Welcome to Germany, Herr Broombaugh!

So. Boombox is arriving in Erfurt on Thursday. We are going to go to Berlin and stay with Alena, which means we'll be dancing the $%@*! out of that town come weekend.

Suggestions?? 

This causes me to reflect upon previous days and nights of greatness, when all one needed was Simpler Times and a cool ocean breeze...

The good ol' days: Heather, Boombie 'n' me.

Crashing an Animal Collective concert in the wilderness.

Using Michael's jacket as a nose-warmer.

Up to no good: Cruisin' for a bruisin' in Morro Bay. 

 Weather warm, pool glacial: What to do?

Like moths to the flame: A lamp shop near the beach. 

A strangely eerie sight.

A road trip too long: One too many of everything. 

Ready to go home.

This has been, of course, just a foretaste of the adventure which begins this Thursday. Needless to say, ich bin gespannt.

Ö as in Löve

Dear ö,

You are so cute. I love your innocent, astonished little face. When I see you in italics I imagine you singing in a choir, belting your little heart out. Sometimes when I see you in caps you look so frightened, I just want to hold you close and comfort you. I always thought of you as different from the others. Your sister ä is bipolar and has an attitude problem to boot; your brother ü has a self-satisfied smirk permanently plastered across his smarmy face, but you are as honest and pure as you are expressive. I think I have a crush on you.

However, these days I can't escape the fact that you don't feel for me the way I feel for you. Every time I need you, you're never there for me. I call your name but you are nowhere to be found; in your place a cheap, soulless replica.

I need you so bad. Without you, how could I say wunderschön, Löwe, Öffentlichkeitsarbeit? Oh ö, how I long to know the secret of your ways.

Yet you leave me all alone to tackle löschen, lösen, aufhören. You are deaf to my pleas, staring unblinkingly ahead.

Hyperforeignation

I can't believe this is not a word. I can't find it in any dictionaries. Well, if nobody objects, I'd like to coin the term 

hy·per·for·eign·a·tion [hahy-per-fawr-in-ney-shuhn]

-noun

1. Overemphasis in attempt to correctly pronounce word or phrase foreign to the speaker, resulting in unnecessarily incorrect pronunciation, especially when speaker's native linguistic inclinations, when followed, would have resulted in correct or more correct pronunciation.

Everyone who has ever learned a new language has probably hyperforeignated at some point. Take for example the subconscious German reaction to the letters W and V, as they are pronounced in the English alphabet. The letters W and V enjoy nearly identical pronunciation in the German language (both sound like an English V), but are markedly different in English. It seems like the first reaction by German speakers learning English is to pronounce all Ws like Vs ("You are velcome!") but then, upon realizing that W makes a "oua" sound in English, the tendency is often over-corrected. Suddenly, all would-be V-sounds are redirected into W-sounds. Sometimes this pattern is successful. Winter, Wein and Wilkommen, all pronounced with a V-sound, turn neatly into winter, wine and welcome. However, this pattern can't be applied to everything. Wodka, for example, is pronounced the same in English but spelled with a V. Same goes for sowjet (soviet). Soon, telewision, winigar, and wery begin to dot the linguistic landscape. The mind seems to go, "Look, here comes a V-sound, better pronounce it like a W!"

The same confusion surrounding W and V among German speakers seems to be experienced just as strongly by speakers of French with the English H. In French, the letter H, as in hôtel, hôpital and horreur, is silent. These words, translating neatly into hotel, hospital and horror, give the false impression that all words in which the first letter pronounced is a vowel also receive an aspirated H, which is why you'll hear things like holive oil and horange. The aspirated H does not exist in French, so it is odd to hear such a concentrated effort placed on aspirating an H which does not need to be there. Meanwhile, the H disappears mysteriously from the words hair, have, and he.

(This switcharound seems to plague Italian speakers as well; an Italian friend I knew in Switzerland used to go to town every week with her friends Ellen and Hamber, known to everyone else as Helen and Amber.)

English speakers, are, of course, not perfect either. In fact, as typical linguistic late-bloomers, English speakers may be some of the world's worst hyperforeignators. (Or best, depending on how you look at it.) In the non-English speaking world, polite overlookance of blatant hyperforeignation by English speakers as they attempt to master a foreign language is general, and all recognizable sounds (let alone entire sentence constructions) uttered in a foreign tongue are met with encouragement and praise.

Yet we're improving. Young Anglo-Saxons are a more-traveled, worldlier demographic than the generation preceding them. Younger and younger, they are tentatively dipping their toes into the shallow end of the Olympic-sized pool that is non-English-speaking world.

We are, however, in no way exempt of the hyperforeignation phenomenon. In German, I personally have even been guilty of over-umlauting on occasion. That is, once I discovered the power of the German umlaut (mäandern, Küche, Öffentlichkeit), I got a little overexcited and began putting umlauts where they didn't belong, saying I was going "einkäufen" or telling people about my "Kätze" at home. (What color? "Schwärz.")

One really shouldn't take those dots so lightly, I slowly discovered. After all, an innocent ü can mean the difference between gay and humid.

I still can't say ö, so mistakes in which I incorrectly employ that letter are only made in my mind.

I aired the idea of hyperforeignation at dinner last weekend in Leipzig with other Congress-Bundestag participants. Marcus said he once asked a guy in Switzerland if he had "Fenster" on his computer (Fenster meaning "window" in German).

The guy: "Fenster?"

Marcus: "You know, Microsoft Fenster."

(A moment of confusion for both parties, then clarity:)

"Ahhh, Vindows!"

Patrick then added that he had once referred to das Mutterbrett in the German workplace and was told, "We just say 'motherboard,' man."

So I suppose the definition could be expanded a bit to include:

2. The unnecessary translation of words or phrases out of one's mother tongue into a foreign language, when such terms would be better known when left in the speaker's mother tongue.
So there you have it. A new word. Fully defined and exemplified. What more could a linguaphile want?

First Todo Aleman article

My cherished 4 readers,

My first travel article was published on Todo Aleman today! It describes my work in Switzerland as a teenager at the Ecole d'Humanite, and also what attracts people in the States to German.

Read on. Or else.

Anna

The Life of a Praktikant

[2:05:14 PM] Erich: psst

[2:05:19 PM] Erich: hello??

[2:05:34 PM] Anna: brb on phone

[2:05:48 PM] Erich: ok

[2:13:32 PM] Anna: hey!!!!!!

[2:13:47 PM] Anna: sorry, was on the phone with one of my spirit of footballers

[2:13:51 PM] Anna: still there??

[2:19:58 PM] Erich: lol yeah just finished emptying the paper shredder

[2:21:19 PM] Anna: the life of a Praktikant

[2:21:18 PM] Erich: i have to go throw away the shreddings now

[2:21:25 PM] Anna: ok take your time

[2:27:59 PM] Erich: the paper shredder was overflowing

[2:28:14 PM] Erich: so much so that it would not accept any more pages

[2:28:19 PM] Anna: sucks

[2:28:23 PM] Erich:  it took two garbage bags to fill up

[2:28:36 PM] Erich: and i covered myself with all of the shreddings at one point

[2:28:51 PM] Erich: this was maybe 7 feet from my boss

[2:29:08 PM] Anna: my goodness, what an impression you must be making

[2:30:39 PM] Erich: eh they prob think i'm somewhat incompetent

[2:30:40 PM] Anna: my boss is in africa

[2:30:44 PM] Erich: luckyyyy

[2:30:54 PM] Anna Weltner: but my coworker called me a dau

[2:31:04 PM] Erich: a dau??

[2:31:03 PM] Anna: duemmster anzunehmender user

[2:31:10 PM] Erich: hahaha

[2:31:28 PM] Anna: it's an IT term for describing the computer challenged

[2:33:31 PM] Erich: i'm sure you're not that bad

[2:34:51 PM] Anna: well, my computer reacted violently to an attempt to download an important program, and in requesting help for the problem I earned myself the title of "DAU"

[2:35:29 PM] Erich: was this important program called 'shemale porn download assistant'?

[2:36:30 PM] Anna: something like that i think

Author's Notes:

1. Dümmster Anzunehmender User: "Dumbest Assumable User"
2. Praktikant: Intern

Where have I been all week?

A week without posting! What's the deal? How am I to know I even did anything if I have no post to show for it? Let me (Achtung! Klischee!) take a stroll down memory lane.

Monday
Wrote press release about Spirit of Football's 50th day on the road. Sent it to Spirit of Football directors to look over before it goes out. Spent too long sitting in chair. Harvested contact info of important sports people.

Spent three hours teaching English.

Translated a report about the meeting of Spirit of Football and the mayor of Kati, Erfurt's twin city in Mali.  Sven gave my German a makeover and and sent the report to local newspaper Thüringer Allgemeine.

Used the word nichtsdestoweniger for the first time.

Tuesday
Trip to Frankfurt with Sven to meet with an NGO called Kickfair cancelled.  Wrote press release about Spirit of Football's interview with Malian football/soccer legend Salif Keita.

Got email back from Christian from Spirit of Football- apparently criticizing my 50th-day-on-the-road press release. The problem seemed to lie somewhere in this sentence: "It's a journey fit for those not short on spunk."

"Please use a subtler turn of phrase," the email implored.

Read release again. Found nothing wrong with it. Feelings bruised. Wondered, what's wrong with a little spunk? Wrote delicately defensive email back, saying needed new words to describe The Ball 2010's journey/pilgrimage/odyssey to South Africa. Had already used "amazing," "daring", "inspiring" and "ambitious hardly begins to describe" so many times.

Bought groceries.

Went to McFit. Noticed McDonald's is kitty-corner from McFit. Realized do not know how to say "kitty-corner" in German. Kätzchenecke, the literal translation, is probably not it.

Got email from Christian, explaining that "spunk" means "cum" in British. Most of our press contacts are in England. Aha. Fixed the offending sentence and sent spunk-free release to press contacts.

Drank wine poured generously by Robert, my roommate who has a nasty habit of speaking English with me.

Baked banana bread and brought some over to Micha, who had never had it before. Watched Sweeney
Todd in German, Micha threatening to fall asleep.

Wednesday
Got email from Spirit of Football's Phil, now in Burkina Faso, asking me to use only British English in press releases from now on. Honour. Colour. Favourite. My spellchecker objects to this as I type.

Carpark. Pram. Lift. Jumper. Full stop.

Met up with Sven in Weimar, planned out the newsletter we are working on about The Ball, which I hope will be allowed to be called The Baller. 

It was Saint Patrick's Day but no one in Erfurt seems to have noticed.


Thursday
Day of hopeless attempts. Got to the language school to find my English course canceled for the day. Attempted to meet up with someone to repair my bicycle, after work, as planned, who didn't answer my calls.

Spent the evening reading the script of a play called Nest, by Bathsheba Doran, set in early-1800s Philadelphia. Michael, theater student in San Diego, sent it to me. He is performing in it soon. He inquired as to my thoughts. Well. The play begins like this:

SCENE 1
A dark kitchen in the middle of the day. Susanna Cox crouched, masturbating quietly, efficiently.
Jacob enters, holding a jug. He watches for a moment.

JACOB
Susanna?

(She stops immediately.)

What are you doing?

A beat.

SUSANNA
Nothing.

Identified with a new nation's struggle to find its artistic identity:

"We can no longer depend on Europe for art. Europe no longer understands us. We are currently without a voice and I consider it a national emergency. America must be written. She longs to be articulated, she craves form and meaning."

Decided to write more. Yes! And better! Reminisced about theater class with Michael, practicing stage slaps and stage falls and stage screams.Went to bed early.


Friday
Took the train to Leipzig and went to an event put on by the Leipziger Volkszeitung and the American Consulate. Met His Excellency John C. Kornblum, who, as the American Ambassador to Germany, had started Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange in 1983. He was happy to see that the program was still going
on 26 years later.

Saturday
Attended the Leipziger Buchmesse  until I physically couldn't move anymore, which happened around 1 p.m. It was super crowded. Funnily enough, as an avid bookreader, the book fair isn't quite my scene. I'm glad I went, but honestly I find book fairs ironic. Book readers and book writers tend to be really introverted, private people. Fairs are for people who like spectacle and noise. I imagine for writers it would be torture to go to a Buchmesse.

Felt guilty for speaking English all weekend. Read Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things in German on the train home.

Sunday
Today. Underachieved appropriately. Wrote an hour or two for the newsletter.  Read Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories.

Looked up kitty-corner: Schräg gegenüber. Not Kätzchenecke as privately hoped.

All things considered, not a bad week, though there was no room for grooving to electro this week.

Soon.

Weekend Highlights: Stadtgarten!

Last night I went to Stadtgarten with Brian and his Arizonian partner-in-crime, Sofia.

I forgot my Fotoapparat again, so I'll give you this nice photo:

It was indie night and NATURALLY, they played Le Tigre the first time I went to the toilet and Crystal Castles the second time. A guy was handcuffed to the bathroom door handle and declined my offers to free him. Some people from Klingenthaler Weg, my old 'hood, were there and we danced together for a while. (I love being greeted by people I know when I'm out. I feel like the world's little darling!)

Katherine, Brian's fashionable roomie, had a clothing sale yesterday and I bought four things of hers. Two of them are dresses which, on me, will be sported as shirts.

I am supposed to translate something for Spirit of Football by tomorrow and do my homework for German and prepare my English lessons for the week. It's already 3. I should get on it. 

Ohh, and Micha gets home today.

Is this a dream?

I am always shocked at how gullible I am in dreams. Last night I really knew I was dreaming, but still couldn't manage to take control of the dream situation. I just let the dream walk all over me. What was I thinking? I could have leaped into the air and flown out the window if I'd wanted to. I could have grown eleven feet or ridden an elephant. But no, I chose to stay at home and do what other people said.

Here was the "story" of the dream: First, I woke up in my apartment in Erfurt. I went down the stairs. My step mom Brenda was sitting on the couch. That should have been the first clue right there. What is my step-mom doing in Germany? But I just accepted it. Then she told me that someone I loved had passed away and gave me a pile of forms to read through and fill out. I told her, look, we've been through this. I've had this awful dream so many times. She said, "What dream? This is real. You have to accept it." Brenda has a great deal of credibility in my mind so I just accepted it.

Then I had a curious idea. I turned to look at the door. I focused my eyes on the doorhandle. Suddenly, it began to turn. I concentrated on it. The screws began to loosen. It slowly came away from the door.  I pulled the doorhandle off with my mind. Then I didn't know what to do with it. It floated there for a second.

Suddenly, something distracted me. Perhaps it was Brenda's voice, or another thought I'd had. The door handle sucked back into the door. Brenda began talking to me, but I kept staring at the door handle. The weight of the situation began to sink in. There was a lot of work to be done. Papers to sign. Old family freinds were coming over and someone was going to have to feed them. I glanced hopefully at the doorhandle but it wouldn't budge. Brenda seemed to know what I was thinking, and told me it was no use.  Just the same as when I lived with her and Dad and I would check the status of the refrigerator every 20 minutes, hoping something delicious had materialized.

Since I couldn't unscrew the door handle with my mind again, I did as I was told. I had a lot of work to do. Family friends came over. I was upset. Everyone was upset. I made dinner. The person who had supposedly died came over for dinner too. No one seemed to think that was odd. As we were all talking about what we remembered about him, he even interrupted, "He always held a grudge against me." Someone rubbed his shoulder and said, "There, there. I'm sure that isn't true."

Then I woke up, thankful it had only been a dream but kicking myself for going along with the dream story instead of befriending a dragon, building a castle in the clouds or turning into a dolphin.

What a letdown.

Nachtsüber, part II

"Übrigens fand ich Ihre Wortschöpfung 'nachtsüber' sehr

anerkennenswert. Warum nicht?" 

-Frau Clayton, German instructor back in California, speaks up for my non-word nachtsüber, which cost me half a point on my German final exam here in Germany.

"Work"

So, work's been treating me well. Everyone is prejudiced because I do my work for my internship at home. That seems to make it non-work. Everyone does air-quotes when they ask me if I worked today. Like, Anna, hast du heute viel "gearbeitet?" 

Just after I began my internship with Spirit of Football (background info on that posted here), I became a little bit irrelevant because the two sites I was going to blog for, FourFourTwo and Todo-Aleman, both didn't need me anymore.  What happened with the first one was that someone from a company called Substance PR who has one of Spirit of Football's partners as a client also pitched a blog to FourFourTwo on the same exact topic. And FourFourTwo went, "Well, Anna's doing that already, you should talk to her." And the guy from Substance sent me his work and I realized he actually knew things about football/soccer, and was using soccer words and quoting people I hadn't heard of, so I wrote him and said, "Look, just take it! You do it!" It's probably better for Spirit of Football to have someone who is interested in the sport write their blog for a sports site, I reasoned.

And I still had a regular writing assignment with the website Todo-Aleman, the trilingual project of the Goethe-Institut. I was to take over Andrew's blog there about The Ball's journey through Africa. However, after I sent my first post to them, they wrote back saying they didn't need me to write for them anymore and they would just link to Andrew's blog, theball.tv. I phoned them up and asked why, and Marcus from Todo-Aleman explained that with budget cuts it was necessary to cut down on the amount of staff who receives and edits work. It was cheaper to link to a site which would essentially say the same thing.

Then we got to talking and Marcus asked where I was even from anyway, and I said the States- California to be exact (exaggerated compliments were payed to my German, as is custom). Turns out Marcus has lived and worked in California. And he knows San Luis Obispo, my home town! It's pretty there, he said. I agreed. Then he asked what I was doing in Erfurt. I unloaded the unwieldy title Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals. (Every time I say that I feel like I'm pulling a tuba out of a clarinet case and dropping it on the breakfast table!). He was familiar with the program. I explained a bit more about how I'd come to learn German and get interested in German culture, and he said that was the sort of thing they were interested in promoting at Todo-Aleman. (The site can be viewed in English, German or Spanish, and its target audience is young people in North and Latin America.) Then he asked me if I wouldn't mind writing a 5-part series about living abroad, starting with 2005 when I lived in the Swiss Alps. I agreed. It's really a more fitting subject for me to be writing about anyway.

The first episode, which I wrote in English, is being translated into German and Spanish and will be published on the site soon. Hopefully. I'll let you guys know. My three (3) loyal followers. 

I was happy to get some sort of writing work, even if it was not related to my internship. However, I have also been doing things which are related to my internship! I've also been writing press release after press release, reporting on the progress of The Ball's pilgrimage to Johannesburg. The goal is the World Cup and there are, if I am correct, just 93 days left to go. 

Recently I wrote to the British embassies in all of the African countries where The Ball will be passing through and requested that their Ambassador or High Commissioner meet with the Spirit of Footballers, perhaps attending an event with their partner, Special Olympics Africa. Some embassies haven't written me back, while others have been really keen. The High Commissioner in Zambia seemed really friendly and wrote a nice email about the power of sport to connect people from all different backgrounds. I should quote her on that.

Aside from my internship and random writing assignments, I am still working at the Erfurter Sprachschule, where I teach English. So far no one has noticed that I am not a teacher. Shh.

This evening I went to Übersee with Douglas and he brought an important fact to my attention: Unterrichtsstunden (instruction hours) are only 45 minutes long. Not 60. This entire time I have been adding them up as whole hours, meaning my 90 minute courses go down as an hour and a half, not two hours. I have been working there since November and I didn't know this. Fortunately I asked to be paid at the end of the courses, which meant I only added up my hours and gave them to my boss yesterday. 

I just sent him a teensy little email, saying, "Oops-didn't know about the Unterrichtsstunden." 

Off to dreamland. Sleep tight, Erfurt.

The Theatah. Dahling.

 

Photo thanks to Katherine's Handy. 

On Sunday I went to the Opera with InWent. The Merry Wives of Windsor in German. It was a bit more of a modern adaptation. Some caterpillars made out. That was my favorite part. Where is my Fotoapparat when I need it??

Mostly awake is slightly asleep

Hello, dear readers. All two of you.

When I first awoke this morning I had this sentence in my head, clear as anything: "She went to a French school, where she drank blood from a paper cup." I don't know where that came from. I am crazy. Second spontaneous thought I had was: "I miss Sandercock Street."


It's true. And I miss Linnaea's Cafe. I miss Heather. I miss dollars. I miss falling asleep with my cat smothering my air supply. I miss the lady at Scolari's who always asked me how my cat was doing when I bought cat food. I miss Simpler Times beer.  I miss Cooper cracking open a can and pretending to be in a commercial, saying campily, "When times are getting a little too complicated...reach for Simpler Times." I miss pouring latte art. I miss the beach. I miss having more friends around than I knew what to do with.  I miss palm trees. I miss bonfires. I miss Mexican food. I miss random spontaneous gatherings in the shower. I miss reading by the creek. I miss staying in the pool all day when it was too hot to do anything else.  I miss breakfast out on the porch in the sun.

 

Hijacking pool in empty apartment complex

But I'm still far from ready to go home to San Luis Obispo. I have so much more to do and see, so many more cool German words to learn. And I don't even have a place on Sandercock anymore. Unless you count my sister's place, where I will probably end up, penniless, begging for a scrap of carpet to sleep on. Cooper lives in San Francisco now. Nothing will be exactly as I remember it.

I had another German dream the night before last. I dreamt I got on the wrong train and there were only senior citizens in it. As the train drove off, I noticed that there was only one car to the train. I realized my error and started to panic. I asked the man next to me, "Where is this train going?" and he said, "Anywhere! That's the beauty of it. We don't know."

 

Strange shot of me grooving to electro with my sister Heather

Quirks

Why do I always forget to eat? Why do I cook things and then walk away, then come back two hours later and find them? I did this again yesterday.

I suppose it's just a quirk. My youth pastor back in California (a long time ago) used to have a strange problem in which he would pick things up without noticing. If he was deep in a conversation, you could sneak up to him and put something in his hand and walk away, and he would grab it automatically and keep talking. Then 5 minutes later he would finally notice that he was holding a book/magic marker/rubber ducky, and would go, "All right-who did this? Who was it this time?" And all the kids would giggle.

I think it's something similar to that.

I also sometimes talk without meaning to. It's a problem. It's like sleep-talking, but without the sleeping part (speaking of which, get a load of this guy.) I just start mumbling what I'm thinking, (but I think I'm only thinking it) and then I notice people looking at me and I think, was I just talking? Or was I only thinking? And then someone goes, "What did you say?" And I scoff and go, "I didn't say anything."

Yesterday in the car back from Ikea, I was lost in thought and then I noticed Micha looking at me strangely and I thought, was I just talking out loud? And if so, what did I say? And in what language?

When I first got an ipod I had to listen with just one ear bud in, because if I listened with both I would accidentally start singing along in public!

I guess some people just have their heads in the clouds. Some of us say what we're thinking on accident, and some of us pick things up on accident. To paraphrase Elizabeth Gilbert, some of us have only one foot on the earth, and really, really long legs.