Weltmeisterschaft 2010!

Wow... what an incredible time to be in Germany. I'm not sure if I can explain how intense the World Cup is here, but I'm going to try.
So the group stage is now over, after each country has played 3 games and tried its best to advance to the knock out stage and continue its hopes of World Cup Domination. Germany has made it through to the next round, thanks for a win tonight against Ghana (who the US now has to play on Saturday) and the celebration in the city is, literally, insane. In the best possible way.
The game ended in the open air plaza where I was watching with hundreds of other people, most of whom were dressed with German flags wrapped around themselves and with German flags painted on their faces.

This <--- is what the plaza looked like after Germany scored its goal. The arm in the picture is a man in a German flag waving a 2nd german flag and started some chants :) Fantastic. Everyone jumped up and was cheering like crazy, blowing their noise makers, high fiving, and screaming at the top of their lungs. Good things goals don't happen too often ha ha On my way to the Bus station to catch the bus back to my dorm, I cross a road the runs right along the area where the buses pick up and runs through the center of the city. This road was backed up beyond belief and police were standing everywhere, ready to break apart a riot or something. There were people all over in the roads, probably drunk, celebrating that Germany has won and moved on. These boys were making a canopy of German flag that cars had to drive under/through, it was hilarious. Most cars were pretty cool about it too, and the police officer who was standing about ten feet away.

As I was standing at the bus station, I had about ten to fifteen minutes to wait for the next bus, I was watching all the literally hundreds of people walking by to their trains or buses or next bar and not a single one wasn't wearing either black, red, gold, a german flag, a german colors flower necklace, or had a german flag painted on their faces (or other body parts). It's incredible how patriotic the Germans are when they're allowed to be. The World Cup gives them the chance to be proud of their country and to showcase that pride. Back to the bus station though: this road that runs right by the station was FULL of people, not kidding at all the street was literally almost invisible and the cars looked out of place. The people were standing and cheering as the cars drove by, innocently enough. When a car happened to be enthused though, the crowd became ridiculous. They would shake the car, cheer even louder, chant German soccer songs in the street, the car would honk its horn, people would be hanging out of the windows or sun roofs and screaming. Insane.



This is the amount of people lining the street. You can sort of see them shaking a car behind the bench also. Poor people in the car ha ha













This is all the people lining the street. Incredible...









The bus finally arrived and I got on. About 3 stops later, the bus was stuck at a stand still in traffic because of all the celebrating, so I got out and walked home the rest of the 20 minutes from there. As I walked down Bertha-von-Suttner Platz, a busy area where the street cars and buses have multiple stops outside the Beethoven house, the atmosphere was incredibly infectious. I found myself smiling non-stop and cheering along with the crowds. As I got to the end of the road, I noticed people were all looking behind me at something so I turned around. There was a man climbing on top of a bus stop shell to jump on the top of the halted bus, to start shaking it... all while cheering madly and being egged on by thousands of people around him in the street. The people inside the bus looked terrified but it was amazing to see. I kept walking and was honked at by many many cars and started cheering each time. (to the right is a pretty awful picture... thanks night time... of the incredibly crowded road on the way back, the street where the man was on the bus) On the way back, I encountered two German boys and I asked them if they had been here in 2006 (when Germany hosted the cup and took 3rd) and if it was always like this. They said it's always like this when Germany wins... so I can't wait for more wins and celebrations :)
It's now shortly after midnight and the game ended about two hours ago. I still here the sound of car horns and cheering out the window, less with each passing minute but they're still there.
I find it incredible the way the Germans channel their patriotism into the outlet of football and how deep their passion for their country runs. When it surfaces, it's phenomenal to witness. I doubt I'll ever see a frenzy like this in America, even Badger game days don't compare. There's something special about the world cup.
I hope I get a chance to see a game in Cologne and witness the insanity in an even bigger city.
Let's go, Deutschland! '54, '74, '90, 2010!!!!!

bee tee dubbs

Classes are going well, halfway through and I need to start thinking about the papers I'm going to be writing... ew. What's homework again? ha ha the course load is ridiculously simple compared to Madison. Great semester to have senioritis! ha ha
I won't be traveling for two weeks or so until June 25th when I'm headed to Portugal (Faro) for a long weekend with friends, should be amazing. I'm nervous because it'll be my first trip to a country where I can't speak the language... yea...
Then I need to decide where I want to travel the last week of July/first week of August while Lissi is on vacation and before I leave for the states again... God, less than two months... :( Don't want to think about that.

After being gone for two weeks, the kids were really excited to have me back on Tuesday. Some were being really naughty but others bombarded me with little hugs :) Made me feel really great that they missed me. I taught them Kickball yesterday which was so fun but hard because they don't understand baseball so I had nothing to base it off of. At first they didn't understand the idea of staying in the baseline, of having to touch each base and not just run a giant circle, of having to tag someone out and not throw the ball at the runner, of not skipping over a runner ahead of you because they're going too slowly ha ha It was great :) They thought it was complicated but they did a good job. Frau Schumacher also thought it was good practice for both me and the kids to give and understand instructions in a foreign language/by a non-native (ish) speaker... It's awkward saying things like "if you catch the ball in the air, the kicker is out"... Who has a vocabulary made for that? ha ha. Answer: not really me. I managed though :) I'm definitely getting attached to the kids and developing individual connections with many of them. I'm going to miss them... They're so incredible. About ten of them are from another country or have parents who are and are learning a 3rd language (beside German and English in school) already. It's amazing. I like having discussions with them about what America is like and how it's different and just spending time with them during the work times. They invited me on their field trip in July too so that will be fun.

Microwave update: it still sparks sometimes when it heats things up. I find this very dangerous, everyone else finds it normal and doesn't care enough to replace it. Fantastic: I may die in a mircowave fire.

Otherwise, life is good. The weather is starting to get nicer and I spent today wandering in the Drachenfels hills in Konigswinter to see a castle and some ruins.. then headed to the Birkenstock outlet for some 50% off sandals (yep, suck it :-p). First pair of legit sandals... we'll see how I like them.

Now it's time to catch up on sleep again.
miss and love you all
d

Hamburg: long overdue

I've been gone for the last nearly 3 weeks traveling and didn't have time to update the blog at all, sorry! This post is about the long weekend in Hamburg at the beginning of May and in the next few days I hope to write about the week in Paris and week in Berlin. Here goes: :)
I decided on Monday around 8:00 PM with Alyssa, while we were waiting for Aerobic Bodywork to start, that since we had Thursday off class and we have no class on Fridays that we should go to Hamburg for the long weekend. Why not? Couldn't think of a good reason since getting there cost less than 50 Euro ($70)... it did involve 5 different trains though ha ha
We traveled with Ben, a guy I know from Madison, and met up with Ben's cousin in Hamburg because he recently moved there. Ben's cousin met us at the train station, helped us buy our local train ticket pass for the next few days, took us on a short walk around a cute lake in Hamburg. Not much was open due to the holiday and it was "Father's Day" which in Germany means men get together and drink... without their families? A bit backwards ha ha. We headed to our first hostel shortly thereafter. Since we got our train tickets on Tuesday, we had to book a hostel on Wednesday for the following day. I didn't think this would be a problem considering it's Hamburg and not, say, Paris... false. There was something going on in Hamburg that weekend so I had to make about 20 calls to different hostels and finally found some decently priced ones. The first was a sort of hotel and was really nice. The second ended up being an international youth hostel association member so it was REALLY nice with a great breakfast spread ha ha. They were both located a short ways from the city center so lots of trains happened but it wasn't bad at all. I would definitely recommend both places without hesitation. That's a picture of the City Hall in Hamburg which is huge! It's important because it's the city-state's capitol and therefore city-state city hall also.
After settling into the hostel we decided to go wandering. We found some interesting places and then out of no where a red line... it looked promising. We decided to follow it and were led through a cute quarter of the city.
We found some interesting things like an Otto Von Bismarck monument, the Reeperbahn aka red light district of Hamburg and the best area to go out at night, an interesting restaurant for dinner where I had an awful Hamburger... sad face, but Ben had a great "lady steak" ha ha that's what they called the smaller steak. We were pretty beat from traveling and had a big day ahead of us so we didn't go out, just got some much needed sleep since the journey begin around 5 AM that day.
The next morning started early since we had to move our things from the first hostel to the second, on the opposite end of the city, before we had a walking tour at 11 AM. Our tour was extremely informative and made me realize a lot about Hamburg. I didn't realize the city had such a history and culture to it... I hadn't traveled much around Germany before this semester so I didn't know what to expect. It's a big city with a lot of history from WWII because it was bombed heavily and experienced a Great Fire in 1842 which allowed the city to rebuild itself in a way most European cities don't have the opportunity to. They have a lot of memorials for the war too, which is something I like about Germany.
An interesting part of the tour was seeing the opera house that's being built on the harbor, it's supposed to be as iconic as the Sydney opera house when it's finished. It looks like an iceberg in a way. It's supposed to be a wave on top of a warehouse building (there's a large warehouse district where the opera house is being built)... google a picture, it looks incredible.After the tour we went back to a memorial at the St Nikolai Church for WWII. The church was bombed to piece but the tower was reconstructed and memorials constructed where the church stood. It was bombed during the biggest air raid of WWII which destroyed a large portion of the city and left thousands of people homeless.
This is where the church's frame stood. There are memorials to victims of concentration camps, the entrance for the church archive through the mini pyramid, and other statues.
There was also a peaceful and asian inspired garden next to the tower... I liked it a lot.


This is the tower that still stands, we went up it and looked at all the pictures of what the city looked like after the bombings and how badly the church was burned down. It was incredible... it never ceases to amaze me how awful people can be and the kinds of things we do it war.

After the memorial, we headed to the hostel to check in and set up our rooms, took a short nap because we were exhausted, had some dinner and headed to a wax museum called the Panoptikum on the Reeperbahn before we went out. The Panoptikum is no Madame Tussau's but they definitely had some interesting figures. We got yelled at for sitting on a stone wall that was apparently also made out of wax ha ha but we got some interesting pictures with some 'famous people'. I have them all detailed in the Facebook album but here are some favorites:

The two Benedicts ha ha



The creepy Hilter wax figure that was made in like 1941... yea...


Apparently Harry Potter is famous enough to be a wax figure? ha ha

This is us being Beatles Groupies :)
After the museum we headed out on a Pub Crawl, where you pay 10 euro or so and get to be taken to 5 different bars and clubs and given drinks/drink specials, it's a good deal usually. We had a lot of fun, met some interesting people from England (a whole bachelor party) and some from places like New Zealand, Australian, North Dakota ha ha

The following day was spent at an interesting art exhibit (let's just say it was more sexually charged than we expected... because we apparently walked into the wrong art building and weren't at the photography exhibit like we thought). We also walked around HafenCity, the warehouse area, with Ben's cousin. We later in the evening went to Miniatur Wonderland, lots of models of things built in an intricate and amazing way (for pictures see the facebook album). We ended the night with dinner at 11 PM at an "american restaurant" and out at a disco with some of the guys from the night before.

Unfortunately we didn't have nice weather until the last day when we had only a few hours to enjoy it before taking the train back to Bonn. I really enjoyed Hamburg and had a rough week following it because we pulled two all-nighters and got little to no sleep for three days. There was so much to do and we were having such a great time that sleep just didn't matter. I'm really glad I went... before going, it didn't sound as exotic as some other places people were headed to for the long weekend but I had an amazing time with Alyssa and Ben, really enjoyed the city itself, and felt like I learned a lot about a city that plays an important role in Germany's history. I would recommend traveling there to anyone :) So many things to see and do for all types of travelers.

Alright: Paris and Berlin updates coming soon! Promise!

Post Modern Colonialization

Volunteering at the Elementary School has easily become one of my favorite, though most tiring, parts of the week and this week was especially fun because I was able to bring in some American candy for the kids to try.

They tried smarties which they thought were good but sour, tootsie rolls which they thought tasted like caramel more than chocolate ha ha, candy buttons which they loved but kept trying to get every bit of paper off the back of it, and some old time wafer things that one girl claimed smelled like smoke after you licked it ha ha









Frau Schumacher played a game with them after we handed out the candy and the winner got extra pieces so they liked that. This was called Jaeger/Hase or Hunter/Rabbit. When she said Rabbit, they ducked and Hunter, they jumped up. She would try to confuse them and any movement if you were supposed to stay down, like for more than one Rabbit in a row, resulted in disqualification! Intense...








They are cute little monsters though... :)

Lucas was a mess that day, he had chocolate on his face and ink on his nose ha ha :) But they had a math test that morning and I sat next to him to keep him focused, didn't tell him the answers though, and he did really well. He's smart, he just needs to focus... He apparently asks Frau Schumacher everyday now "Kommt die Debby heute?" "Is Debby coming today?" :) That made my day when she told me.



This is a group of children hyped up on foreign candy... good thing they had recess next ha ha :)




Felix was telling me how he knows the word for Frieden, Peace, in English and was giving the peace sign :) I couldn't help but laugh.

I know Frau Schumacher enjoys having the help and it has really become the most rewarding part of my experience here... it's definitely making me realize I would miss teaching and the classroom setting in my life, I want to pursue it back in Milwaukee.




Well that's all for now, I'm headed to Hamburg eeeeearly tomorrow morning for the long weekend with Alyssa, Ben, Kent, and Cassandra. Should be exciting, I've never been to Northern Germany :) I'll post on Monday for sure.
miss and love
d

Reflecting

For some reason, a strange mood has hit me and I've decided to reflect on a lot of things in a blog post... Maybe it'll help to get it all out in to words and I don't have a journal here with me, sadly. I should probably buy one.
Regardless, here goes.

This mood started a short while ago as I was looking at my old roommate's profile on facebook... it feels like forever ago that I was sharing a room with her but it was only a few months and just last semester. For some reason, the memories I have of that last apartment and semester are imprinted differently than previous years. It feels like a waking dream almost. It's as if I woke up from a really long dream and remember flashes of it, but no details. I can't recall what Meg and I talked about when we were going to sleep... but I do remember the sounds outside my window, like a comforting lullaby, comforting only because of its familiarity. I remember standing in front of the balcony door in the middle of the night, having gotten up for some reason, and without turning the lights on just watching the wind move the trees and the snow come down during the storm, but I can't tell you what side of the door the handle was on. It's all a vague blur for some reason, which is startling because I was trying so hard to remember every detail as it happened because I knew it was my last semester.
Then I started to think about how this, this semester in Bonn, is my final semester. I saw a picture of Madison earlier on newsfeed and it made me miss being there in the Spring semester very badly. I think the pain, the missing, isn't coming from literally wanting to be there right now... it's more like I'm trying to begin to part with that era of my life and realizing it did go by just as quickly as everyone said it would... and that I didn't listen. I didn't do enough, didn't take enough chances, didn't live enough adventures. I have great memories but, like most people, I wish I knew then what I know now... to stop worrying about the little things and maybe stay out later with friends instead of studying for a pop quiz.
I think I took things like spending the last semester on campus or walking at graduation with a grain of salt and I shouldn't have because I would have liked, very much, a picture of me in a cap and gown on Bascom Hill and, sadly, I will never have that. Conversely though, I want to preserve the memory of my Grandfather at Jenny's graduation and hope he would have looked as happy if he would have made it to mine. That was one of the last times I saw him and I don't think I could make it through a day that reminded me that much of him without being sad.

Maybe this is all coming from a place of fear too because now I need to "grow up", not that I haven't in the process of the last 5 years, and find a job, find a life... build a life rather. Scary. Where do I even start?
Maybe with finishing my homework and going to bed...

Spring is finally coming!

It seems the weather in Germany has decided to come late this year but spring is finally here. This weekend was beautiful and I had time to lay out in the sun on the Hofgarten (a giant lawn in front of the castle where my classes are) and to explore Dusseldorf with some friends on Saturday. I went with Katelynn and Mandy, the two girls from Louisiana, Zach (who I went to the UK with), Suzanne and Uliana, both girls from Madison. We explored the city, went to an aquatic zoo, and saw Konigsallee which is a really pretty boulevard to walk up and down. It was a perfect day so even I had ice cream. Mandy and I headed back pretty early, around 5 PM, to get to H&M and shop a little for the 80s party we were going to that night. I finally found some shorts that fit :) yay. They are plaid though so I can't wear them with everything. I also found some tank tops... which are striped. I have an unnatural obsession with stripes ha ha it's like the indecisive person's wardrobe solution though: can't decide what color to wear today? wear two at once! problem solved.

Sanja, my buddy, invited us to her friend Jacky's place to have some drinks before the 80s party at a bar. It was definitely fun to hang out with everyone and the weather held out so it wasn't freezing to wander around in. Didn't make it to the 80s part of the night though, I got tired around midnight and headed home around 1 130ish? The Germans start their nights later since they don't have a bar close and I'm still not used to that.

Today is 2 months that I've been here! Incredible... Time really is flying now. In 3 months and 10 days (I just counted quickly) I'll be heading home. I did plan my next trip though! In May for the Pentecost Break, Mandy and I are headed to Paris from the 22-27. This is the closest thing I have to a life long dream and I am beyond excited. I can't wait to see the Eifel Tower and the other buildings that make up the iconic skyline of Paris... It will be fantastic. The week after that I'll be headed to Berlin with the Junior Year Program. After that I need to take my finances into account and figure out if I can travel anymore. If I can, I want to make it to Poland for a weekend to see the concentration camp at Auschwitz... That's something that won't be a fun trip but it will be impacting and memorable. I also would love to see Italy or Greece, maybe head back to Amsterdam again for a night or two.
Maybe I can travel with Jenny if she makes it here this summer :)

Well now I should go do some homework... It's hard getting back in to the swing of things with school after being off for so long and not really having any assignments but it's nice having a routine again. I really am happy I came and I'm enjoying my time here, I know I'll be sad when I have to leave but at least I, unlike most of the people on the program, have the opportunity to live here again in life if I so choose... :)
love you all
xo
d

New Favorite Quote from class reading

"Oh, Edith, this is our golden time! Tarnish it not by any pensive shadow of the mind; for it may be, that nothing of futurity will be brighter than the mere remembrance of what is now passing."
Nathaniel Hawthorne "The May-Pole of Merry Mount"

Simultaneously brings to mind the notion of carpe diem and to love each moment as if it were your last while cynically assuming the future is probably downhill from moments of euphoric joy. I'm not sure which reading I want to win out... the poetic cynic in me likes having them both there.