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.

A Few Thoughts About Packing

I say, half-jokingly, that if my mother had had her way I would have been living out of a suitcase for the last two weeks. But the truth is I’m lucky my mom is the Type-A, plan-ahead kind of person that she is, because, left to my own devices, I would be sitting here, now just two days away from boarding my plane, staring at empty suitcases.

I’m not a procrastinator by nature— quite the opposite: in college, I was the weirdo who wrote papers a week before they were due and did most of her weekend reading on Saturday morning. But I’ve missed almost every deadline in this whole Fulbright process, and I refused to even acknowledge my suitcases’ presence until the day before last, even though they were sitting on the bed in my brother’s vacated room—the “staging area,” as my mom likes to call it—open and half-packed for a week before that. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this about myself: confronted with monumental change, I prefer to push it to the back of my mind, as though banishing it there will mean it doesn’t exist. Of course, that’s never the case, and more often than not my denial only results in more panic and anguish at the last minute. I know this, yet I do nothing about it, and the cycle continues—procrastinate, panic, procrastinate, panic. I can’t help but worry about what will happen to me when I’m on my own in Germany with nobody to keep me in line but myself.

One curious side effect of this whole packing process is that it has turned me, usually the most reluctant of shoppers, into a shopping machine. Last night my mom and I went out to look for a few last-minute essentials, and we wound up buying what feels like a whole new wardrobe. In theory, it’s a wardrobe for the post-graduate me, an upgrade from the jeans-and-t-shirt look that has been my MO for the past four years. But when I spread a few of our purchases out on my bed last night—a black trench coat, a form-fitting grey dress, a pair of black ankle-boots—they seemed more like things that belonged to someone else, that had showed up in my shopping bag by mistake. But I guess that is, in a sense, the point.

I’ve always had a sort of mystified reverence for the transformative power of clothes. As a child I spent hours dressing up in old dance costumes out of an over-stuffed trunk we kept in our basement, playing princess as five-year-old girls are wont to do. What I’m doing now is, in principle, the same, the only differences being that this time it’s not make-believe, and instead of princess, I’m playing the part of self-assured, sophisticated world traveler. I recognize that there’s a certain unhealthiness to this pattern of thinking, in believing that, if I just have that right pair of shoes, all my problems will be solved; or that, if I can just look the part, no one will be able to see through the charade. But I’m getting too old to buy into the idealistic myth that appearance doesn’t matter in this world. And who knows? Maybe, if I can convince others, I can convince myself as well.

Another thing that packing is making me realize is that when you’re trying to fit your entire life into two suitcases, there’s very little room for sentimentality. I feel like I could fill an entire suitcase just with my favorite books and mementos, things to scatter around my apartment in Frankfurt and to serve as talismans against homesickness. But I don’t have that luxury: even sticking to just the essentials, clothes and shoes and a few toiletries, I’m already running out of space. I’m constantly trying to remind myself that what I’m after is a fresh start, that over the course of my ten months in Germany I’ll accumulate new books and new mementos.

But I also know that, in the final frenzy tomorrow, a few things will find their way into a suitcase, stowaway style: a leather-bound edition of Wuthering Heights, a certain painting (hey, it’s flat anyway!), a T-shirt bearing a picture of Martha Graham wearing a raspberry beret. And I won’t beat myself up about that. Not all things are just things. We’re not that different as adults than we are as kids clinging to a favorite stuffed animal. Some of our possessions serve as anchors, to remind us of who we are, where we’ve been, and what is important to us.

Packing it all up into two suitcases just helps to clarify which are the things that are closest to home. 

The American Culture Conundrum

My departure to Germany is (finally) mere days away. As I’ve said before, I’ve had more than ample time during the waiting process to think about what living in Germany will be like. One particular thing I’ve been pondering lately is the extent to which I want to stay up-to-date with U.S. happenings while I’m abroad. I’m fortunate enough to have the language proficiency that would enable me, if I so chose, to go “cold turkey” on all things American: current events, politics, pop culture. But, culture junkie that I am, cutting myself off so completely may prove a challenge.

Placing myself on a strict German-only media diet is a tempting proposition, largely because it would help me to advance my language abilities even further, and put me on the fast track toward more instinctive, idiomatic German. The goal is to be able converse with Germans without having them automatically switching to English when they hear me speak. The more diligently I apply myself to reading German news sites, watching German television and reading German books, the more quickly the desired level of fluency is likely to occur. It’s hard to think of any time I might spend perusing the pages of the New York Times or NPR or People.com while in Germany as anything other than time that might have been better spent learning my way around Frankfurt, interacting with native speakers or, at the very least, perusing Die Zeit, FAZ, or Deutsche Welle instead. It seems like cheating, somehow, and a waste of the opportunity I’ve been given.

Of course, there are some aspects of the U.S. cultural landscape that would be easier to swear off than others: politics, for example—I can’t congratulate myself enough on contriving to be out of the country come election day; or celebrity gossip—who’s dating whom, who’s having whose baby, what the Kardashians are doing RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE. These are things I can surrender with very little regret.

But music, on the other hand. And books. And movies and television… I’m already compiling a list of the movies that are set to be released while I’m in Germany: big ones like The Hobbit, Les Miserables, and the newest James Bond, and smaller ones like Liberal Arts, which was filmed almost entirely at Kenyon. Speaking of Josh Radnor, Ted Mosby is set to finally meet the mother while I’m overseas. There will be new seasons of Modern Family and Grey’s Anatomy (yes, I still watch that schlock). True, many if not most of these things will find their way to Germany eventually, and what isn’t readily available in Germany I can always seek out on the Internet. But that’s exactly why I feel like I have to make a conscious choice about the amount of American culture I retain in my life: if I’m not careful, I could find myself watching only American television and listening to only American music, and in doing that I can’t shake the feeling that I would be doing myself a huge disservice. I keep trying to remind myself that all of these things—the American TV series and movies and albums and books I’m interested in—will still be waiting for me when I come back to the U.S. The chance to have such unlimited access to their German counterparts, however, may only come this once.

There are other obstacles to the all-German-all-the-time scheme, in addition to my own reluctance to give up certain American “comfort foods”. With the internet, it’s a lot harder to go radio silent on U.S. happenings than it was, say, twenty years ago, when my professor had to seek out an ink-and-paper copy of the New York Times every day to get his fix of American news. Now, it’s just a matter of a few mouse clicks. And American news does still seem to be news elsewhere in the world, too: more often than not, there’s an American news story at the top of Die Zeit’s homepage anyway.  Also, my job may require me to stay on top of all things American so I can tell my students, “These are the pop songs/TV shows/movies that are popular in the U.S. right now,” etc. A teacher at the Gymnasium I will be teaching at has already told me that she and the other teachers are looking forward to the opportunity to practice their English with a native speaker. And let’s not forget that Frankfurt has a fairly sizable English-speaking and American-expat contingent, so there are plenty of English-language bars, English-language cinemas, English-language bookstores, and English-language people that it will be almost too easy to seek out.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s still unclear how much homesickness I will have to contend with: I may find myself, in moments of loneliness, turning to American culture as a kind of security blanket. I’m already taking steps to ensure I don’t end up back on American websites out of boredom or habit: I’ve replaced all the English-language bookmarks at the top of my web browser with German-language ones. The theory is that, with time, browsing these German websites will become the same knee-jerk reaction that browsing NPR, Slate, or The Huffington Post is now. But homesickness is a whole different story than boredom, and I can easily imagine myself seeking out the latest Kardashian gossip purely for the sake of a little taste of home.

One site I will definitely not be foregoing, of course, is Facebook, and I imagine I’ll glean a fair amount of news just through the status updates of various friends and acquaintances. Skype, too, will doubtless provide glimpses of the homefront, however much I decide to keep up with on my own.

Aside from it just being the right and responsible thing for me to do as a student of German culture, I like the idea of leaving American culture to its own devices for the next ten-odd months because I like the idea of being able to come back to the U.S.  at the end of that time and look at it with completely fresh eyes. I want, in a sense, to ensure the greatest amount of culture shock possible for myself. One of the benefits of travel, so I’m told, is that it helps you to see where you come from more clearly, and I hope, by stepping away as much as can be managed, to provide myself with the clearest possible vision. 

Back to School (But Not Really)

Yesterday my college roommate and I took an afternoon trip up to our alma mater, Kenyon College in rural central Ohio. It was a short visit—we were only on campus for a matter of five hours—but it was an instructive one as well. Here are some thoughts:

1.     Taking the familiar drive up the hill to campus, all of the cues told me I was going back to school, but at the same time I knew that that wasn't the case. Being there—eating in Peirce Dining Hall, sitting out on a bench on Middle Path outside Ascension, seeing all the familiar faces (and the unfamiliar as well)—it all felt so normal and, at the same time, so incredibly strange. I felt as though I was of Kenyon, but no longer a part of Kenyon, if that makes sense. A few times during the visit I was introduced to new people, and I found myself qualifying my greeting, “Hi, I’m Katie, I don’t go here anymore.” And, to be honest, saying it helped make it true.

2.     Kenyon really is still there! It didn’t dematerialize like Brigadoon the moment I left campus. And there’s something comforting about that, about knowing that, while I’m off in Frankfurt doing things that are entirely new to me, people in Gambier, Ohio will still be doing pretty much the same things they did when I lived there: students will put off writing papers and make late night Market runs and engage in “whose tastes in music/film/literature are more obscure” contests instead; professors will run around looking harried; visiting students will be herded about in flocks, clutching their conspicuous Visiting Student folders and looking astonished by everything. Sitting outside the Village Inn, watching a small contingent of first-year girls march south on Middle Path toward Kenyon’s annual first-weekend Greek bash, the Highlighter Party, I felt like an elder-statesman expert on Kenyon life: I was one of those freshman girls once, I made the mistakes they’re going to make, and the discoveries as well. Kenyon worked its magic on me, and I’m a different person now than I was then. And now I’m going to go off and become a different person yet again.

3. Alongside all of the sameness: there should be some kind of law stipulating that schools are forbidden from making any dramatic changes for at least two years after I leave. The year after I graduated from high school, my school opened a new wing; now, the year after I graduated from Kenyon, the president is stepping down, the apartment I lived in has been demolished, and a campus institution, a cafe called Middle Ground, has closed its doors and been replaced by a wildly inferior joint called Wiggin Street Coffee. I approve of none of this. I’m the one who’s supposed to go off and change; Kenyon is supposed to remain exactly as I left it.
4. While sitting in Wiggin Street Coffee (or Impostor Middle Ground, as I like to call it-- though apparently the popular name among returning students is "Wiggle Ground") waiting to meet my professor for coffee, I eavesdropped on maybe the most stereotypical college conversation ever. A film was referred to as "Kafka-esque"; a sophomore girl lamented being mistaken for a first year; there was an overabundance of plaid and eighties-style mustaches. Five minutes of covertly listening in on this from a neighboring booth reminded me that I really am ready to not be a college student anymore.
5. Most importantly though, after talking with my professor and a couple of friends who just returned from studying abroad in Germany, I'm definitely excited to go and be young and have wild adventures in Europe. Someday down the road, I want to be the person sitting in a bar with her friends, narrating all of the crazy things that happened to her during the year she lived in Frankfurt. I want to collect a healthy arsenal of stories that begin "The time when..." or "The night with the..." or "That weekend we were in..." But one thing that's clear to me after talking to my friends is that these kinds of adventures don't just happen to people-- not often enough, anyway. You have to seek them out, or at least be willing to put yourself in situations where the unexpected, unusual, incredible might occur. Given that the flight portion of my fight-or-flight response is somewhat over-developed, this might be a challenge for me. Presented with a new and maybe uncomfortable scenario, it’s going to take some significant will power to force myself to ride things out rather than immediately run for the door. This will get easier with time, of course, as will many things about my move to Germany. “It will get easier” has been a constant refrain in conversations I’ve had lately. At the same time, I think I’m ready for a little bit of hard. Then again, I’m sure there will be moments when that is not the case-- when I’m lonely and scared-- and I’ll be willing to give anything to go back and be a student at Kenyon again, with the future safely ahead of me.