How to succeed in a foreign country without missing home too much

I really like Germany. I've enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to live and work here for the past nine months; the idea that it will come to an end in three weeks is both hard to believe and sad. I am fortunate enough to live in a time when world travel is both possible and easy (if rather pricey and stressful sometimes), so I can say with some certainty that this will not be my last time in Germany. Despite that, I will miss my colleagues, my job, my friends, the language, döner kebabs, and the place I've called home.

That does not mean, however, that my time here has been all sunshine and roses.

The entire winter, for example, was cloudy. And grey.

Sometimes you really just want to have a normal conversation in English, without having to coach a reluctant student through unknown vocabulary. My colleagues are fluent and friendly, but there's something different about talking with a native speaker, especially one with whom you have inside jokes.

A couple things have allowed me to read and hear English on a regular basis. I highly recommend them to anyone who is traveling in a foreign country, has access to the internet, and just wants a taste of home.

Thing 1: The Daily Show. John Stewart is hilarious and the studio audience laughs along with me, unlike Germans. Germans aren't big into displays of humor.

Thing 2: The Colbert Report. Ditto. As an added bonus, you can watch both shows from anywhere in the world (or at least in Europe). For reasons unknown to me, they are not part of the "if you don't live in the country where this was produced, that's too bad for you, nya-nya-nya" rules that accompany pretty much every other thing on television.

Thing 3: My home library. In addition to its collection of real books - and I will be reveling in that collection soon enough - it has a number of electronic resources. I have downloaded audiobooks and ebooks all year with great joy and had a grand old time not working so hard to understand every single page. Don't ask me about reading children's books in German. No fun. I think many libraries have a partnership with a company called Overdrive, which provides these electronic resources. Check it out if you're so inclined.

Thing 4: Skype. Seriously, how did the world survive before video calling? I've had my bouts of homesickness both in Germany and while at college, and Skype has been a lifeline. I talk with family and friends regularly. It's nice to feel like I'm still somehow part of these important people's lives even though I'm across an ocean.

Thing 5: Chocolate. Sometimes you just need it. Chocolate is delicious.

So there you go. Along with actually liking the place where you live, making friends, and having a purpose for being wherever-you-are, this is my formula for living abroad. Feel free to add any other stress-relievers or tricks that you know.

Daily Chuckle #7

A seventh-grade student describing how the character in a story became embarassed:
Student: And then she turned into red.
Me: If she turned into red, then she is red now. Poof, I'm red!
Student: I do not think you are.

A twelfth-grade student writing a mock cover letter for a job in psychiatry:
Student: If I want to work with people who have problems with drugs, what is the verb?
Me: Um...to help?
Student: No no, for the people who have the problem. Do they consume drugs or consummate drugs?
Me: Definitely not consummate. Consume is technically true, but we say they use or abuse drugs.
Student: Oh, what does consummate mean?
Me: Ask your mother.
Student: She doesn't speak English.

A colleague in the teacher's room:
Colleague: Jessica, how is President Obama today?
Me: I...don't know. We don't usually talk.
Colleague: But you are American! You must know how he is, in your heart!

A fifth-grade student, after his neighbor says something to me in German:
Student #1: She doesn't speak German! English!
Student #2: Oh. But I don't know how to say in English.
Student #1 (in German): You should think about that before you say something in the future. 

The attack of the Hochwasser

Living along the Rhine has its literal ups and downs. This week specifically saw a pretty dramatic up, as in, the water levels.

Due to heavy downpour in the entirety of central Europe last weekend, every river was running high and pouring all the extra water into the large rivers, like the Donau and the Rhine. I got back from a visit to England on Monday, having not really checked the news for several days, to find that a bunch of ship traffic was waiting on one side of the bridge because the water levels were too high for the huge cargo vessels to fit underneath. This happens with some frequency, since ships are built larger and larger and bridges are not similarly supersized. I figured there had been some rain and the river had gone up a few feet.

Ha. Hahahahaha.

See the bush? That's where the path normally is.

The ducks are having a grand ol' time.

Construction bits moved to the top of the wall

Dirt and gravel dumped in the gap in the wall.

The river is trying to sneak around the gravel!

This entire area is usually construction headquarters.

High-walk.

The fire department helpfully installed this high walk, just in case the river actually made it past the wall that was purposefully built to keep it from getting this far. You know, the construction that woke me up for a month straight when I first moved to my apartment? The huge machines I still dodge nearly every morning on my way to the bus? The wall that has cost the city a great deal of time and money, and means that my lovely view of the Rhine is obstructed by backhoes and mobile offices?

Apparently no one trusts it.

So if the water were to come up as far as the houses, the fire department would bring in steps or ladders and we could all walk high above the river, safe and dry. Then presumably I could enter through my neighbor's window, swim downstairs to my apartment, and...cook? This seems rather unhelpful for those of us blessed/cursed with a first-floor dwelling. This is presumably why my landlady lives on the second floor of her house next door and rents out the first floor.

You will be happy to know that these pictures represent the highest that the water ever came. My apartment is safe, my feet are dry, and the river is slowly returning to its usual place. It's not quite there yet - the path is still underwater, with ducks and swans merrily paddling about - but I'm hopeful that by early next week I can go for my walks along the no-longer-flooding Rhine.

(Hochwasser, literally "high water", is the German word for flooding. Where English-speakers would say that the river is flooding, Germans say that the "high water comes!")

Public transportation

Normally I'm a big fan of European public transportation. It's (mostly) non-sketchy, fairly cost-effective over distances under four hours, it runs regularly, and it saves me from the expense and stress of actually having a car.

I wish the States had a similar system. Seriously, I'm headed to Colorado this summer for a friend's wedding and my choices for transport are a) rent a car or b) rent a car. Or c) ride the Greyhound at 2am by myself from the sketchy bus station in an unknown city. So really, just a) and b).

But I digress.

Last Thursday was the Feast of Corpus Christi, called Fronleichnam in Germany. Don't ask me what that means. As is often the case, largely-secular Germany has a tradition of religious holidays and no one is willing to give that up because of silly things like not actually following the religion in question, so we had a four-day weekend. I headed to England to visit some friends who are studying there. As a cost-conscious person, I flew Ryanair, Europe's budget airline. They manage to be cheap because they fly out of the most inconvenient, non-central airports possible. In Germany it's not an issues - there's a bus that goes straight from my city to Frankfurt Hahn (the budget airport): eleven euros, one hour, badabing, badaboom.

Not so easy in England. London's budget airport is called Stansted and it is the spawn of the devil. Buses travel the two hours from Stansted to London with some frequency, but I was going to Oxford and I was on a pretty tight schedule to get there before my hosts left for an evening engagement. I wasn't keen on wandering the streets for several hours Friday night. I bought a ticket for one of the few buses that goes from Stansted to Oxford - as Oxford is a student town, you'd think there would be more buses, but no - and was three minutes late thanks to a combination of plane delays and England's obsessive, excessive border control. I missed the bus and discovered that the next direct one left in three hours, too late for my agreed-upon meeting time.

Thankfully I was able to work out an alternate route through London, switched buses, and made it with four minutes to spare.

On Monday, I again pre-booked my ticket on a bus direct to Stansted, waited at the nearest bus stop, and watched my bus drive right by without stopping. Again I found an alternate route through London, inquired at the main office as to the reason my bus had not stopped, and was told that I'd booked it for the wrong stop. That particular bus, uniquely of all the buses in Oxford, only stops at the places where you have pre-booked. I had accidentally chosen the city center rather than the stop closest to where I was staying when buying my ticket, and so the bus passed me by.

Equally thankfully, I was able to buy a ticket on another bus that got me to Stansted just in time for my flight back to Germany.

So this morning I was already feeling a little sour towards European public transportation. Just to tease me, my bus was late this morning, so I missed my usual train, and the second train was also late, though only by five minutes. I power-walked to school, arrived somewhat sweaty but (barely) on time, and promptly began to think longingly about my environmentally-unsound personal car waiting for me in the States. I know buses and trains are the way of the future and I'd really prefer that Colorado had some useful ones, but right now I'm not feeling kindly towards public transportation. Give me a car with automatic transmission over National Express or DeutscheBahn any day.

At least until tomorrow when I'd actually have to drive it. The Germans drive like crazy people.

All the world's a stage

Today my "middle school" students saw several plays in English, performed by the British traveling theater group White Horse Theatre. The sixth and seventh graders saw a play called My Cousin Charles and the eighth and ninth graders saw one called Two Gentleman, a modern adaption of the Shakespeare play The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

The theater group did very well presenting these plays to a young audience of English language learners. They spoke slowly and loudly, and usually accompanied everything they did with over-exaggerated actions (rather in the style of Monty Python), to make the whole thing very clear.  Mostly the students seemed to understand, laughing at all the right points, for example.

My Cousin Charles is about a girl who tries to play tricks on her hated cousin, only to have the tricks backfire. This past week we had my two sixth grade classes think about tricks they could play on hated cousins. Some of the options:


 - play hide-and-seek, tell the cousin to hide first, and then not seek him/her
 - put toothpaste/a mouse/gum/dust in the cousin's shoe
 - lock the cousin in a room
 - lock the cousin in a dark room
 - ask the cousin to crawl into a box and then not let him/her out
 - trip the cousin so that he/she falls into mud


The slightly older students saw Two Gentlemen with a changed ending, and mostly were able to follow along. What they didn't catch, they discussed with great animation and in German during the half-hour of class we had left at the end of the day. I was gratified to see them so interested in the play and can only hope that they'll keep their interest in Shakespeare for the twelfth grade, when they read him.

In the spirit of enjoying Shakespeare, I leave you with the Reduced Shakespeare Company's rendition of all of the Bard's comedies in one four minute segment. If you have the time, you can find other clips from their Shakespeare show online. The Othello rap is a particular favorite.

Weekday quiet

It's a recurring, overused, beat-the-dead-horse joke that the United States has a lot of space and Europe does not, comparatively speaking. I'm of the opinion that the difference in space is at the root of many differences, political and personal, but that gets into "serious discussion" territory. Instead, let me show you two pictures.

Picture #1

Picture #2

Two "suburbs", separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Obviously Picture #1 is American and Picture #2 German, as indicated by the space differences. The American suburb has single-family homes, front yards (albeit small ones), trees, and houses set back from the street. The German neighborhood (Europe doesn't have suburbs quite like the States, but this is a reasonable approximation) has a row of houses on either side, all sharing at least one and often two walls with a neighbor. You walk out your front door and there is the street, just a step down. No front yards, no green space, no sprawl. German homes are very compact.

At the end of the street here is a little park and the Rhine River. In the States, where anyone not living in a city has their own green patch, parks are nice but not particularly crowded unless they have a play structure for children. If you want to sit outside after dinner on a nice spring evening, you do so on your deck or on your porch or in your front lawn or whatever. In Germany, where a few lucky people have a balcony, the green spaces are overrun on nice weekends. This past weekend was gorgeous: mid-60s, sunny, hint of a breeze. It's a very pleasant time to stroll along the Rhine, as I and everyone else from the area proceeded to do. And everyone who wasn't strolling was covering the small green space with blankets, picnic baskets, portable grills, and lawn chairs. The sheer number of people here, where usually we have the construction workers and the period person+dog, was a little startling. Certainly there are places in the States that are equally busy during certain times of the year. At home, there's a park where everyone goes to watch the fireworks on July 4th. But I've never seen a public green space quite so full of people, so constantly.

The close proximity of so many people does not mean that we're all friends and hang out and have one big barbeque together. Quite the contrary - Germans are good at pretending like the other people they live so near don't exist. It's probably the only way to get around the fact that you have very little private space. But it was really nice to see so many disparate groups spending time in this green space for a weekend together. Groups of teenage friends, elderly couples, families, and single walkers all moved around one another like currents in the river.

And today? Well, I have Mondays off because I'm spoiled rotten, but nearly everyone else has to work. The park is nearly deserted except for a young mother and her young child, and only a few people are walking their dogs along the river. Everything is very quiet. I'm headed out for yet another walk and bask, all by myself. I think I prefer the quiet, as a ferocious introvert, but there is a loss of energy with the loss of so many other people.

Stop in the name of a pedestrian!

Germans really earn their reputation for being a rule-conscious, order-conscious people. This manifests itself in a number of ways, from street cleaners literally sweeping the sidewalks at 5am to homeless men chastising you for putting a recyclable into the trash can. Not that I would know.

The concern with order really comes out in things like traffic signals, perhaps because American me is accustomed to Bostonians ignoring walk signs and nearly getting themselves run over twice a day. Germans wait until the light tells them to go. Pedestrians usually don't walk across the street until walk signal comes up, even if there aren't any cars coming. When cars come to a crosswalk without signals, the presence of a pedestrian hovering at the side of the road will cause them to stop, even if there are no other cars behind them and they have to brake hard to keep from jutting into the crosswalk. I can count on one hand the number of times a car has not stopped for me.

I certainly don't mind waiting a few extra seconds while the car that is nearly past the crosswalk already goes on through. Also, I don't trust that the driver is actually going to stop, because American, and usually wait for the car to fully halt before crossing. This makes some people impatient, as all the Germans step blithely out into the street, secure in the knowledge that they will not be run over. Often I end up scurrying across the street like some sort of foreign mouse to keep from feeling like I've overly inconvenienced the person who didn't have to stop for me in the first place.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

This practice of yielding-to-pedestrians-with-a-vengeance became especially surreal when I left school yesterday to walk to the train station. I got to the street I always cross (it doesn't have a signal) and did my normal fearful inching out, only to step back smartly when an ambulance came around the corner. It didn't have lights or sirens, so I can only hope that it was just out for a relaxing drive and not headed to the hospital because it stopped and waited for me to cross the street.

My scurrying was especially fast, I assure you.