Lisbon

Great Lakes, Great Proportions

To take my mind off not being present for this year’s Thanksgiving, I decided to meet up with a friend in Lisbon, Portugal. We had the misfortune of choosing an extremely rainy weekend to explore the city, but I am still very pleased with all that I got to see.

Monument to the Discoveries

Roaming about Lisbon evoked very romantic visions of what I imagine a European city to look like, where streets and passageways traverse up steep slopes and haven’t yet given way to wheeled transportation- just the foot and the will of the leg. The sidewalks are still lined with black and white stone pavers in ordinate designs that lead you around another corner and up the next hill, and oddly juxtaposed buildings bring you on a story from past to present. This weekend I was glad I got to relish in Lisbon's antiquity. This feeling of well-worn age is something I don’t experience too much in Augsburg, although it is one of Germany’s oldest cities, founded in 15 B.C. (Augsburg = Augusta). 

I believe the appearance was due largely to the weather, but I liked looking at the weepy, sooty buildings and gloom brought about by the lack of sun. The dreary atmosphere was particularly noticeable in the dimly lit cathedrals that I visited, which possessed no outside light other than what shown through the thick stained glass windows.  Also in opposition to the gold leafed and colorfully plastered cathedrals that I more often see in Germany, the ones in Lisbon remained austere and utilitarian.

'Weepy, sooty buildings'

On Sunday, after enduring a full day of rain on Saturday, I decided that museums were the best way to see the city. Just missing a morning downpour, I slipped inside Lisbon’s Tile Museum and wandered through tiled hallways, discovering how tile is also an underrepresented art medium and not just for bathrooms.

Election watching and the U.S.

Late Tuesday night... well early Wednesday morning... I participated in an event that I suspect all (if not most) US citizens did: election watching. I expect that I was like everyone else at the beginning, nail biting and on the edge of my chair, watching the state races and Electoral College votes unfold. However, this time was also different from 2008 election, when I was huddled in a friend’s college dorm room, completing engineering homework and anxiously awaiting election results; myself, another ex-pat, and two other Germans drowsily watched the elections, just wanting to stay awake until our questions were answered, and not another minute more. In the end, we didn’t make it through, but luckily woke up just in time to watch President Obama’s acceptance speech.

Living in Germany, I am very humbled by foreign interest in national issues such as hurricane Sandy, the election, and even our healthcare system. Sometimes, I’m simply amazed at how much people know and other times, I’m slightly embarrassed at how far some of the more ‘erroneous, biased facts’ tend to reach (and also, this). Whatever the case may be, I still try to bring in relevant and personal observations about my culture into discussion. My hope is to add dynamic to the conversation and (hopefully) portray the U.S. in a different light from mainstream European media. (The link is to an opinion article).

Interestingly enough, mention of the U.S. has managed to sneak into almost all of my lectures at the University. Most of the time, the U.S. is used as a comparison to highlight a difference in political ideologies (and court cases) and other times it’s American research and terminology. It always catches me off guard to listen to a German lecture and then have a few very familiar phrases thrown into the middle of sentences.

For me, it’s still odd to see the presence of my homeland everywhere, on the streets as stars and stripes leggings and scarves and on fliers for ‘American style’ college parties (red solo cups included). Although I do welcome the fact that I can still find brownie mix in major grocery stores.

Humor

Originally I was going to use this blog post to explain my experiences studying at a German university as a foreigner, but as I was drafting this post, I realized that I needed to expand on both of these ideas. The latter is undoubtedly a theme throughout this whole blog, as I learn to once again situate myself within a new environment.

A few years ago, as I was writing an essay reflecting on my time studying abroad, I explained that the most necessary ingredient for a successful stay was humor. It’s been a little over three years and I still find this statement to be remarkably true.

In the month between my arrival in Augsburg and the beginning of the semester, I was helplessly going about trying to figure out the necessary requirements for registering with the University. Since I was new in the city and the only foreigner I knew that was studying here (at that time), I hung on to the slow trickle of information that was given to me. Indeed, I had already been accepted to the Environmental Ethics program, but that didn’t quite mean that I was an actual student yet; I still had to take a German proficiency test (passed), sort out health care, and pray to all the University Gods that I didn’t forget any important documents back in the States.

Surprisingly, with the amount of things that could have gone extremely wrong, registration (which was less than a week before classes started) went without a hiccup. Other than that, I had to get my head around the University’s internet system (UofMers: not quite WolverineAccess/Ctools) for which to enroll in classes and making ‘the perfect’ schedule (no classes on Friday = Travelday!).

Here’s where the humor part becomes important: at any given time, especially now that I’m at the University and among students, I can either completely misunderstand a conversation or stumble upon my own speech. As I haven’t been in Germany for that long, I’m still working hard at comprehending/speaking fluidly and correctly. Trip-ups are bound to happen and it’s not comfortable having my lingual ‘imperfections’ exposed, but I just have to remember to laugh it off and acknowledge that things will get better over time.

One Festival, United Under Trachten

This October, I’ve had the particular pleasure of living not too far away from every American’s dream festival: Oktoberfest. Whether you cherish the amber colored liquid or not, partaking in this annual wedding celebration is regarded as the zenith of the ‘ultimate’ European experience. Riding the trains to Munich during this time, I met a few Americans (some were unfortunately from Ohio) and overheard a number of Australian/English conversations- it seemed that no matter where in Europe travelers were a few days ago, everyone was making the pilgrimage to southern Bavaria. 

It was even noticeable in Augsburg- you could always tell who was making their way to Oktoberfest by the clothing they were wearing, Trachten: lederhosen for the men, dirndls for the women. The streets near the train station were teeming with people in traditional German garb. What made it most interesting is that if anyone were placed in southern Germany for just the two weeks of Oktoberfest, it would be easy to assume that a large percentage of Germans still wear this clothing (which isn’t the case).

 

Even more apparent in Munich, Trachten is what binds both the tourists and the locals for these two weeks. Just from looking at someone’s appearance, it’s hard to determine whether they’re a foreigner or they’ve been going to Oktoberfest for years. I was even mildly amused when I found my dress (bought at a large clothing store) worn by a few other German women, assuring me that I fit in as a local . On the fairgrounds with thousands of other visitors, it’s egregiously apparent if someone isn’t wearing Tracht- almost as if they weren’t ‘in’ on what the festival was about.

Dancing on tables, an Okto-time favorite

In the beer tents, all pretense of who you are and where you came from dropped away as it was known that everyone was there for the same reasons: enjoying the food, drink, and atmosphere. And no matter where you were doing, when the song ‘Ein Prosit’ was played by the bandstand (which occurred every 20 minutes), everyone has to raise their glass and stumble through the lyrics.

Uprooted

Now that I'm entering my second full week of living in Augsburg, early adventures are now becoming part of my everyday life. Although I still don't know the city entirely, and a wrong turn can lead me into a back alley, I'm sure that now I'll be able to lead myself back home. This city's larger than the ones that I've previously lived in, so there's still much to discover - especially in terms of finding a new favorite falafel joint or a special coffee shop.

Dome in Munich

In this being my third stay in Germany, I'm surprised to realize how much I've changed, or rather, grown more accustomed to a particular way of doing things. A trip to the grocery store no longer has entertainment value (because where can you find jarred meat in the States?), rather it has become a constant reminder that I am in a different place. After spending a day (unsuccessfully) running around the city looking for a few odd grocery items, I am confronted with either keeping my preferences and constantly searching for ‘that one thing’ or moving on and finding a new norm.

Munich and, more importantly, Alps in the
background

However, I welcome this unexpected push to find a new equilibrium. I’m forced to explore what Augsburg offers and relish in random exchanges with strangers. I’m excited to see where curiosity will take me and how my roots, that were so entrenched in American soil, will adapt to to their new, German environment.

Early evening Munich

Feeling uprooted, it was also nice to see Munich with a familiar face yesterday.

Greetings from Germanland!

So I’ve almost been in Augsburg for a full week and I figured that I might as well clue everybody in to what I’ve been up to.

Just your average picture of a German city (Augsburg) from a vantage point - I have tons of these from previous times abroad

Sleep deprived and exhausted, I arrived in Munich early Saturday morning and managed to drag all of my stuff (100 lbs in total) through the airport, on a few trains, and to my new flat. Saturday was almost a blur for me as I deliriously tried to purchase bedding and food, in German nonetheless, before falling asleep at two in the afternoon. When I awoke around 9pm and had just resigned myself to suffering from jetlag, my new roommates surprised me with a cake to celebrate my birthday.  

Me, my gnome, and famous Augsburger graffiti

This week I’ve been lying low as I’m trying to ward off jetlag as well as getting my head back into speaking German. To prevent me from just sleeping all day, I’ve given myself little tasks to get me out of the flat and explore the city. So far I’ve managed to get myself terribly lost, but with that I’ve also successfully registered with the city, opened a bank account, and bought my fair share of pretzels (the soft, Bavarian kind).

Today, I’m headed off to Munich to attend a conference on Sustainable Economies with one of my roommates, tomorrow Oktoberfest. When in Rome, right?

Why Environmental Ethics

My interest in Environmental Ethics was a long time coming and is undeniably the result of many unforgettable experiences while studying at the University of Michigan. However, I feel as though one event in particular precipitated my draw towards ethics. 

In May 2011, I worked on a project for the class ‘Sustainable Neighborhoods’ in Detroit, Michigan. The main part of our project was to talk to residents in the Delray neighborhood and develop ways in which the community could ask for benefits (such as neighborhood improvement) when a bill for the New International Trade Crossing is passed in Michigan’s state Legislature. What I found most surprising in my two weeks was how the environment so severely affected Delray’s residents. 

Surrounded a busy freeway, oil refinery, cement factory, waste treatment center, and steel/coke plant, Delray’s air quality left much to be desired and many were suffering from various respiratory illnesses. Even one of the neighboring communities was ranked to be one of the most polluted ZIP codes in the Michigan, if not the U.S. I found it particularly hard knowing that my chosen profession (engineering) supports a lot of these industries. Even more, being an asthmatic, I saw how a whole community was suffering from an illness that could have been entirely preventable. 

In studying ethics, I want to explore some of the questions I’ve asked myself over the last year, mostly regarding concepts of regulation, economic gain, and progress. For me, it seems like a dichotomy still exists between industry and the environment; engineers can make decisions to promote economic growth, but do we (can we?) fully realize the costs?

Welcome, welcome!

I am Cassandra Ballert and I will be writing for the Roger M. Jones Journal this year. Please- take a seat and enjoy the ride!
 

My traveling friend

 Here’s a little background on who I am and what I’ll be doing:

I am from Commerce Township, Michigan which is seated in the north-east corner of the sprawling Detroit suburbs. In December 2011, I graduated from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) majoring in Chemical Engineering and German, minoring in International Engineering, and scholaring with the Graham Sustainability Institute. My academic path may seem a little disjointed, but trust me, it works (and I’ll get into that in another blog post). Between graduation and now, I had a quick stint working as an Environmental Engineer, but (alas!) I found myself going back to school to add yet another area of study to my collection: Philosophy.

Starting in October, I will be studying Environmental Ethics at the University of Augsburg in Germany.  Why specifically Environmental Ethics is a topic I plan to cover in my next post, as the reasoning is long and involves a story.
 

Sign poetry in Tahquamenon Falls

I will be using this blog space for a myriad of different things: reporting on experiences abroad, capturing feelings of a lonely traveler, developing my photography and editing skills, and keeping my brain fluid in English. :) My goal is to also keep the readers engaged, so I’m hoping to maintain short, but frequent posts and I genuinely encourage commenting. (So please do!)

Let’s take this trip together,
Cassie

Final Travels

I fly back to California today, just a few days past the year anniversary since I arrived in the UK. I just finished an amazing, whirlwind trip of Europe in which I visited many new places and saw a few great old friends. Being in Sweden for Midsummer was absolutely fantastic - if you ever get the chance to be in Sweden for that holiday, go! As we were so far north, it would get darker at night but never get fully dark, and the sun was up blazing through the windows by 4am. Midsummer's Eve involved copious amounts of herring, Swedish drinking songs, wildfowers and coffee. Besides the amazing Midsummer celebrations, one of my favorite things about Sweden was the idea of "doing a fika", which means sitting down somewhere and enjoying a cup of coffee, normally with a friend and some cake or a little bite to eat. This is a tradition I hope to bring back with me to the US, where coffee (or whatever your drink of choice) is not something to be sucked down in a take-away mug during your commute but rather an excuse mid-morning or mid-afternoon to take a 15 minute break from your day and enjoy it. From Sweden I flew to Germany and spent a few days in Berlin before meeting up with my friend in Göttingen. Berlin was not my favorite city, and I was a bit worried that I might not enjoy the rest of my trip in Germany, but Göttingen is a lovely little university town that reminded me just a bit of Ann Arbor with, of course, a very strong German flavor to it. Through a series of events, I was able to participate in an open event at the World Master's Orienteering Competition and had a great time sprint orienteering in the town of Gosler. From Germany I went to Belgium and visited Brussels, which is very small and somewhat like a dingier Paris but has a lovely charm of its own, and took a day trip to Bruges and Ghent as well. I spent my last few days in Paris and then took a quick trip to the town of Reims, which is the capital of the champagne region, so we toured both the Pommery and Veuve Cliquot champagne cellars (and of course sampled their products as well). All in all it was an excellent trip, and I'm excited now to be headed back home to enjoy the California sunshine and to unpack my suitcase and do some laundry. I've had an amazing year and I can't express how happy I am to have had these opportunities. Thank you Roger M Jones! Signing off for good now, thank you to everyone who has read this over the past few months. Cheers!

Until Next Time

And I'm off!  I'm leaving England today to embark on my last European adventures before returning home to California.  I'm headed first to Sweden, to stay with a family friend on a farm about 2 hours north of Stockholm and celebrate Midsummer this weekend in true Swedish style.  Then I'm going to Berlin for a few days, then to the German university town of Gottingen to stay with a friend from high school.  From Germany I'll go to Brussels for a few days before taking the train to Paris to meet up with a friend from Michigan who is currently working in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia but is taking her vacation in France.  Then I'll come back to London for one last night to catch my flight from Heathrow and fly back to San Francisco!  It's been a difficult few weeks trying to wrap everything up here and say goodbye to the places and people I've grown to love so much.  Leaving someplace is always difficult for me, and I'm juggling the feelings of being so sad to go but excited about the next part of my life and so glad to have had this opportunity.  I'll try to get in a post or two about my travels before I finish off this blog for good and hand it off to next year's Fellow.  A la prochaine...

Jubilee Weekend

Happy Jubilee!  Apologies for not posting in so long.  I have finally finished up exams and have been trying to pack in all the last touristy things I've wanted to do before I leave.  I'll do a post shortly on all the fun little day trips and London things I've done, but first a bit about the Jubilee and finishing up at UCL.

This weekend was/is, of course, the Queen's Jubilee (Monday and Tuesday are bank holidays).  London is decked out with impressive amounts of bunting, Union Jacks, and signs thanking the queen for her years of service.  Pret, the take-away sandwich chain that is more ubiquitous than Starbucks, has signs in front of each shop saying "Keep It Clean for the Queen", and many buildings have displayed giant signs saying "Congratulations" or "Thank You, Your Majesty".  On Sunday, I went with a friend to try to watch the flotilla on the Thames but due to the crushing amount of people we were only able to watch on the giant viewing screens.  It was amazing seeing London packed with so many people, though it made me very glad that I'll no longer be here for the Olympics.  We tried to get on the tube at Leicester Square and there were queues to even get into the station - I can't imagine how difficult it will be to get anywhere in July and August!  Today I'm hoping to catch a glimpse of the carriage procession of all the royals as they follow a route through central London from Westminster to Buckingham Palace.  I'll be sure to post pictures if I get close enough to actually see anything.

I am now officially done with my time at UCL, having finished up my last final (though technically the term doesn't end until this Friday).  Exams here are very different to how we do them in the US - all the exams here take place during term 3 (May 1 - June 9th) and include exams for all the classes you take throughout the year (including the ones that ended in December).  It's different for science and engineering courses, but all my exams here were 3-hour essay exams.  Luckily you get a choice for every single question (the exam may consist of 4 questions, for example, but for each of those you have a choice of maybe 3-5 various questions), but 3 hours is a long time to continuously write without any breaks.  I have no idea how I've done on my exams either, as every piece of work (exam or coursework essay) that you submit at UCL has to be graded by both a first marker or examiner at UCL, and then also a second marker outside of UCL who ensures the grades given by the UCL markers are fair and consistent with other schools.  It's a very complicated process, as is taking the exams themselves.  All students are provided with candidate number cards, which you write on your exam instead of your name (everything is graded anonymously).  Exams are scheduled in a variety of locations all around London and each exam hall normally includes people taking several different exams at once.  My tutor (professor) was present at only 1 of the 4 exams I took - each exam is run by "invigilators" who read the rules out and escort students to the bathroom, etc... It's very much like taking the SAT or another standardized test.  Especially given the length of normal UK exams, I would imagine British students would be excellent at the SAT!

More on day trips and touristy London things later - and hopefully some photos of royal carriages!

Grad Schools and Americanisms

Whoops, sorry - realized it's been a bit long since I last posted!  I'm finally back in the UK, after a whirlwind month and a half of traveling to the US for interviews for Pharmacology PhD programs.  I first did a weekend interview at UM to interview with the PIBS program, then flew back to London for three days before hopping on a plane to San Francisco to start a 2 1/2 week trip all around the States.  I interviewed at UCSF, went home for a few days, and flew to Philadelphia to interview at UPenn.  From there I went to Madison, Wisconsin where I stayed with some friends from water polo and interviewed at UW, then I flew down to North Carolina to visit UNC.  I flew back to London and was back for a whole 10 days before taking another weekend trip, this time to Northwestern.  I returned (for good) on last Monday, so now I'm back to enjoying all that London has to offer.  Also, I've decided on UCSF for grad school (the Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics program) so though I know I'll be extremely sad to leave London this summer, I know I can look forward to moving to San Francisco and I'm very excited about joining that program!

Speaking of America, I stumbled across this list of "Americanisms" a while back and had a thoroughly fun time reading through the list. Some of them ("my bad", fanny packs, "I could care less") bother me just as much as the people who wrote in. Others were truly amusing to me, such as #29 "The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when 'fortnightly' would suffice just fine" (really?  'fortnightly?') and #36 "Surely the most irritating is: 'You do the math.' Math? It's MATHS!". Most British people are quite used to having Americans around and generally understand most Americanisms (if you ask for the "bathroom" or "restroom" in an American accent, no one ever looks surprised), but every once in a while a word that seems completely normal to me will elicit blank stares from my British friends, and vice-versa.  For instance, I've learned that a "gilet" is a vest and a "dummy" is a pacifier, and I've taught my friends what a "sidewalk" is (they call it "footpath" or "pavement") and what it means to "scrimmage" (I'm very happy to say that this one is catching on with my water polo team).  The one phrase I have a very hard time remembering has a different meaning here is "pants".  In the UK, the term "trousers" refers to everything that would fall under the heading of "pants" in the US (got that one, not too hard) - but "pants" only means "underpants", which leads to some amusing situation when I forget to say "trousers" and say "pants" instead.

In another striking difference between the US and UK, when I set up my bank account over the summer, I received a letter from my new bank telling me not to choose a PIN number that's easy to guess, like 1111 (ok), 1234 (of course), or 1066 - I guess thieves in the UK are well-schooled in their history.  I have a hard time imagining Bank of America warning me not to choose "1776" for my pin number based on the historical significance of the date.  I've been thinking a lot about Britishisms vs. Americanisms over the time I've been here, and while I've found that I have quite consciously tried to replace some American phrases with their British equivalents (lift instead of elevator, take-away instead of take-out, half one instead of 1:30), I'm not as good at noticing when a particular phrase or comment sounds very American.  It's funny the things people just assume because of how we've grown up: when I brought back some Girl Scout cookies from one of my interview weekends to a rugby game (one of the girls said "Oh wow, I saw these once on an episode of Friends!") it reminded me of how much we take for granted other people will know about our own culture, as my excitement over a hot cross bun (I had no idea they were real and actually existed outside of a nursery rhyme!) highlighted for my British friends as well.

Ta ta, off to write more essays.  Only a week and a half left of classes, shockingly - we finish on March 23rd!

(Belated) Happy New Year!

I can't believe it's already mid-January, and I'm already 20% of the way through term 2!  I've started all my new classes and have been very much enjoying them, and again I have a great schedule (2 hours of class a day, Monday through Thursday).  I'm taking four new classes this term, two in the Classics department and two more in other departments.  First is Greek Myth, which is the class that made me apply to the Classics department at UCL in the first place - I've loved Greek myths since elementary school!  Reading our "Classical Mythology" textbook has hardly been like work at all.  The other course I'm taking in the Greek & Latin department is Greek Comedy, which has turned out to be really fun so far.  The tutor is so very English and it's great fun to listen to his lectures on Aristophanes and Menander.  I'm also taking London Before the Great Fire, which is an Archeology course quite similar in structure to the course I took last term at the British Museum and the classes I took over the summer - instead of sitting in a classroom listening to our tutor lecture, we go on field trips every class to visit museums and archeological sites.  Last week we went to the Museum of London (one of my favorite museums in the city after I visited it over the summer with my Multicultural Literature course) and we have 8 more trips coming up, from walking the remnants of the old city wall to Southwark.  Lastly, I'm taking an ELCS course (European Language and Cultural Studies - the same department that offered the Literature of the First World War course I took last term) called Literature and Memory in a Globalized Society.  So far it's been a bit theoretical for me, discussing the various kinds of cultural memory, but next week we start talking about the first novel on the reading list and the reading list (Julian Barnes, Milan Kundera, Jorge Semprun) was what attracted me to the course in the first place, so I'm looking forward future classes.    All in all it looks to be a very interesting and engaging term.  I've also received back several of my essays from last term and got decently good marks on all of them, so I feel like I've got a good handle on what's expected of me.

I've received great responses from my grad school applications and so far I have invitations to interview at 9 schools (still waiting to hear back from one).  It's a little complicated to work out the interviews, as flying back and forth from London for each interview doesn't make much sense, but I have worked out to fly back to Ann Arbor on January 26-29 to interview for PIBS, and then I'm going to take a week off from school and combine it with reading week to interview at 4-5 more schools (UCSF, UPenn, Wisconsin and UNC - possibly UCSD as well).  Two weeks after I return from that trip, I've booked a visit to Northwestern from March 1-4.  It'll be very busy and a lot of traveling, but I'm looking forward to visiting so many schools and taking the next steps towards figuring out where I'll be getting my Ph.D!  Luckily grad schools pay for all your expenses to visit (they don't normally do this for international students, but round trip flights from London are incredibly cheap right now so it worked out very much in my favor)!

One more thing - I very highly recommend the BBC show "Sherlock"!  I just started watching it a little while ago and I've been very impressed with it.  It's a modern retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, and the location where they filmed 221B Baker St is just a 2-minute walk from where I live (it's not actually on Baker St).  "Sherlock" may even have replaced "Downton Abbey" as my favorite British television show...