First stop: Istanbul

Just a quick little blurb on why Turkey is on my list of places to visit:

I can distinctly one spelling quiz in the third grade where we were asked to spell the word 'Constantinople.' I knew it was a city name, but I wanted to know where it located and what significance it had. As I looked up a map of Turkey, searching for where Constantinople was said to be located, I remember being horrendously dismayed that the city was now named Istanbul.

However, I do remember looking at the landscape of the city and still being amazed the strategic placement of its foundations, precariously located on a strait between both Europe and Asia. Already at the age of 9 or 10, I knew I wanted to discover the city and it's long history.

Semester's end

A bit different from the semesters in the States, mine has just ended this past weekend (yes, weekend- there was an exam on Saturday). Also in comparison to the general semester in the States, regular class work and midterms/papers don't exist to keep you on your toes the whole semester...with the exception of a few presentations here and there, it's all very relaxed right until the end, where one exam determines the grade.

Now that I'm officially on break (until April!), I've had some time to reflect on my past semester and tie it together to my overall goals in Environmental Ethics. Having completely no background in philosophical teachings, this semester allowed me to find major themes and direction, along with developing my German (a major goal).

As with this major, this semester was a smattering of different subjects.. some were more focused on Philosophy and Ethics, whereas I used others to simply broaden my vocabulary and terminology (and to boost my confidence in German). For those curious, here's a list of the classes that I took this semester:

-The Normitivity of Nature and Nature of Normitivity
-Ethical Problem Areas at the End of Life
-Physical Geology
-Environmental Philosophy (In English!)
-Environmental Economy
-Discussions on Environmental Ethics
-Societal Structures and Frameworks
-Resource Strategy: Education for Sustainability
-The History of Stuff: Nitrogen

Admittedly, the first few months of the semester were rather difficult and hard to grasp and I had to reassess my learning style; German was still flowing back to me and concentrating on lectures took an extreme amount of effort. Towards the end, luckily, connections within all of my classes started appearing and a foundation started to form. I'm still shaky with identifying specific philosophers and their theories, but that's an undertaking I'm looking to involve myself with next semester. Until then, it's travel time in Turkey and Italy!

Christmas markets

December. December.

Where clouds of work start to form on the horizon of a sunny student life (papers and presentations). In Germany, December is a month filled with Christmas markets, Glühwein (mulled wine), and gingerbread-like sweets. About a month out from Christmas, all German towns and cities fill their squares with little stands, selling almost every Christmas themed good possible. There were candies to be had, wooden nutcrackers to be bought, and warm drinks to be consumed.

Since this pre-holiday period in Germany is new to me, I would sometimes take the longer way home, stopping in the downtown area to peak around and envelope myself with the sights and sounds. The most memorable Christmas market event would have to be watching a figure, dressed with a horribly frightening witch’s mask, parade down a row of food stalls, stopping to hand out pieces of sweet bread to children. The children, all not more than four years old, naturally cried in terror and looking at the costume, I probably would have too. As an onlooker, the scene reminded me all too much of the Grimm Brother’s Hansel and Gretel, where kids are lured to a witch’s candy house only to be held captive.

UofM Alumni at the Augsburg X-mas market

At nights and on weekends, the Christmas market is also frequented by many to meet with friends, drink a Feuerzanganboule, and feel the cold biting at your toes before deciding on a warmer locale. For me, having grown up in the States, it was still odd to know that everything was solely geared towards Christmas and not the more general ‘holiday season.’ 

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.