Conclusion: Being the Russian General Consul for Bonn is the best job ever

  Once again, my apologies that this blog post is a bit late.  On Tuesday, September 7th, 2010, I had quite possibly the most fun I will ever have at a General Consulate of the Russian Federation in Germany.

   Ok, let´s backtrack.  Every year the BUKAs get invited to visit the Russian Consulate in Bonn for meetings and dinner.  This year was no exception, so on our last night in Bonn, we thirty BUKAs prepared for our last big hurrah in Bonn. 

   If you ever receive an invitation to dinner at the Russian Consulate, you may first ask yourself, "What should I wear?"  According to Herr Friedrich von Matzahn, keeper/handler/counter/babysitter of the BUKAs, smart casual (which by the way does not translate into German) is the appropriate attire for the Russian Consulate.  Given the tense (for lack of a better word) relations that often exist between our two countries, the American BUKAs decided we should up the smart and down the casual, so we all put on our nicest clothes in hopes of making a good impression.  Little did we know we were about to meet:

Jewgenij Schmagin, Consul General of the Russian Federation in Bonn, Germany, and yes, he does always have a shot of some sort of alcohol in one hand while he wildly gesticulates with the other.  Mr. Schmagin has been on the job for three months, a fact which he restated about 25 times over the course of the evening.  After meeting Mr. Schmagin, who is incredibly friendly and hospitable, one can only imagine that his previous post was as Consul General to a summer camp.

    First the Consul General served us cookies and sat with us at a long table and basically repeated in more or less terms how happy he was that the Cold War was over, how much relations between China and Russia have improved in the last few years, and how, all things considered, he thinks the US is an okay place anyway...  He then delivered a speech in which every sentence included some variation of the phrase: You cannot imagine how big Russia is.  It went something like this:

  "Dear Chinese, American, Russian and German friends, you cannot imagine how big Russia is.  Russia is so big that we can hardly imagine how big it is ourselves.  Russia is so big that we need to spend many days on a train to get from one side to the other.  Russia is so big that we are on two continents.  Russia is so big that at the same time some places are very very cold while other places are very very hot.  Russia is so big that it takes up nine time zones.  Russia is so big that in some parts of Russia the day is beginning while in other places it has already happened.  Now that you have been in Germany for some time, you are maybe thinking, oh my, Germany is big.  Tell me, do you think Germany is big?  Is Germany big?  Certainly you are all thinking, my, Germany is quite big, yes?  (we are all staring at him confused until finally the head of the Humboldt Foundation, a soft-spoken man to the right of the Consul General in the picture above says:) Um, no, Mr. Consul General, everyone is well aware that Germany is actually a very small country."

   Then the Consul General proceeded to give us a tour of the Russian Consulate, which he reminded us multiple times is technically part of Russian territory.  "Now you have all been to Russia."

Then he fed us lots of wine and caviar and the Bishop made a toast.

Then he taught us how to play Gorodki, a traditional Russian game in which you throw sticks at a target.  (It was somewhere around round two of Gorodki that we realized dressing up for the Russian Consulate might have been a mistake).

Then we had a cookout, during which the Consul General insisted on serving all of the Americans hamburgers (sort of a low blow, but being as he was consuming vodka like it was water I figured stereotype shmereotype).

Then it was time for traditional Russian singing and accordion playing.  And then the Consul General decided that each of the four countries represented should take the stage and perform a traditional song from their country.  The Russians went first, and performed a traditional folk song.  Then the Germans performed, and I swear if I had not known better I would have thought they had rehearsed.  They broke into different parts and sang in a round and had harmonizing, and it was just really really organized. Then the Chinese sort of kissed up and sang some Russian song from the 1950s that is very popular in Chinese translation.

  

 See what I mean?  They were pretty proud of themselves.  All the while the Americans were having our usual "oh shit we missed out on a solid nationalistic song-singing education" moment.  What could we sing?  Yankee Doodle?  Too cheesy (heh, macaroni, get it?).  She´ll be comin´round the mountain?  Too folksy.  

   And then suddenly, we knew.  The song that said it all.  The song that perfectly explained our existence as Americans in Germany, as Americans at the Russian Consulate!  The song that said, so what if we are the fattest country on earth!  So what if we export hamburgers like it is our national pastime!  So what if the closest we get to a folk culture education is square dancing in middle school gym class!  So what if we call football soccer!  So what if every time we try to play the Russian stick throwing game our sticks accidentally get lost in the woods!!!  We stood together, shoulder to shoulder, counted off and began:

First I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinkin I could never live without you by my side, but then I spent so many nights just thinkin how you did me wrong and I grew strong and I learned how to get along...

By the time we hit the chorus to I Will Survive the accordion had joined in and the Consul General was dancing.  It was like every bad wedding DJ, drunken karaoke mistake, Bar Mitzvah hallucination all melted together into one perfect cultural exchange.  It was a proud moment in BUKAdom, a proud moment for America, and I dare say, a meaningful step forward  for Russian-US relations.

The surface of the moon.

  Week one of orientation is over, and I´m sitting here in hotel room 4009 in the Tannenbusch Acora for the last time.  Tomorrow, bright and early, we board the bus and officially move to Berlin. (Note: in the haste of moving this post and others were left as drafts, thus they are being published a bit late)

  So, Bonn.  I promised in my first post that I would hold judgment and let Bonn be a place that I got to know personally.  For those of you who have been dutifully reading along without doing any supplementary reading, let´s review history for a moment.  I am in Bonn, not Bern (that is Switzerland).  Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany (just for fun, the 19th largest city in the US is Memphis Tennessee, which has a population about twice as big as Bonn, at 680,000 compared to 320,000).  Although it was certainly much more than just a village, Bonn basically rose out of obscurity in 1949 when it was selected as the new capital of West Germany.  Why Bonn?  Well, Konrad Adenauer, first Chancellor of West Germany, selected little Bonn basically as a small, hopefully temporary, location for a new German capital with the hope of showing the world that Germany was not a place to be feared anymore. 
         Bonn.  Although the name is not in any way etymologically related, it might be helpful to think Bonn equals bon, good, harmless.
    And, you might say Bonn was pretty bon.  It did its job.  Bonn sustained West Germany through the cold war, rebuilt the image of Germany in the eyes of the world, and delivered it safely and soundly into a reunified Germany in 1990.  For the next year, the German government and the German people debated between their two choices for capital cities, Bonn v. Berlin.  Don´t think for a minute that the choice was easy.  After forty years, people felt pretty comfortable with Bonn, and Berlin still represented to the world and the German people the same demons of the past, but, after much deliberation, on June 20, 1991 (my fifth birthday, in case you were curious), the decision was made to move the capital to Berlin, and only 9 years later (ha!), the process was complete (our trip to Berlin will take ONLY 9 hours tomorrow).


    Pause for an unnecessary cultural/historical allusion.  Sometimes when I think about Bonn, I think of Apollo 13, or at least the movie with Tom Hanks that I watched a lot as a kid.  Germany is the mission, set into motion by the cold war (um, yeah, like the space race), and Bonn is the lunar module Aquarius that had to act as a lifeboat and take on the crew for four days (or forty years) because of oxygen problems (communism?) that prevented the crew from staying in their main command module, the Odyssey (think Berlin, for the hell of it), which they were later able to repair enough to use for a safe return into the earth´s atmosphere (reunification!)  So what ever happened to Bonn?  (FYI Aquarius burned up upon reentering the earth´s atmosphere a few days later.)

      Fortunately for Bonn, things worked out a lot better.  Once most of the government offices left, a bunch of international organizations, big businesses, etc, decided to take over their buildings.  In Bonn, there is life after reunification.  It´s just different.
     For example, today me visited a major solar panel company, Solar World, with headquarters in Bonn.  And, on Thursday we visited Deutsche Welle, a news organization that broadcasts radio, TV and internet in over 30 languages around the world, bringing the German perspective to places around the world, particularly places in which freedom of the press might not otherwise be possible.  Interestingly enough, Deutsche Welle is located in a building in Bonn that was originally planned and constructed for the German Parliament.  The decision was made to move Germany´s capital to Berlin before the award winning building was even finished, leaving the people of Bonn (and the German taxpayer´s) in a bit of a lurch.  Imagine for a moment if the Capitol Building in DC was converted into a radio station...
     We also had a chance to visit the German Defense Ministry, which maintains its primary headquarters in Bonn, and has a smaller office in Berlin.  Defense and participation in foreign wars is understandably a touchy issue in Germany.  I found the Captain that we met with to be one of the most interesting people in our week of endless meetings.  He informed us about the current status of German troops in Afghanistan, the Congo and Kosovo, as well as the issue of conscription in Germany.  Currently all men in Germany have to serve in the army for nine months (if I understood correctly, they would like to change it to 6 months).
      The main thing that stuck out for me in our visit to the Defense Ministry was what the Captain had to say about the image of the soldier in Germany.  Despite conscription for all German men, Germans in army uniforms still get strange looks when they walk down the street in uniform.  He said he knows career soldiers who wear their civilian clothes when they go to and from work, just to avoid the stares.  When visiting the US, he said, regardless of the fact that he was wearing a German uniform, people would stop him in the street and shake his hand and thank him for his service to his country (I wouldn´t be surprised if the aforementioned Americans did not realize that the soldier with whom they were shaking hands was not in fact wearing an American uniform...)  It is only natural though, he said, that after fighting and losing two world wars, symbols of war make the Germans uncomfortable.  Speaking of uncomfortable:
      Yesterday´s trips took us outside of Bonn to two other large enterprises that play major roles in Germany today.  They were interesting, but somewhat unpleasant places to visit.  One was this:

     This is an open brown coal mine.  When I think about mines I generally think of tragedies in which people get stuck in narrow sooty shafts under the ground or eventually develop the black lung.  In open coal mining people are hardly used at all.  Gigantic, billion-dollar machines manned by around 4 people claw away miles and miles of earth to expose soft brown energy stored just a few feet below the surface.  The crazy thing is that whole towns have to be moved to keep them out of the way of these giant earth eating machines.  The town of Königshaven is an example of one of these towns.  We visited New Königshaven, which was rebuilt with the same plan as old Königshaven, right down to the street names, but almost all of the buildings are new.  I am still trying to mentally envision how they dealt with the Königshaven cemetery I saw signs for...

     After visiting the coal mine, we took a trip to a gigantic Bayer chemical plant.  Before touring the plant, we were guided through a museum exhibit about the history and current work of Bayer.  I am sure I wasn´t the first person to see Bayer´s exhibit about history and feel like something was very clearly being left out.   The museum included one panel on the history of both world wars, which showed some busy factories and a picture of "forced laborers".  Our tour guide said that Bayer was a part of the war effort, and that there was discussion after the war about whether or not the company should continue to function, and of course the decision was made to keep Bayer as a tool to help rebuild the German economy.  Questions we asked about some of Bayer´s more controversial involvements in the Third Reich were met with hostile, incomplete responses.  As for the bus tour we took through the chemical plant, once of the BUKAs put it best when she said:  

This is just like driving through a movie set, if you were making a movie about chemical plants.

Me, My Life, and Bangladesh

   You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning to the incessant beeping alarm of a cell phone that´s been roaming for three months, shield your eyes from the gloomy gray strands of light creeping through the window blinds, and attempt to pull the all-too-small hotel comforter over your face only to remember that you are are in Germany... and it´s all because of Bangladesh?

I do.

    Today was the first day of my Orientation Seminar as a German Chancellor Fellow, and although I should have been excited, my early morning self really would have preferred an extra hour (or twelve) of sleep.  I slumped out of bed, remembered begrudgingly that, thanks to Germany´s prohibition on Sunday shopping, I had absolutely nothing for breakfast (no kidding, yesterday I ate müsli with water, and I really never want to do that again), and raced to meet my colleagues at the hotel reception.  We boarded the U-Bahn and made our way to the Hotel Bristol in Bonn for a day of meetings and to give our long-awaited project presentations auf Deutsch.

    The plans for the day pretty much focused on our colleagues from the Climate Protection Fellowship, because this is the first year of their program.  The AvH (Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung) had invited various Climate Change experts to today´s meeting, and as a result a good portion of the day was spent hearing about solar panel production, silicon, renewable energy, and various other subjects that don´t exactly have a bearing on historic Jewish buildings in Germany, but which I found honestly interesting... if incredibly depressing.  Basically it turns out that WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!

   My reflections on the talk:  Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems we have spent the last 150 years skipping blissfully towards the edge of the cliff of catastrophe.  And now, with rocks crumbling beneath our feet, the gaping mouth of the abyss preparing to swallow up civilization in one smoggy slurp, we are desperately screaming UNCLE!  And here he is, Uncle Alex(ander von Humboldt) to the rescue, in the form of a very well planned Symposium.

   Actually I really did find it fascinating, if terrifying.  But for me, the issues were best laid out by the guest speaker, Foreign Minister of Bangladesh.  She explained to us that Bangladesh is the densest populated country on earth and among the most desperately threatened countries when it comes to climate change - crowded, low lying, marshy, impoverished, coastal, a recipe for disaster.  The people of Bangladesh are really experiencing horrible things, which are only going to get worse, despite having played a quite minimal role in the industrialization, and thus carbon emission, currently plaguing the world.  I don´t really know that much about Bangladesh, and I have a feeling that this a bit of a problem for a lot of Americans - relating to foreign countries is not exactly an area of national strength.  But there is one thing I know for sure about Bangladesh.  Bangladesh is the reason I am in Germany.

Simple.


    But maybe it is best to start at the beginning.  Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, spring 2005.  I am a freshman history major.  I have pretty much been a history major since I was seven, and I read Little House in the Big Woods for the first time and decided that I wanted to be a pioneer when I grew up.  Once I found out that the pioneer days were over, it was pretty much clear that I was a bit more interested in looking backwards than forwards.  Nevertheless, in college I had to take some science courses, so I selected a science course that most resembled a non-science course - The World of Language.  It was sure to be a winner.  For those of you who are getting snarky right about now, yes linguistics counted as a science credit, it is part of the cognitive science department.
   Anyway, it turned out that half of the class time was devoted to using linguistic skills to illicit information about a language.  We were divided into groups.  Each group had one native speaker of a language that no one else in the group spoke.  The groups met for a few hours every week in the attic of Maryland Hall, where we would ask our native speaker questions like:  How do you say "I am."  How do you say "I was."  And based on this type of information we would draw conclusions about how the language functioned and how it was constructed. 
    My language was Bengali, the language of Bangladesh.

   To make a long story a little bit longer, I found out that I loved linguistics.  It was thought provoking.  It forced me to think on a different level and in a different way.  I just wanted to think about languages all of the time.  At the end of the semester I decided that I wanted to take my new understanding of languages for a spin, and try to learn a new language (my only previous flirtation with languages being a mostly unsuccessful attempt at high school Spanish).  I picked German.  German seemed like a logical choice.  Lots of history, same alphabet.  Once I started learning German, I suddenly found myself learning Yiddish.  And once I began learning Yiddish, it made sense to learn about Jewish history.  And then it made sense to think about German, Yiddish and Jewish History all together, and then suddenly, here I am, all because of Bangladesh.

     That is a very self-interested way of saying, I suppose, that I care a lot about Bangladesh, and maybe you should too.  It´s also a way of acknowledging that self interest is completely okay, normal, and probably in a lot of cases a good thing.  It´s definitely my motivating factor behind giving a damn about global warming.  Death by climate change sounds incredibly unpleasant and unfortunate, and above all, totally unnecessary.  So why should I experience it, or for that matter, anyone else in the world?

    One hundred fifty years ago, the world was just getting really into the idea that burning stuff from inside the ground could make you do stuff faster and more efficiently.  Laura Ingalls Wilder and the pioneers were heading West, Germany was being unified into a modern nation state (for the first time), and my host institution, Die Neue Synagoge, was the largest active synagogue in Germany.  Boy have times changed.

      What is my point?  Well, for every generation the future and the past feel too far away to actually be reckoned with.  And in this sense historians (like me) and scientists concerned with climate change actually face similar professional issues.  We both want to get the world to engage with things that it does not know how to relate to, because these things are either too long gone or just not here yet.  The study of the past and the study of the future are united in their struggle with human nature to overcome our own natural self-interest in the time, places and people with whom we are closest, or perhaps to teach us how to channel this self-interest into mutual interest.  How to do this, well, this is only day 1.  I have a year to figure it out.

   In the meantime, I guess it´s best to figure out where my mutual interests lie- in the past and the future, in technological advancement and a healthy planet, in German history and Jewish history, in other words, in me- my life- and of course, in Bangladesh.

240 hours later

   Classes are over.  For the last two months of my life I have spent an unimaginably large quantity of time on the second floor of the Institut für Sprachvermittlung, IFS language school in Bonn, Germany.  Today it feels like a lifetime has passed since those first days of school back in July when I could barely get through a lesson without feeling totally overwhelmed, shedding wasted tears over really important things, like using the wrong preposition or declining an adjective incorrectly (blasphemy, I know). 
     I can even be a big enough person today to admit that after the first week or so of classes I went to my teachers after class and admitted to them that I was well aware that I was the weakest student in the class, and that I understood if it was best for everyone if I joined a different class.  To this they basically told me not to worry so much, that I wasn´t the worst student in the class, that I was making good progress, and that my mistakes showed that my brain was actually getting ready to leap the next level of language ability.  Phew!

  
      Well, at least I think that is what they said.  Truth be told, I didn´t totally understand what they said.  But I went back to class the next day, and I have been going ever since. 
       As for that giant leap in my German language ability, it´s hard to say if it ever happened.  It´s hard to say how or if anyone would ever even know that her own brain had just morphed into something more capable, more Deutsch fähig (German capable!)  But, either way, here are some of my important German language moments in the last few weeks:

1. Pizza.  When one of the Americans found an add for delivery pizza "American style", of course we had to give it a try. Sure it´s weird that the "New York" pizza had tuna fish, and the "Boston" had Hollandaise sauce.  It is equally illogical that the "Texas" pizza had fried potatoes and onions and that all the pizzas were made with gouda cheese.  Regardless of these minor details, I was able to successfully order pizza, and request a substitution for corn topping...

2. Internet.  After being sold the wrong kind of internet monthly card by the very nice, but clearly incompetent sales lady in the O2 store in the small city of Andernach, I was able to explain and correct my internet woes successfully over the phone.  In fact I have gotten so good at dealing with German sales people, that sometimes I buy stuff for other people too.

3. Drunks on the U-bahn.  At 9:00 this morning, in the subway, I was involuntarily involved in a conversation with a woman who was clearly taking advantage of the lack of open bottle laws in Germany.  I successfully explained to her that I am not from Brazil, but she didn´t seem convinced.  Still, understanding the drunk rambling of Germans seems like an accomplishment of a sort.

And of course there have been successful moments in school - realizing I could understand Thomas Mann or Heinrich Heine in the original.  Watching movies in German.  Attending a Patrick Süskind play and having a clue what was going on.  Learning about the life of Martin Luther through a totally propagandist film, and being able to explain in German why I was pretty sure it was propaganda.  Having discussions about school reform.  Debating genetic engineering.  Comparing social welfare systems.  Explaining my project.  I can´t honestly do some of this stuff in English.

It´s strange to think that the first part of my German experience is over, and yet my year in Berlin and my project are still completely ahead of me.  The leaves are starting to change colors, the sky is already getting dark around 8, the kids in Rheinland Westfalen head back to school on Monday, and I head to my my orientation seminar, day 1.  What awaits me there I can only begin to imagine, but I am sure I have only scratched the surface of my German experience.

Well there you have it, I put my two cents in, my five kopecks, as the Russians would say, I gave my mustard to it, as the Germans would say.

"Can I ask you a very private question?"

I look across the table at the kind-faced Chinese German Chancellor Fellow sitting across from me, and obviously my heart starts to race a bit.

"Um, sure", I tell him, "what do you want to know?"

"Are they real?"

"Are what real?"




My hair.  He was asking about my hair!  Oh thank god, there is actually nothing at all private about this very cautiously asked question.  Yes, my hair is real, I told him.  It is curly.  It grows like this naturally.  Gelockene Haare (in German) is not exactly common in China, or in Germany for that matter. 

I guess it should not have come as much of a surprise to me that the question over the nature of my hair was considered a private one.  My new Chinese friends, thought extremely nice and polite, are a bit harder to get to know than the Russian BUKAs.  We aren´t in class together, and most come across a bit more reserved and formal, perhaps.  But after the enthusiastic responses from us Americans and the Russians to the Chinese cooking at International Essen Fest, the Chinese BUKAs decided to invite us all to a Chinese dinner tonight in honor of:

Chinese Valentine´s Day.

I am ashamed to say that prior to today I was not aware that Chinese Valentine´s Day existed.  Before heading to dinner, I decided to do a little bit of research (meh, Wikipedia).  Well, there are a number of variations on the story of the Qixi festival (aka Chinese Valentine´s Day) which translates to The Night of Sevens (it sounds sort of like a Horror Film to me), since it falls on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month when the stars Altair and Vega are high in the sky and easily visible.  Here is one version (with some improvements!):


There was once a cowherd named Niulang. He lived with his elder brother and sister-in-law. Disliked and abused by his sister-in-law, Niulang was forced to leave home, with only a pet cow for company.

The cow, however, was a former god who had violated imperial rules and was sent to earth in bovine form (obviously).  One day the cow led Niulang to a lake where fairies took a bath on earth. Among them was Zhinu, the most beautiful fairy and a skilled seamstress (more like a day job).
The two fell in love instantly and were soon married. They had a son and daughter and were very happy.
But, in the eyes of the Jade Emperor, the Supreme Deity in Taoism, marriage between a mortal and fairy is strictly forbidden (all good things are). He sent the empress to fetch Zhinu.

Niulang grew desperate when he discovered Zhinu had been taken back to heaven. Driven by Niulang's misery, the cow told him to turn its hide into a pair of shoes after it died (the cow apparently died soon after...).

The magic shoes took Niulang, who carried his two children in baskets strung from a shoulder pole (use your imagination), on a chase after the empress (all of the babysitters were apparently busy celebrating Chinese Valentine´s Day).

The pursuit enraged the empress.  She took her hairpin and slashed it across the sky, which created the Milky Way (yummm), separating husband from wife.

But all was not lost (it almost never is) as magpies, moved by the love and devotion of Niulang and Zhinu, formed a bridge across the Milky Way to reunite the family.

Even the Jade Emperor was touched (but only a little bit), and allows Niulang and Zhinu to meet once a year on the seventh night of the seventh month.

The End.

For our celebration, the Chinese BUKAs prepared some delicious typical Chinese dishes, and the rest of us provided beverages and dessert.  I brought a watermelon, and only realized later, in my research, how appropriate this was. 

As it turns out, it is traditional for young girls (me, for example) to carve melons for the Qixi festival to demonstrate skills in the domestic arts and then make wishes for a good husband.  If I had known that I would have put a little more thought into my carving.  So much for my domestic skills.  One of the girls from the Chinese group also offered me this bit of advice: men from the Shanghai region make better husbands than those from the Peking region, as they are more skilled cooks and better with children... I suppose I will keep that in mind.

Logistically speaking, at the moment I am a bit too preoccupied with trying to learn German and sort out my project to devote the proper attention that I imagine would be necessary to wish for a husband from Shanghai.  But, I guess I could add it to the five year plan.

Anyways, it seems that Chinese Valentine´s Day is also of importance to new brides.  As it so happens one of my best friends was married just this weekend in a land far far away, called New Jersey.  Since I wasn´t able to be there with her, I figured I would offer her this piece of Chinese Valentine´s Day advice: Make an offering of flowers, tea, and fruit.  Then take some face powder and put half of it on the roof and distribute the other half to the young ladies of the house.  According to Chinese tradition, you will forever share in Zhinu´s beauty.
     

What did you do, eat a clown for breakfast?

Yup, this is an actual German saying, according to my teacher.  The exact words are "Hast du einen Clown gefrüstückt?"  It´s generally a way of acknowledging that a group of people have what one might refer to commonly as "the sillies" or "the giggles".

The German language is chock full of wonderful sayings, colorful words, and ridiculously specific verbs.  One of the most interesting things about the language is one of its grammatical quirks in which verbs are often relocated to the end of sentences.  It gives the language a sense of anticipation... a little bit of, well, excitement.

Whereas in English one might say, "Do you know the man, who ate a clown Monday before brushing his teeth, buttoning his shirt, tying his shoes, driving to work, attending a meeting and laughing uncontrollably in front of his boss for two and a half hours?"

In German one would say, "Do you know the man, who Monday before brushing his teeth, buttoning his shirt, tying his shoes, driving to work, attending a meeting and laughing uncontrollably in front of his boss for two and a half hours a clown ate?"  

See what I mean?  It´s a pretty suspenseful language. (I admit that was a terrible example, but you get the point, Suspense!!!)

With all of this in mind, sometimes it´s hard to tell if I am actually making any progress in my pursuit to speak German.  I don´t have too many conversations with Germans quite yet.  Mostly I just talk to the other fellows and the teachers.

They say you will know when you are really absorbing a language when you dream in that language.  Well, I can definitely say for sure that I am dreaming in German.  The trouble is, I can´t understand a word that´s being said!  It´s like my subconscious is a foreign film without subtitles.

In an effort to improve our ability to speak and understand in German, today we played the game taboo.  As my Russian classmates were unfamiliar with the game, one of my all time favorites, I had the pleasure of explaining the rules.  The group divides into two teams.  Each team takes turns trying to help their teammates guess words that are written on flashcards.  Some common words that might be used to help describe the word are also listed, but these words are taboo (hence the name taboo), and if you say those words, you lose a point, or a turn, or something.  The goal is to expand your vocabulary and ability to free associate in German.

Problem 1: My dear wonderful Russians seemed to miss the point of teams.  They all wanted to guess and help each other during every turn (thanks a bunch communism).

Problem 2: They insisted on using Russia and Russian references to explain every other word.  I wish I were kidding.  Here are some examples of interactions during the game:

"This is a problem that Russia has been experiencing in the financial sector since 2008..."  Word: Crisis

"This is something that is happening in Moscow right now..." Word: Fire

"This is a place that shares a border with eastern Russia..."  My guesses: China, Mongolia, various countries ending with Stan.  Actual answer: Japan.

JAPAN?  Seriously?  Ok, I could not control myself anymore.  In some of the best German I have displayed since arriving here I explained to them that Japan is a nation made up of  islands.  It can´t share a border with Russia or any other country for that matter!!!

Finally it was my turn.  Of all things, I got the word Parka.  So, I gave it a try.

"This is something you might wear in the winter to stay warm if you lived in Siberia "  Answer:  Blank stares.  Five confused Russians sat before me.



That was when our teacher made a new rule.  The words Russia, Moscow, and Siberia, permanently taboo.

Germany Exposed

  I suppose it is fair to say that part of my job here in Germany is to take time to get to know and understand German culture.  I am trying to take this part of my work especially seriously this summer before my actual project begins in October.  And, let me tell you, while 25 hours a week of language school may not exactly sound like a stressful life, you have to keep in mind that when the school day ends, and even when the weekend begins, my work is not done.  Every moment, every experience, every interaction is part of my fellowship - thus my work.
   This weekend my work took me to a town about 30 minutes south of Bonn, called Bad Neuenahr, in the Ahr Valley.  Bad Neuenahr, as its name suggests, is a spa town along the Ahr River, a tributary of the Rhine.  The town is the site of the Apollinaris spring, from which Apollinaris mineral water "the queen of table waters" has been sourced since 1852.  According to the bottle of Apollinaris sitting in front of me at this moment, the company is now owned by Coca-Cola.
    Nevertheless, the purpose of my visit to Bad Neuenahr was not to drink from the spring, but rather to bathe in its waters.  Mineral water contains naturally occurring substances that a) make it taste sort of weird and b) make it supposedly therapeutic.  Going back to Roman times, naturally occurring springs, like the one in Bad Neuenahr, have been desirable locations for wellness and relaxation.  With that in mind, I suppose it shouldn´t come as much of a surprise that most of the patrons at natural springs looked old enough to remember the Roman era, personally.
     As one of my colleagues and fellow spa enthusiast studies the Social Security system in Germany, and had just days before given a report on the subject, we considered this opportunity up close research on the lives of pensioners.
     In addition to bathing in the mineral laden waters (I have a sneaking suspicion that the water in these baths is honestly no different than that of your average swimming pool, but then again, I am no expert, yet) we visited the various different styles of saunas offered.  This, is when I really had the opportunity to see Germany.  All of it.  More than I had planned.  Mostly just because the saunas were clothing optional.  I learned as a child on a family vacation in the French Caribbean that there is a direct correlation between the age of a European and his/her desire to be naked in public settings.  Germans are no exception.
      I also learned how little I understand temperatures in Celcius.  Like all good Americans I pretty much spaced out in elementary school when the metric system was explained, because I understood innately from birth that so long as I continue to live in the USA (or if I move to Liberia or Myanmar), the metric system just doesn´t effect my life.  No matter how willingly we as Americans may export useful things like happy meals and coca cola to the great wide world, there is just no place in these fifty states where we seem to care to import things like milligrams or meters, and definitely not Celcius (scientists and other practical matters as usual excluded).  My ignorance to the subject first came to light when I studied abroad in Austria and accidentally purchased a kilogram of spinach.  That´s a lot of spinach.
     The second time was this weekend, when I happily walked into a 95 degree sauna.  As it turns out, that is pretty damn hot.  My level of understanding of normal Celcius temperatures is pretty good, I think.  I mean, sure I understand the formula for figuring out the actual temperature, but generally I just follow these simple rules: 0 is Freezing of course, less than 10C wear a winter coat, 10-15C, light coat and optional scarf, 15-20 light coat, 20-25C t-shirt, 25-30C shorts, 30C and up air conditioning and swimming pools may be necessary. 
       If I had known that I was entering a room that was over 200F, you can be certain I would not have entered, but since I had no clue, I happily partook in this traditional toxin purge.  And you know what?  It was delightful (for like 5 minutes before it felt like my face was going to burst into flames).  Lesson to my isolationist third grade self who daydreamed her way through math class: You can do your best to hide from the world, but whatever you do, don´t hide from it in a 200 degree sauna.
      But back to Bad Neuenahr.  After leaving the sauna we wandered a bit through the town, where it seemed that the favored post-wellness activities of drinking beer, eating wurst, and listening to a local band play ABBA songs were in high gear.  Out with the old toxins, and in with the new.

     On the way back to Bonn we stopped in the town of Remagen.  Remagen, which sits along the Rhine, is about 2000 years old.  It is amazing to me to think that 2000 years ago Remagen was a dot on a map, but New York and so many major players in the geography of today were not yet even inky twinkles in a cartographer´s eye.  Today, Remagen is still just a speck.  But, through that speck one might say Germany has been, on two notable occasions, exposed.
      The first time was when Caesar´s army crossed a bridge near Remagen to the western side of the Rhine and then destroyed the bridge, preventing the German tribes from crossing the river.

      The second time was during World War II.  By March of 1945 the Ludendorff Bridge, built in 1916, was the only bridge across the Rhine that was still standing.  This allowed the American soldiers the luxury of crossing the Rhine with dry feet.  Hitler saw his army´s inability to destroy this bridge, despite numerous attempts, of course, as a sign of wrongdoing within his own army and had five high official condemned to death.  Ten days after American troops crossed the river, the bridge finally collapsed.  More a morale boost than a major strategic accomplishment, Remagen is a reminder of the depth and complexity of modern Germany´s relationship to its near and ancient history.  Today all that remains of the Ludendorff Bridge are the identical towers on either side of the river and a few feet (ok, meters) of the bridge itself jutting out over the water.  The tower on the Remagen side is now a museum.