One week down and a weekend in the Netherlands

Well, one week of school down :) exciting. I like all my classes so far though I may not keep them all for credit since I don't need them. The DSH (german language exam for university level study aka if i want to come back for my masters, i need to take this) prep course is going to be challenging but I'm looking forward to it. I really enjoy hearing the Germans speak in their english with their cute accents ha ha I knew they'd speak english in the literature classes but it didn't totally hit me until they opened their mouths. Makes it more fun for me :)

This weekend I was able to go visit Jenny in Utrecht before she moved out and it was a lot of fun. The trains there took about 6 hours, between transfers and everything, but I really enjoy the trains here. They're comfortable, I don't get motion sick on them (imagine that), and it's nice to zone out with my ipod in and watch the countryside pass by. On Friday when I got there we walked around Utrecht and saw the inner city. It's a beautiful place that looks like a mini Amsterdam because it has canals and buildings in a similar layout. The words in dutch everywhere are hilarious because they have extra vowels inserted in the words. If you understand German, it becomes even funnier because it almost seems like someone trying to speak German and failing. The amount of bikes in the city is also nearly unfathomable. To cross the street, you have to play frogger: get through the pedestrians, then watch out for bikes, the the traffic in each direction, and the bikes and people again! There's just so many... I almost got squished. We made dinner afterwards with Anoek, Jenny's awesome and tall dutch roommate. I made hamburgers!! With hamburger buns! Haven't had that in months and it makes me miss the beginning of my dad's grilling season, and baseball...
Saturday we had a picnic in the park on a beautiful sunny day and headed to Amsterdam for the afternoon. We walked around, saw a few interesting things took some awesome pictures, but didn't have enough time to go and do things. I might make it back to Amsterdam before the states to see the Anne Frank house or Red Light district but if I don't, at least I saw the beautiful canals and got to travel with Jenny a little. We went with Anoek to her hometown of Appledorn in the evening for her friend's birthday party and to the #1 Gay Club in the Netherlands until 4 AM; had a great time dancing :) Sunday I headed back to Bonn and ran into one of the girls from China in my class at the Train Station in Oberhausen. Turns out she'd been in the Netherlands all weekend too and rode her first bike- a tandem bike through flower fields. How awesome for her :)

This week I start a volunteering project at an elementary school in the Bonn area and work my way through homework for the first time in months. Hope you all have a great week :)
<3
d

Tomorrow is the first day of school!!

So, the day has finally arrived: tomorrow is my first day of school. I plan to wake up early, eat a good breakfast, go running, probably shower after that, run some errands, and go to class at 4 PM... Sort of annoying that class isn't until 4 but that's the way it works. I seem to have a very light course load, only four classes. I have one class for 2 or 3 hours each day, Monday through Thursday (Fridays are free except for a spin class I signed up for :-D). I'll be taking 9 hours worth of class, when they tell us to sign up for 12-18 hours... so I assume an hour transfers as a credit? Seems like it... and with the orientations course, adding another 3 credits, I'll be at 12 and a full time student. Wonderful... should be a nice, easy last semester. The only part that worries me about credits is my English credits... I need 4 credits between two classes to graduate with the requirements for the major and I'll be taking 3 classes for 6 hours worth of English, so I assume I'm covered but my advisor hasn't emailed me back. Awesome... hope it works out :-/

I'm excited to finally meet some new people tomorrow :) I've met some awesome people through out the orientations course, but I love meeting new people. There's something intoxicating about the potential of a new encounter that I find horribly intriguing. I think sometimes I (unfortunately) get bored with people after this wears off, not because they are uninteresting people but because I'm looking for the next intoxication, momentary high if you will, of potential and newness in a relationship. I think this is one instance where I wear rose colored glasses to view the world and set aside my cynicism: I can't wait to meet my classmates tomorrow :)

I'm also excited to meet my professors and see how the relationship here will differ with them. I'm the student who stays after to chat about interesting points in the reading with my professor, I'm the student who will walk 20 minutes out of my way if the professor and I are having a great conversation just so I can walk them where they're going and continue the conversation... I'm also the student who cries when the semester ends because I've become attached to the class (which sometimes prompts the professor to hug me out of pity, maybe sympathy). I hope my professors offer an inkling of the personal attention the professors at Madison offered and I assume they will since the classes I'm taking are upper level and smaller sizes. I'm also excited to be able to offer the English classes, especially American literature classes, an American and native English speaker's perspective on things.

Well, it's almost 11:30 so I should get to bed and be ready for the big day tomorrow :) I'll try to update tomorrow evening.
love you all
d

ps thought I'd leave you with one of my favorite pictures from Scotland: Gwen, Katelynn, Zach and I had just finished a 45 minute climb to the top of a mountain for a gorgeous scenic view of the Scottish landscape. We could see out to sea, the mountains in the opposite direction, all the buildings we saw on the tour earlier that morning, and the sun was shining through the clouds in the beautiful way that makes you hold your breath and almost forget that you aren't looking at a painting. It was a perfect moment and we were elated to experience it, so we captured that happiness in the "jump shot" :) It's a moment I'll never forget.

a stiff drink, to be shit faced drunk, and the graveyard shift

You must be thinking "what an interesting, albeit slightly inappropriate, title for a blog post, Debby. I wonder what this is about." Don't worry baby birds, I'll feed you.
This post is dedicated to three of the most interesting word origins I learned about on the trip to London and Edinburgh. The first happened in London while in Trafalgar Square, the place where people in London gather whenever anything important happens. This is also the square that at one point had 35,000 pigeons so now the birds are fed contraceptives in their feed...
Our tour guide, Coops, took us to the square and told us about Admiral Nelson, a fierce man who lost an arm and an eye in battle and lead the British fleet to many victories. During one such victory, he was fatally wounded and didn't make it through the fight. Being that he was a war hero, and not a common sailor, he was not given a burial at sea but taken back to England for a war hero's reception and burial. To preserve the body during the weeks of the homeward voyage, the body was folded in half and shoved into a barrel, then the barrel was filled with brandy. Strange, but effective. When they arrived at port and opened the barrel, it was found that the brandy was gone! The people were dumbfounded; how could a corpse drink all the brandy? Or maybe he absorbed it all... they were stumped until they took the body out and noticed the holes in the barrel. Sailors had been drilling small holes in the barrel and drinking the brandy, perhaps after a rough day on the boat, the entire time. So the origin of a drink to help people unwind after work, a stiff drink, comes from the stiff lifeless body that the brandy was preserving... disgusting, yet hilarious.

Secondly, we learned many things in Edinburgh about the dead and Scotland's awkward relationship with them. Edinburgh is a small place and for a while it was walled in, so land was precious. When the graveyard filled up with people buried at 6 feet deep, the were buried at 4. When that filled up, they were covered in a shroud and buried at 2 feet deep. When it rained, which it tends to do in Scotland, the top soil would wash away and so would some bones... Years later, when space needed to be made for other things, such as parking lots, the graveyards were relocated. Upon doing this, many coffins were opened and approximately 20% of these had scratch marks on the inside of the coffin... 1/5 of the people in the graveyard were buried alive because of poor medical science and the ability to tell if someone was unconscious or really dead. After this was discovered, for a while they tied strings attached to bells outside the graves to the person's fingers so if they woke up, they could be unearthed. Crazy... Now, once people were buried, it wasn't the end of things. Once you were dead, your body belonged to no one. As long as it was stripped of any possessions, it wasn't stealing, so body snatchers would dig up fresh graves (less than 2 weeks old) and sell the bodies to medical universities for a considerable amount of money. The first serial killers we learned of made a killing (pun intended) doing this. They would get people drunk, bring them back to their place, and then suffocate them in a way that it wasn't detectable that there was foul play. They were eventually caught when they did this during the day and left the body in a pile of kindling to come back for at night and it was discovered by someone. They killed between 17 and 35 people this way (large range since they couldn't detect foul play...). In order to protect your family and friends once they died, people would sit on their graves during the night for the first two weeks; this was called the graveyard shift.
Another great story we heard about grave robbing was about a woman who passed away, was buried, dug up the same night by some grave robbers, and they were intending to sell her body. Now, as I mentioned, the body couldn't have anything on it, or it was considered stealing and the fine was much higher than for just selling a body. Mary's, this woman, fingers were covered in rings and the fingers had swollen so much, that the robbers couldn't get them off no matter what they tried, be it spit, oil, brute force. Eventually, one realized that they didn't need extremities at the medical college and started to cut her fingers off one by one. He cut through one, took the ring off, and threw away the finger. Cut through the next one, no problem. Started to cut the third finger, and Mary woke up screaming at the top of her lungs. Apparently she was just in a coma and the agonizing pain of having her fingers sawed off one by one woke her from it. Wouldn't that be a fantastic wake up? Not so much...

The last word origin we learned in Edinburgh was what it means to be shit faced drunk. The buildings in Edinburgh are built very closely together and many of them are over 5 or 6 stories tall, this left for small alleyways between the buildings, some of which never saw daylight at the bottom. In these alleys, people would yell out the window and then dump their bed chamber pots out; the remains would then be washed to the lake with the next rainfall. To avoid dumping these on people constantly, it was mandated that pots be emptied twice a day, at 7 am and 10 PM. Around the corner from these alleys were the bars where men would gather after work to drink. In these days, wine and beer were more safe to consume than water, which was extremely contaminated (wonder why... waste running into the main source, perhaps?) so men would drink lots of it. At ten pm, when bars closed, they would walk home through these dark alleys and when they heard shouts from above them, they would look up... and get covered in shit because they were too drunk to get out of the way or avoid the alley at that time. Hilarious :) I never knew this phrase had an origin, but I love it.

Hope you all enjoyed this post as much as I did :)
d

First Day of School Eve Weekend

Hey Everyone :) I know it's been a while since I updated, but not much was going on... despite that, I never found time to write. So maybe a lot was going on...? Regardless, the last four weeks of my life were full of the orientations course (in which I received an A, woo!), some field trips to cities near Bonn and photos can be seen on my facebook profile, and exploring the city of Bonn while making some new friends. We finally start classes this coming week, a little later than American colleges... but I'm looking forward to it. I'll be taking a DSH prep course. The DSH is apparently a language test that foreigners need to take in order to study at a German University so if I take this test and pass it, I can come back to study at a German University again no problem. Or just put it on my resume... I'll also be taking four or so English classes at the University, ranging from the American short story to old and middle english incantations :) I'm excited to see the German perspective of the American literature, should be neat. To complete my weeks, I'm also signed up for an indoor cycling class and to volunteer at an elementary school one morning a week for four hours. Should be fantastic :)

We had a short break over Easter of about 6 days so I took a trip with some friends here to London and Edinburgh. We left Friday night and got to London around 9 PM, stayed in a hostel, and explored the city the next day. We did a tour around the important buildings and I enjoyed it a lot, learned a lot about the city, its lay out, and lots of buildings I would have over looked on my own. We also did a pub crawl through an organized company and got to see some of London's pubs, also pretty cool. I really enjoyed the Tube (the subway in London). It's so efficient and awesome... Also, very punctual. Then on Sunday we flew to Glasgow and took a bus across Scotland to Edinburgh. The countryside is so beautiful and green, it's hardly believable. Edinburgh is home to the castle that William Wallace (Braveheart... Mel Gibson) defended. It's also the most haunted city in Europe, or so they claim, so we did a free tour during the day and a ghost tour at night. All the stories about the city were incredible, including seeing the building where JK Rowling wrote the first two Harry Potter stories and the building that possibly inspired Hogwarts. One the tours we learned the origins of the phrases: a stiff drink, to be shit faced drunk, and the graveyard shift. I don't have time to post those today but I promise I will tomorrow since they're super interesting :)

Today I went to the Netherlands with some friends, so that's one more place to cross off the list :-D Going to visit Jenny next weekend hopefully.
miss and love you all
debby

People Watching

The first weekend is coming to a close and I've enjoyed it, though it's been leisurely. I spent Saturday running errands with Mandy and napping until I headed over to Lissi's for the night. I find it so awesome that I can just hop on a train and be there :) I don't have to plan for months ahead of time and buy a plane ticket, I can just decide to go and then take the bus, a short train ride, and walk to her door. Going there will probably be one of my favorite parts of this trip. When I got there, she had mini personal lasagnas made too, super awesome. Mine had little cheese on it and only one kind of cheese. Probably the first time in my life I've enjoyed lasagna, it was delicious. Watched "Where the Wild Things Are" in German, interesting... really cute movie though. Then hung out with Jonas and his friends as they played a poker tournament. I didn't want to pay the 3E entrance and they were half way through by the time I joined so I watched this time around.

Today we went to the Trudel Markt, a giant flee market with all sorts of useful and mostly useless things that one can barter for. I made off with a scarf and belt (since my pants are becoming loose) for 7,50E ($10). Not a bad deal. It was fun to walk around and look at things, see my facebook album for pictures. Lissi and Alfred let me take an entire kitchen's worth of stuff (awesome) back to the dorm so I can now cook :) Eating out isn't that expensive though when I do it with Mandy because we tend to split entrees. She doesn't eat much and I get bored eating only one thing so it totally works out and saves us both money ha ha. Like tonight: ordered a pizza that was 26 cm, 8 small slices. I ordered a salad also so I only ate two slices and saved two, Mandy got the other four. The pizza was 5E total so 2,50 each and for two meals, that's about as cheap as it gets. Awesome. We rock. Now I'm headed out to meet Gwen and others, should be the first time I'm wearing heels anywhere here :)

One of my favorite things about Germany is the public transportation and in general one of my favorite past times is people watching. Public transportation provides an endless stream of strangers to observe and make up stories about so I love taking the train. On the way to Lissi's yesterday I encountered a man on the 16 who was carrying a bouquet of flowers and was traveling alone. This man appeared older, possibly in his early 70's, about the age of retirement. I started to daydream about where he was going and who the flowers were for... Maybe he's a widower and he's off to visit his wife's grave. Maybe he's visiting his daughter for a Saturday evening dinner. Maybe he's recently retired and has been getting in his wife's way just sitting around the house, so he decided to go out for a stroll and is returning home for dinner with some flowers to say he's sorry but he loves her. Maybe he's brought her flowers every Saturday and it's become something lovely that she expects, a bright spot in her weekend, some springtime in her winter each week. I imagine he kisses her on the cheek as she takes them to put in the pot and then hugs her from behind, wrapping his arms around her waist as he's done for probably fifty years.
I hope he's gotten them to celebrate something.
One can only imagine...

One can also only hope that this man is happy. That everyone's story is a happy one. Though some are not.

The first week

I'm sure you're all wondering why I haven't posted and are anxiously awaiting hearing about my week. Well, I had a wonderful 3 day headache trying to get access to the internet and finally fixed it about 30 hours ago. Thank god, my room felt small and empty without internet connection... Oh what technology has done to me. After problems with the room number and then the network server, along with finally my computer needing to download and extra program since it's running an older version of XP, it was a huge nightmare. I'm still annoyed at the extremely closed network which isn't allowing me to purchase skype credit to call friends back home. I had to go to the cafe next door and use their 1 euro cent/minute computer to do it... fun stuff.

So this week was a long one but now it's the weekend. Things have finally settled a bit, into a routine of sorts. The public transportation is fantastic here; multiple buses pick up a half block from my dorm and bring me directly to the university main building. They come every ten minutes, without fail, and drive quickly and efficiently.
Tuesday, arrival day, I moved in after Lydia and Jonas brought me to the city. At first, I had no idea what to do with my time since there was nothing planned for the entire day besides moving in. I went exploring to find a grocery store, bought some things to make sandwiches and snack foods, and got settled in my dorm. Unfortunately, it was extremely dusty and dirty and I was told to clean it up myself... with an ancient vacuum that spit out more than it picked up.
Yea, looks fun, huh? So I cleaned a bit. Went out to dinner with more students from Madison and the entire international program here. My Bonn Buddy, Sanja, also came. She's very sweet, about my size, and we have similar taste in a lot of things like music, literature, bad television... I think we'll be great friends throughout this semester. Dinner was alright, Mexican food, and the service was... well, up to German standards. Going out to dinner here is an event because it takes a long time anywhere for the server to notice you, since they aren't making tips and have no incentive, and when you ask for something... like a refill (which you have to pay for) or condiments, don't except them any sooner than 5 minutes from then. I wasn't in the world's best mood at dinner because I was already feeling extremely homesick. After Lydia and Jonas left me, and I was left with nothing to do really, it felt like being away at college for the first time again. I didn't know what to do with my time. I felt very alone... I kept trying to tell myself that things would get better within the next few days but all I could feel was a gaping hole somewhere inside me, like everything I loved was missing and was going to stay out of reach for a long, long time. It's a painful and lonely feeling.
Wednesday was the Orientation day, which was spent watching a slideshow presentation that was presented in English and German and thus took two times as long as it should have, and then we were taken on a walking tour of the campus, though my group only saw the library really, and ate lunch at the Mensa (student cafeteria).
(The slide to the right is from the Orientation. It says: "German beer: *is probably the best in the world *contains a lot of alcohol". yep)
That afternoon, while still trying frantically to connect to the internet, I encountered a red haired american looking girl wearing both Uggs, a northface hoodie, and then an American Eagle sweatshirt underneath. She seemed lost and confused, so I offered her help. Her name is Mandy, she's from Louisiana, was also born here in Germany and moved away as a child, but she didn't have the benefit of a great college German program so her German speaking abilities are underdeveloped. Or so she thinks, I think she's doing just fine. She reminds me of Julia Roberts, both in appearance and in her voice, possibly the slight southern accent. It's cute. We started to hang out after she let me use her internet, seeing as I still didn't have any, and realized how lonely and homesick we both were. We've basically been inseparable since Wednesday afternoon and everyone else we hang out with seems to assume we've known each other for much longer. I think we're going to be great friends through out the whole semester and probably after... she's very low drama and the same sort of girl I fancy myself to be.
Thursday morning was the German placement test. Cue the dramatic music! We had an hour long test, consisting of six parts, which tested our ability to hear German, to pose questions, vocabulary, prepositions, article endings and cases, and a comprehension section where we filled in missing things in a paragraph. It was definitely interesting and I felt like I did pretty well on it leaving the test. Mandy and I then went to run errands, like registering for the City. They took my German passport and crossed out "brookfield, Wi USA" and stamped "Bonn" over it. Pretty hardcore... We also opened a bank account for her and took care of Lease contracts at the Studentenwerk Building. I continued to try to fix my internet there...
Thursday night we went to Sanja's house to watch the premiere of Germany's Next Top Model, which Heidi Klum hosts, and enjoyed a feast of German junk food. It was strange to hear Heidi speak in German and not in English with her cute accent... she was somehow less charming this way. Sanja claims if you listen closely, you can tell by Heidi's syntax that she is losing her German speaking abilities in lieu of her America lifestyle. Interesting...
Friday we received the results of the placement test. We sat in a room, all ~110 students, and were told to listen for our names. 11 teachers, forming 11 groups, called off their students. Slowly the Asians were called off... then american students... no one from Madison until group 6 or so... then I looked around and realized there were maybe 20 people left and I started to think I had done really well on this test. Then Mandy's name was called for group 10... and only 11 of us remained. We were the cream of the crop. 3 of us from Madison, 4 of us having German roots in the group, and 3 girls from China who have only studied German for 2 years apparently. I placed in the top group... wow. I couldn't stop smiling. It feels nice to have something acknowledge my German skill level I suppose, besides people telling me "aber du sprechst doch gut deutsch!"
We had a couple hours of introducing one another and getting to know the teacher, and picking a German workshop in the afternoon. I chose two: grammar for the upper level and modern short prose works. We'll see how interesting they are... There's another test on April 1st which should be difficult but hopefully I'm well prepared. I'm excited to have some sort of structure now, to be starting classes after 2 or 3 months of not being in class. Actual classes will start in April and that will also prove interesting I'm sure.
Last night we had a welcome kick off party with a free chinese buffet and some free beer and soda. It was an enjoyable time and I've been getting to know a lot of students from all over the States, China, and Germany. I'm excited to build these friendships and branch out from the people from Madison, though they are also pretty cool :)

Now we're off to buy Mandy a cell phone since we can't unlock the main doors to each others floors and we feel pretty ridiculous skyping together in the same building... or awesome. I mean whatever you want to call it. I definitely still miss home, miss my friends, my boyfriend? whatever you want to call him... not sure if he's reading this ha ha but things are getting better. I feel like I'm going to like the city, like five months will go by quickly, and like I will enjoy this experience. I'm starting to think in German too so my next post might not be intelligible...

Der Jersey Hills

One thing I credit american television with founding is the phenomenon known as reality television. Starting with MTVs the real world, nearly 25 seasons of television ago, the art of reality television grew to the heights of The Hills and Jersey Shore in a few short years. These shows, some artfully flimmed and others crudely captured, offer a 'real' look at the lives of controversial groups of young, usually rich, and beautiful people in America. Thankfully, this art form has thrived to the point of export all over the world... including Germany. While the drunken one night stand sort of antics reign supreme on MTV, VH1, and the likes, Germans prefer to show something more meaningful such as cultural clashes between immigrants and natives, and what it actually means to be a native or an immigrant.
This new found guilty pleasure is titled 'Its My Life' (not a translation, is just given as such on German TV) and is a reality show, filmed in a style that seems amateurish when compared to the Hills. The camera angles don't pan back and forth between characters, there are no close ups, it's more like it was filmed with only one camera man and no set up of the scene was given beforehand. Real reality in a way. Annoyingly real, as almost nothing goes on.
The characters of this show are 5 girls, all related as cousins, and all teenagers. They come from Turkish families, a large immigrant community within Germany. The Turkish people have been here so long though, 2 or more generations (after WWII), that the children are born here and raised as Germans. They retain a strong connection to their cultural roots, however, they feel like Auslaender (people from other lands) both in Germany where they live and in Turkey where they visit remaining family. They speak about the trials of belonging to two worlds, having a boyfriend with whom they can't go on dates with until they are engaged (um... what happens if the first date then goes badly?), about needing their male cousins' permission to go out with friends for the night, and how even though German law says 16 year olds may drink alcohol, they aren't allowed to by their cultural and family rules. While Heidi and Spencer may never understand the trials these girls go through, these girls don't understand how to be as entertaining as american reality stars. When two girls started to argue, one walked away to cool off after about 10 seconds of arguing... in case the police came, she didn't want to get in trouble seeing as she has ambitions to be a police officer herself. In the next scene, it was mentioned that she wasn't there because the argument hadn't been forgotten, then in the following scene the girls were sitting next to each other and laughing again. MTV would have dragged that arguement out into a 4 episode arc with lingering repercussions and maybe some boyfriend stealing thrown in for good measure. Jersey Shore would have fist pumped their way into jail over it. German TV however acted too adult about it to provide any entertainingly redeeming facet... The show provided some interesting insights but the teasers for what was going to happen didn't leave me wanting more. The portrayal of the male cousins leaves one feeling incredibly sorry for the girls who on one hand respect their culture and on the other, want to take part in the modern world. One girl was hit by her cousin when he saw her at a cafe with two girlfriends, having an alcoholic beverage, without permission. Lydia told me how their culture, along with other middle eastern cultures, still believe in honor killings and such sources of punishment. In an honorific society in the middle east, if a woman is raped, it is her fault. She has lost her virginity and dishonored her family. To regain honor, her brother or father must kill her. Amazing how in the year 2010 we live in a world still plagued by such horrors...

Another horror, for the record, is a German video store ha ha one must be 18 to enter, and for good reason. The ratio of new releases, classic films, and the like to porn is about 1:3... Along with giant cardboard cut outs of the 'film's' stars. Awesome. Note to self: keep your eyes on the ground and learn to read Braille to check out a movie.

Was able to run today, despite the weather being less beautiful than two days ago. Tried to buy a skype camera and mikrofon but the digital store is only open 4 days a week, today was not one of them. Headed to Bonn tomorrow! Dinner with Sanja, my Bonn Buddy, and others around 6, then who knows. Hopefully settling into a routine will make days pass more quickly. I'm excited to start my classes, it's been too long since I had a good discussion about English literature :) the nerd in me needs to come out...