Lass es dir schmecken!

Theoretically, it's the same thing as guten Appetit, but at my place it has taken on a meaning of it's own, something akin to, "I'm going away now."

With no living room (or accompanying sense of community), the only time my roommates and I ever really see each other is in the kitchen as we are preparing food (the act of eating being performed here only within the sanctity of the bedroom). "Lass es dir schmecken!" is the last one hears before the other retreats to eat in private. The first time I heard this phrase I was so confused I had to ask for a repeat, even though I had understood the first time: Let it taste good to you? Okayyy. As if I had such control over my taste buds.

If I had to give this chapter of my life a title, it would be Lass Es Dir Schmecken, as that is the only thing one needs to say at my place.

But the time has come for me to move. Now that I know what it's like to live in a student dormitory I can say I have done my time. My work here is done. I have overcome the loneliness and uniformity and florescent lighting. I've outwitted the bedroom doors that lock automatisch, leaving one stranded without shoes, phone or jacket, leaning out the window and waiting until someone comes by who can call the Hausmeister.

The Waschmaschine that ate my money without giving change, beat and boiled my things to a pulp, somehow dyed them blue, and then barfed soapy water on the floor.

The long, lonely nighttime hobble home after dancing at Engelsburg or Stadtgarten, under the bridge and past the creepy park. (Vorsicht! Da hocken die Bösen!) The futile attempts to engage roomies in conversation. The interrogation about hand towel, er, Missbrauch (misuse). The Milchwerk just outside my window which does something loud with milk late into the night. God only knows what.

The adorable one from Nr. 1 who now pretends not to see me. What I have done to offend him remains a mystery.

So much I've been through!

The strange and unexpected kindness of a neighbor who actually knocked on my door and invited me to a lovely party at Christmastime-the lowest part of the year-proving there was life in the building after all.

The friendly brand-new roommate who actually eats in the kitchen, is charmingly disorganized, hangs his underwear over the radiator to dry and is here doing an internship with a puppet theater.

(On Friday, as he was running late to the theater, I opined that his boss would no doubt understand, since artist types aren't terribly punctual. He responded: "And German artists!?" I will miss him.)

All is being left behind, and I am moving across town to the cutest, coziest place ever with nice roommates who like to throw parties.

So. Aufwiedersehen, Klingenthaler Weg. Goodbye, loud milk factory. Goodbye, dear ones.

Aber Waschmaschine, wir sehen uns vielleicht später in der Hölle. Mach's gut und lass die Kleidung dir schmecken.

Unconventional Methods

A series of accidents has had the loveliest of consequences.

Take for example my Praktikum, or internship.

My tutor happened to attend a party at an apartment where there happened to be a room for rent from February to mid-July, which is exactly when I needed a room, so she told me about it. When I saw the apartment I kind of fell in love with it, and when I was signing the 5 1/2-month rental agreements with the Hauptmieter (How do we call this? Main renter?) we got to talking.

He asked me what I was going to be doing while I was living there anyway, and I said supposedly making a Praktikum in Journalism and/or International Studies. Not that there was any hope. Finding an internship is a big requirement of my scholarship program, so I'd been looking hard, but with no luck.

My searches on praktikums-boerse.de gave me this: 'Sorry. There are no "internships" in "Journalism" in the state of "Thüringen, Germany."'

I'd been in contact with my exchange organization the day before, and they too had admitted there was no attainable work in Journalism in the entire state. Undefeated and chipper as ever, they'd suggested I work in Tourist Information, as a sort of practical use of my International Studies degree-in-progress. They could really use someone who spoke English, I was told. The thought of giving directions to lost tourists all day when I'd come to Germany wanting to become a travel writer more than underwhelmed me.

But back to Andrew's question. "Why do you ask?" I eventually said. "What are you doing while I'm living here?" Andrew the Hauptmieter said he was driving to South Africa with two men from his company, Spirit of Football, for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The goal was to play football (okay, soccer) pretty much the entire way, but they would also be working with the African Special Olympics and the British charitable organization Alive & Kicking, visiting schools and distributing soccer balls to poor children. They would travel with just one ball, otherwise known as The Ball, "football's Olympic torch," which everyone could sign and play with. Their distant goal was to have The Ball be used in the Opening Ceremonies in Johannesburg.

Andrew needed someone who could write to chronicle the journey for him in the form of blogs and articles, someone who could speak for the project while he was off on his great African adventure. And I anticipate, someone who could work for free. This more or less described me.

I cancelled the tourist information jobs, came promptly back to Andrew's with more documents to be signed, and suddenly I had a Praktikum.

In the end, things worked out. The monthly stipend I receive from my exchange program to compensate for not getting paid is more than I would have hoped to have been paid anyway.

In the end I found an internship without even looking, without applying or interviewing, without using my carefully written and much-corrected application letter, and without using a word of my painstakingly-learned German. (Andrew is from New Zealand.) Plus I get to work from home, in this gorgeous apartment with vaulted ceilings and roommates who often share what they are eating.

But first I needed to move in, right? A word on that:

I moved in on Friday as Andrew was moving out. For some reason I had the worst trouble trying to move my things from my old apartment to my new one. I didn't have the keys to either for a couple of days and had to schedule moving at a time when someone at both places could be home and Katharina, my tutor, could give me a lift in her car. After a couple of failed attempts to coordinate a moving time, Katharina and I had settled on Friday afternoon. However, at the time when she was supposed to come by, I got a phone call from her instead.

She said, "Hi, sorry, I can't find my car."

Somehow this didn't register with me properly.

I went, "Oh-your car keys? You can't find your car keys?"

And she said,"Nooo, my car."

"...Keys?"

"No! I can't find my car. I don't know where I put it."

I imagined her rummaging through her bag, going, "It's around here someplace."

Just after that I got a call from my future ex-roommate who said he couldn't let me into the house anyway because his bike wheel was broken. He apparently had tried to walk home from his internship at the puppet theater, but then he didn't get far because he stepped in dog poop. He had to go back to the theater and bum a pair of shoes.

I expressed my condolences.

I decided to just "move in" to the new place with only the backpack I had with me and sort of bum it out until I could get my luggage from my old place. Then, just as I had gotten to the new place with my backpack, Max called to say he had made it back from the puppet theater and had decided I didn't need a car when I had the Straßenbahn (...tram?) and him to carry heavy things. So I came right back to my old house, but when I arrived he had disappeared around the corner to Kaufland, the local grocery store.

I met Max at Kaufland as he was finishing his purchases. We left the store with a shopping cart full of groceries. To my great horror, Max passed right by all the appropriate shopping cart put-away sectors and walked all the way home with the shopping cart.

After we put the groceries away, we ate some dinner. At Max's insistence that it would be all right, we discreetly loaded my heavy bags and suitcase into the shopping cart, steered it perilously down the hill to the Straßenbahn stop, and boarded the train to my new house, trying to make it appear as if we were NOT pushing, nor having anything to do with, a shopping cart. Transferring trains was awkward. I began to be terribly afraid and wondered if one could be arrested for stealing a shopping cart in Germany. I kept an eye out for officers of the law. We finally disembarked at my new stop, Justizzentrum. Justice Center.

As we guided the shopping cart out onto solid ground, an older woman on the train smiled and winked at me. And I moved in on Friday after all.

Ceremonial taping of my name onto the mailbox:

Author's note:

1. Katharina remembered where her car was: she had driven it to a friend's, where they'd had some drinks, so she took the Straßenbahn back and then didn't use her car for a while and thus forgot she'd left it there.

Zwischenseminar

Just got back from my program's Mid-Year Seminar in Cologne. It was so strange to be in that city again, where I spent my first two months in Germany. Since everything is new to me this year, it seems like it was years ago that I first arrived in Cologne.

I took the U-Bahn to my former host mom's place, transferring nostalgically at Friesenplatz. The announcer voice on Linie 4 had changed to a more chipper, less jaded woman's voice, I noted sadly ("Umsteigenmöglichkeit zu: S-Bahn! Und. Regionalverkehr!"). I got off at Piustraße to familiar graffiti and waited the 5 minutes for the light to change. I began to feel nervous and clammy about coming back, but once my feet recognized the well-trodden ground, they started taking me there even faster. The soap smell inside the apartment building made me feel as if I had never left. It comes from the laundry facilities in the cellar. I climbed the stairs, suddenly unsure if I had lived on the 3rd or 4th floor, but my feet remembered.

I knocked on the door.

My host mom Ellen answered with a flood of greetings and informations (yes, informations), sweeping my coat off while informing me of all that had happened in the past 4 months (had it really only been that long?). In contrast to my first arrival in August, this time I had no problems understanding what she said, having all but conquered that accent.

We cooked dinner and split a bottle of red.

Ellen paid the obligatorisch complements to my German, adding that she'd heard no trace of an accent on the telephone earlier (Why do Germans always do this? I want to believe them, but they were already telling me how good my German was back when it was really terrible. Sometimes they jump the gun and tell me how good my German is without me even telling them that I am foreign, which makes one suspicious. I think the measure of one's language success in Germany is that the Germans stop complementing you).

I told her about Erfurt, about the seminar so far, about the tour we made of Deutsche Welle. I told her about how the program participants who had been in Model United Nations were asked to speak at the seminar, and since the seminar was in German and I was the first one who was given the mic, I thought it had to be in German. It was hard to describe the workings of the International Labour Conference in German, so all the words I didn't know I just said in English and kept going. Germans do the same thing to sound cool anyway ("Er war so eine easygoing person!" or, "Wir haben das party feeling wirklich erlebt!") Anyway, I talked for 5 minutes before they told me I could also speak in English and everyone laughed.

Babbling in German about Model UN. Film still thanks to Erich.

My friend Erich had the rare and unfortunate presence of mind to film this, but I couldn't watch the entire thing. I could see my brain working overtime and noticed myself making these little thinking breaks where there were clearly words missing.

After I said goodbye to my host mom I burst into tears, and then I went dancing at Underground in Ehrenfeld, where the music was okay.

Have I mentioned this already?

As much as I enjoy living in Germany, I have to say I greatly look forward to coming home and having my own "secret language." I am beginning to fantasize more than a healthy amount about coming back to the States, going to the park or to a coffee shop and cracking open a hefty novel in German, which I will read very obviously and prominently. The first time I was able to read a book in German all by myself I started taking the thing with me on the train, in the Straßenbahn, into cafes, wherever I could be seen, thinking this way people would be "tricked" into thinking I was German. Kind of like when you're a child and you open a book and you let your eyes roll over the text for a while, hoping people will see you and assume you are actually reading.

Of course, the problem I had for a while was that wherever I took my book, my pocket dictionary had to come too so I could discreetly look up the hard words, which kind of defeated the purpose.

Zustand

The first blog post from someone who never "blogs." I almost want to keep it a secret, like the little boy who says he hates reading, gets sick, comes across a good novel, and secretly reads it under the covers, embarrassed, hoping his mom won't catch him reading and make a big deal over it.
Or like the kid in Green Eggs and Ham.
Anyway.

I'm Anna and I live in Germany as an exchange student. I first attended language school in Cologne, then moved to Erfurt for university and will start an internship here in my field (Journalism, International Studies) in February. I'm here on a scholarship called Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, which I received after having interned for the Arts section of the alternative newsweekly New Times in California, where I grew up.

Slowing down a bit.

It is 3:04 in Erfurt and as it is Saturday and Winter, I have yet to go outside. It will be dark soon anyway. Right now the snow looks pretty from here. The Knife is playing softly. My hair still smells vaguely of cigarettes from last night, despite this morning's washing. More empty water glasses than necessary are within an arm's reach, a weird habit I couldn't seem to leave behind in California.

Blogs are awkward things. Public diaries. I always insisted I wasn't the blogging type. I'm an editor, a reviser, a proofreader (not, like, for money). I don't just press a button and subject my innermost thoughts to the criticism of the world.

Public bathrooms are often public diaries too.

But back to criticism. Criticism is really not as bad as the overwhelming sea of indifference. Some people really couldn't care less. At least criticism means someone looked closely enough to find a fault.
Plus, there are so many blogs out there. Everyone's out baring their souls, some more eloquently than others. Do I really want to join the pretentiathon (sound it out; it makes sense!)?

Yes, and yes.

I came across the rather unwieldy title for this blog in 2005 at breakfast in the Swiss Alps. I was working at the Ecole d'Humanite, an international boarding school. In the Esssaal, as we called it, I was (doing probably a rather bad job of) supervising my assigned table. The teacher in charge of the table next to me was trying to engage his breakfasting students by posing questions about human existence. The students only grunted with vague thoughtfulness through mouthfuls of muesli.

Suddenly he stood up and went, "Listen children, I do not philosophize every morning!" As if they were missing a lunar eclipse, shooting star, volcanic eruption or other natural phenomena. Something about his outburst appealed to me, and I saved it in my brain. I think it is called remembering. Then when I was setting up this blog I somehow couldn't get around this statement. The idea that an inspired thought should not be missed or wasted or taken for granted.

I began to think thusly:

It's not pretension to think one's ideas need attention, as the inspiree is not 100% in control of his or her inspirations. Sometimes they just show up at the breakfast table asking to be channeled, packaged in words and shared. I began to think that inspired thoughts do not belong to us, we merely bundle them up against the chill of indifference and misunderstanding and send them along.

But I digress. It's getting dark now. I'm starting a blog and I don't care who doesn't care.


Notes:
1. Zustand: status, condition, situation
2. The author used "thusly" on purpose and is aware of stuffy it sounds.
3. Photo: Cologne, looking over the Rhine from atop the Dom.
A foggy morning.