at Bar ohne Namen was exactly the same as drinking at any bar in the U.S., complete with overpriced drinks and creepy/awkward men staring from afar. Also, nicht so gutbürgerlich. Aber es hat trotzdem viel Spaß gemacht. (So, not so gutbürgerlich. But it was a lot of fun anyway).

Sonstige Bemerkungen (Miscellaneous Observations)

v My thought process is already starting to morph into a komische Mischung of English and German—in fact, a good chunk of this blog entry was written in German and then translated. I’m surprised (and thrilled) that this is happening so soon—aber so geht es (but so goes it) when you’re surrounded by German and Germans, I suppose.

v Bikes are a way of life here— they’re the most convenient way to get around the city. I definitely need to look into getting a cheap one somewhere (der Flohmarkt, flea market, is a possibility). But riding around the city will take some getting used to: M&M (S’s son and his girlfriend) took me to Eis Christina, an Eisdiele (ice cream parlor) in Nordend, and it was a bit anxious-making having to look out for cars and pedestrians—and I didn’t even have to navigate for myself. Also, M lent me his bike, which was a little too big, and since I’m a bit out of practice, it was a somewhat ungainly process.

v New method for disguising my Americanness: pronounce English words with a German accent. Specifically, words with the short “A” sound—they don’t have that in German. So here my name is “Keth-rin”, S's dog Nancy is "Nency", and “Android” and “Apple” are “Endroid” und “Epple.”

v In Germany, almost all businesses are closed on Sunday, which provided me with my first concrete experience with culture shock—apart from the Celcius-Fahrenheit and Meter-Feet Conversion Problem, which has come up several times.

v One of the most difficult units in Intro/Intermediate German in my opinion—both when I was learning it and when I had to drill it as an AT at Kenyon—is asking for and giving directions. An effective means of teaching this information, I realize now, might be to put German language-learners in a car with three German twenty-somethings arguing about the best way to get to a particular bar:”Geh hier links.””Man kann hier nicht links gehen.” “Doch Maria, natürlich kann man hier links gehen””Geh eine Weile dieser Straße entlang, und dann rechts—nein, nicht hier rechts sondern das Nächste. Ja, hier gehst du rechts.” Und so weiter und sofort.

v On a similar note: While I was out and about earlier today, just trying to get myself oriented in Westend-Süd, a man stopped me and asked me, in German, if I knew where to find the Alte Oper (old opera house—which is not, incidentally, that old, having been destroyed during WWII and later rebuilt). I did, in fact, know where the Alte Oper was, and I directed him accordingly: “Gehen Sie geradeaus, und es liegt auf der rechten Seite der Straße.” But not five minutes later, the warm fuzzies of having successfully interacted with a random stranger in German disappeared, when a man shouted something at me in German and, when I looked startled, immediately switched over to English. Rats.  

v Hearing small children (dh. Five or six years old) speak German fluently continues to be the cutest and at the same time most humbling thing ever. Additionally, according to one particularly precocious specimen I saw at Rothschild Park today, German children, much like the American ones at my summer camp, “like to move it move it.”

v Even in Germany, the debate about what, exactly, constitutes a hipster rages fast and furious—and indeterminate.

This Episode of Misadventures in Travel is Brought to You By

… Hurricane Isaac, and by the Lufthansa strike.

I will get to Frankfurt sooner or later. It’s just going to be later instead of sooner. (**NOTE** Since writing this post, I have, in fact, arrived in Frankfurt intact AND complete with baggage-- it's a Christmas miracle!) 

As I write this, I’m sitting at Chicago/O’Hare airport gate B17, watching a crew of decidedly not striking Lufthansa employees funnel passengers onto a flight to Frankfurt that I could have been on, had I not been absolutely convinced that the flight was cancelled because of the strike. Instead, I get to wait three more hours—in addition to the two extra hours I already waited in Cincinnati, for the 6:30 PM flight that the very kind and patient United desk agent found for me after the plane that was supposed to get me to O’Hare in time for the 2:30 United flight to Frankfurt went kaputt. And after I insisted (in my defense, having checked the Lufthansa site) that the Lufthansa flight at 3:40 didn’t exist.

It’s all good, though. I’ll just hang out States-side for a few more hours, reading the copy of Bossypants that I picked up back in Cincinnati and enjoying my first quality German eavesdropping/people-watching opportunity—a group of four, all wearing very stylish eye glasses and speaking what sounds to me to be astonishingly correct German. The oldest of the group, a woman with short grey hair, is carrying a newly-purchased, still-in-the-box backyard backgammon set onto the plane. I find the idea of this quartet engaging in some ferocious backyard backgammon somewhere in Germany to be incredibly entertaining.

Anyway, back to my misfortunes. Due to a bout of inclement weather between Cincinnati and Chicago that I can only attribute to the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac, the radar on the plane that was supposed to take off from CVG at 12:20 was KIA—drowned or short-circuited or whatever goes wrong with the fancy navigation equipment in the nose of planes (Encouragingly for those a little nervous about flying, the plane did not nosedive in a fiery inferno of doom as soon as its equipment went haywire on the way to Cincinnati). A jovial fellow-traveler, who from all appearances is a real-life version of George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air, offered the pilot his Garmin, but no dice: we were all going to have to find new flights to wherever it was we were going. Grumble grumble. This is unacceptable. How dare the pilot not be willing to fly back into storm weather basically blind, endangering all of our lives but, gosh darn it, getting us to O’Hare (almost) on time?

I’ve always thought that I’m a pretty good traveler. As it turns out, I’m a pretty good traveler

—as long as everything runs smoothly. The minute something goes wrong, I become anxious, twitchy, prone to bouts of pacing, profanity, and, worst of all, tears. Fortunately, in this particular instance I gave a very good impression of a helpless, bewildered young girl on the verge of an enormous undertaking, and people treated me accordingly: fellow passengers smiled sympathetically, desk attendants offered to escort me to the gate where my new flight to O’Hare would be boarding, the stranded pilot called me “sweetheart.” I hate crying in front of strangers (I won’t pretend I’ve always felt this way; it’s actually a fairly new development), but the truth is it’s not a bad way to get help in the airport. As long as you crack jokes through your tears, don’t curse out the attendants trying to help you, and don’t snot or blotch too noticeably.

One interaction with a particularly sympathetic fellow-traveler I found less enjoyable than others, and less helpful than most. It was with a woman, thirty-five-trying-to-look-twenty-five, with a tumble of dirty-blonde curls and wearing a cross choker around her neck.  I’m at the height of my panic mode, still a good five or six people away from the gate desk. Having completed her own alternative arrangements, the woman comes up to me, rubs my arm sympathetically (anyone who knows me knows that I have a pretty aggressive aversion to unsolicited physical contact), and reminds me that I have my health, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t know if this makes me unusual, but I don’t find the idea that some higher power wanted me to miss my flight all that comforting—particularly in the moment. I also don’t want to hear that the experience will make me stronger, or that one day I will look back on this and laugh. But I do my best nod-and-smile, thank the woman for her kind words, and agree with her—this is happening for a reason. As she floats away on her cloud, I add to myself, “Because there’s crappy weather between here and O’Hare.”

Anyway, before I know it, I have an alternate connection to Chicago and a brand new Frankfurt flight. And suddenly I’m a good traveler again.

Apart from all of the flight-change hullaballoo, my feelings about the big departure have been oddly muted. I tried to run a diagnostic on my thoughts when I first arrived at my gate, having hugged my parents away at the safety checkpoint and thus begun my great adventure in earnest. But my brain was—and is, still—strangely quiet. I can’t tell if that’s because there’s nothing going on, or because so much is going on that it’s all sort of cancelling out. There’s such a meditative quality to airports, such a sense of suspended motion, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the former.

It’s counterintuitive to say that, I know, given that airports are all about motion, and the amount of hustle and bustle that comes with the territory, and especially in light of the chaos that I’ve just had to wrangle. But when you’re sitting at your gate, or on your plane, and the hustle and bustle are over and there’s nothing to do but wait— wait to board, wait to take off, wait to land, wait to debark—all the motion falls by the wayside. You might even forget that you’re going anywhere at all. This is why I prefer window seats on planes to aisle seats: I like being able to look out and see the earth passing by beneath me, as proof that I’m not just hanging suspended in space.

Do you remember that old gag, mostly from cartoons, where it looks like the character is running past all of this scenery, but then the camera pulls back and you see he’s actually running on a treadmill, and the scenery going past is just a painting on a conveyor belt, looping over and over and over? The gag is played for laughs, but as a kid I always felt sort of bad for the poor guy. But then again, it’s an old puzzle: how do you prove that you’re the one in motion, and not the ground below your feet?

The Most Psychologically Stressful Part of Packing

... has been deciding which books to take along, and which to leave behind. Anyone to whom this comes as a surprise doesn't know me at all. 

It's really upsetting, because books seem so deceptively packable: so small, so wonderfully rectangular. But they weigh a ton, and I'm flirting with the fifty-pound weight limit on my two bags to be checked as it is. Hence, I'm going to be that weird girl in the airport carrying roughly twenty books in her carry-on. I amuse myself by imagining what a conversation with a curious neighbor during my layover in O'Hare might sound like: "Yes, these are all for the flight. Well, you see, I'm a very fast reader." 

I think I've settled on a smattering of the American classics: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, To Kill A Mocking Bird and my very well-loved copy of Little Women. I have no great love of Huck Finn or The Catcher in the Rye, so they can stay here. I'd like to add a couple of more contemporary representatives—McCarthy, maybe, or Middlesex or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. My John Irving collection was eyeing me expectantly just now. But there are a few non-American essentials that take precedence by merit of sentimental value: Wuthering Heights, as I've mentioned in a previous post; Jane Eyre and any one of several Virginia Woolf works. My Barnes & Noble paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice might not survive the journey, but it's coming too. Additionally, I have a trans-Atlantic reading of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses planned, and I really ought to give Infinite Jest a crack because I may never have such ample free time again...

Well, I could go on and on with in depth analyses of every book on my bookshelf, whether it's coming and why. But the point is that I don't have room for every book I might conceivably want, maddening as it is. Most, if not all, of these books are coming purely for emotional support, anyway, as I fully intend to get to work on my German reading list as soon as I can find my way to a bookstore. 

Nevertheless, I will probably spend a good couple of hours tonight packing and unpacking and repacking and making changes to the lineup. And I may find myself in Germany, begging my parents to ship over something I left behind that suddenly seems absolutely essential. These are all things future generations whose exposure with the written word is exclusively digital won’t have to worry about. But I like my paper-and-ink books, dammit, and I want them. They just won’t fit in my bags.

#First world problems.