is thems the thoughts of cows?

Since I've been in Germany taking this little break from reality, I've had lots of time to read for fun - something I never did while in school and working. I read something near thirty books (nerd alert) during the cold of this winter, among them, pretty much everything David Sedaris has published. Total literary candy. Once I started reading them, I couldn't help myself from devouring more. I like to think that Sedaris and I have a lot in common - we're both unusually small people who get carried away living out fantasies in our minds. We both seem to have a "let's see where life takes me" (read: impulsive) approach to life. We both take a more experiential (read: lazy) approach to learning language, as evidenced in many of his hilarious memoirs, most notably When You Are Engulfed In Flames and Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts about his ex-pat attempts at learning French:

“On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From the dog owners I learned "Lie down," "Shut up," and "Who shit on this carpet?" The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count. Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. "Is thems the thoughts of cows?" I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window. "I want me some lamb chop with handles on 'em.” 

“I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to lady crack pipe or good sir dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?” 

“What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.” 

And, an excerpt from "Jesus Shaves," my favorite story of all. He nice, the Jesus.


Language has never been my strong-suit. It's far too linear to appeal to my mostly right-brain (read: flighty) way of life. I realized this first while suffering through a miserable three years of high school French classes, but that didn't stop me from trying my hand at Spanish in college and then moving to Germany post-grad to see if I could successfully learn a language by sheer force.

Things are going pretty much exactly as I expected, considering my track record. I can understand most of what I hear in day-to-day conversation, but I usually clam up when it's my turn to talk. I probably only have around 150 words committed to memory and I've created a nice little cocoon of English-speaking friends to keep me safe. My one proud accomplishment? I get asked for directions with a surprising frequency, which I've taken to mean is because I look like a local. I'm proud to say that I've successfully provided directions to several people. In English, of course.

morning walk

Volkspark near our apartment

Baby and I took an early walk this morning in an attempt to help me recover from a too-late night out (seems to be a theme in my life...I'll grow up someday.) The weather was SO gorgeous that we ended up staying out for almost three hours. Spending time outside is such a luxury, especially after the brutal German winter (their longest in 130 YEARS) and a couple years of looooooong work weeks trapped in a dark office.

I write about how much I love this city and our neighborhood all the time, but I think I fell even more in love this morning. I may be a Nashville girl at heart, but it looks like it'll be more difficult than I thought to go back to Tennessee. A few crappy iPhone photos from this morning:

Rathaus Schöneberg, the city hall for our borough, has an interesting history attached to it. President Kennedy spoke here in 1963, where he famously said "Ich bin ein Berliner." On the night of his assassination, Berliners spontaneously congregated at the spot and the the square surrounding the building was renamed John F. Kennedy Platz. President Obama is traveling to Berlin in June of this year, and is rumored to be speaking here to commemorate fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy's speech.

Even the police stations are good-looking

Poodle Pack...groomed to perfection

For something a little less picturesque - I spotted this nightmare of an outfit and spent a good ten minutes walking slowly, and probably not inconspicuously enough, to get a picture:

You're welcome.

Now I'm headed to meet friends at one of my favorite biergartens. Thank God for springtime.

Photo of Café am Neuen See via

you are here

Nostalgia is one of my favorite pastimes. Whenever I have brain space to myself, my mind usually wanders into what I was doing a year ago, when the weather was the same. I hear a forgotten song and go back to the moment I first heard it, who played it for me, where we were. When I’m in a new place, nostalgia is my anchor, a reminder that I have infinite experiences and people to be grateful for. In springtime, I’m especially nostalgic because, like the rest of the living world, it’s the perfect time to shed all the old parts you’re made of.

Starting new is a tough concept for me – I am fiercely loyal to the people and places I love. I have always thought that any problem can be fixed by enough hard work or optimism or a shift in perspective. I can count all of the things I’ve quit on one hand, and can’t even begin making a list of things I’ve persisted through to the point of exhaustion. I like it when things work. It’s easier that way.

This time last year, I finally came to terms with my first real heartbreak – a slow burn of a failure whose charred remains are still smoking. I’m independent to a fault, but when I commit to anything, I continue to believe in its goodness until it breaks me. Even when everything good has long since dried up. This time last year, I began spiraling into someone I could no longer recognize. I was living in my hometown – a place I love with a proud vengeance, but an immeasurably tough place to be when things aren't going well. I felt like there was a magnifying glass on my failure. An emphasis on what I fucked up. By the Fourth of July I decided to commit to change.

I decided to seek out infinite possibility and it was waiting for me the second I opened my eyes to it. It took me one week to find a job abroad and two days to sign the contract. I booked a plane ticket almost immediately. I decided I was comfortable draining the savings account I’d religiously built up over the years. Best of all, I didn’t have to ask anyone for help. Miraculously, moving to Berlin was byfar the easiest decision I’ve ever made. When I stepped off the plane, I felt awake for the first time in months. I was surrounded by an abundance of space, something I hadn’t seen in the two years I’d been in Nashville. Jetlagged and dry eyed, I heard a steady mantra: “you are here, you are here, you are here.”

For now I’m thrilled to be wandering in the total unknown. My feet always hurt because I walk everywhere. My head is wrapped up in conjugations and new letters I can’t pronounce. My heart feels four years younger. I don’t have an end date or an idea of what’s next, but I do have a new perspective and for the first time in a long time, I know it can fix anything wrong.

little things

A delayed weekly round-up, because the real fun came this weekend when temperatures jumped to the fifties (fahrenheit, of course) and the sun stayed out for hours (!) at a time. Berlin is even closer to heaven in springtime.

A few things that made my week a little bit sweeter:

This colorful building discovered in a new-to-me corner of Schöneberg 

This Americana band made up of Germans and an English dude

One of several gates from a Saturday spent in Potsdam

A hike around Lake Wannsee that reminded me of lakes back home

A post-hike weissbier at a biergarten that felt right out of a grown-up fairytale. So much so that I can't seem to find any information about it online. Magical.

And, a mellow springtime song to kick off the week. Get happy y'all.

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stereotyping

Cute and warm - impressive

(via)

This "What I Know About Germans" list, discovered through überlin, is about as dead on as a 100-point list can get. If you're living in Germany and looking for a laugh, or interested in learning what my life amongst these well-dressed, well-educated, heavy-drinking people is like, check it out.

Some of my favorites:

• They have excellent winter wardrobes (I suspect this has something to do with the fact it’s what I would classify as Winter, ten months of the year).
• They speak English better than most English people I know.
• They have unexpectedly wicked senses of humour. 
• Germans don’t tend to jay-walk. And they judge those who do.
• Germans can drink. And not just write themselves off, vomit in the bath tub at 2am, wedge in a kebab and back it up the following night, a la American/English/Australian binge drinkers … I mean drink. While the rest of the world is vomiting in the bath tub, the Germans are calmly ingesting their 57th shot and washing it down with a beer, their cheeks a little rosy, their eyes a little glazed, but their livers working as smoothly as a German made automobile.

Brilliant.

we're going to be friends

My new favorite blogger, Liv Hambrett, an Australian who's been living in Germany for years, wrote today about the number one thing that's been plaguing me since I've been here - which will be a whopping three months next week - making friends. Making real, easy-to-call, see-you-in-ten-minutes friends in a country where you don't speak the language, don't know a soul, and don't have a work group helping you meet people you have something in common with, is the most difficult thing I've ever done and the only thing I was really worried about before I hopped on the plane. Here, a particularly resonant quote from her piece:

"I find myself, once more, in the generally nervous, uncomfortable position of having to make friends. Of having to enter, with either stealth or flat out asking for mercy, pre-existing social clusters. And it’s not easy. In fact, making friends is hard work, particularly at an age at which you have friends, you have brilliant, smart, funny, like-minded friends that form part of a group you have spent a lifetime cultivating. Particularly at an age when asking ‘can I play too’ doesn’t come as naturally, for various reasons, as it does when you’re six. Particularly when you can’t help but feel, wearily, been there done that, that you have friends, they’re just not here."

I wrote about my frustration and pseudo-loneliness a little last month, but the Easter Holidays, which mean four days off of work here in Germany and four days of Homeland marathons and finishing three books I've been working on, have inspired me to kick it into gear on the friend front. This week, I'm sucking up my pride and officially seeking out other outlets to hopefully find at least a couple people to hang with on a more regular basis. 

Also, one of my biggest irrational fears is that I'm always on the verge of annoying the shit out of people when in reality (so I'm told) I'm not, so I'm attempting one more round of attempting to enter pre-existing social groups...which is probably my worst nightmare. Good vibes appreciated.

In the meantime, I'm missing these "brilliant, smart, funny, like-minded friends" that just don't happen to be here in Berlin with me:

The Volkshochschule Saga

My first several weeks in Berlin were clouded by one glaring problem: I didn’t know German. Really didn’t know it. I suffered through seven years of French and still default to it as a reflex when I hear a foreign language. I took Spanish in college, spent a summer in Costa Rica and still have a firm handle on most of the basics. But German? The extent of my German knowledge when I boarded the plane to move to Germany was beyond limited. Bratwurst, guten Morgen and auf Wiedersehen (spelled wildly incorrectly) were the extent of what I knew. Basically, I am a typical American idiot.

Fortunately, Germans are a well-educated, multi-lingual and kind people who were patient with my American idiocy and put up with attempts to speak a language whose letters looked like a Word Jumble to my uninitiated eye (see here). A few days after I got here, Regine and Carsten (my number one favorite Germans and surrogate parents) and I got started looking for a class. The best option seemed to be Volkshoschule, Berlin’s network of community colleges with cheap German classes for the hordes of people like me who flock to the city. I was ready. And this is where things got interesting.

Volkshochshule has tons of campuses around town, all offering a variety of English classes at different times. Sounds amazing, right? The first hitch: in typical German fashion, the schools require prospective students to show up to the campus between certain hours that vary from school to school, grab a ticket and wait in line to talk to someone before you even know if there’s space available in the classes that you want, then take an aptitude test to see what you qualify for (clearly not necessary in my case as my vocabulary had only expanded to include Hallo, Tchüss and brötchen after a few weeks here). On my first attempt, I bundled up the baby and walked a couple of kilometers to the school in our neighborhood – Schöneberg. We waited for two hours (awful…remind me to never become a single mother) and my number was finally called. Thrilled, I put Tilda in her stroller, walked confidently up to the woman I’d been assigned to and opened with my only full German sentence: “Hallo! Sprechen Sie Englisch?” So proud of myself. I’d only been practicing for the last two hours. Then, the crushing news that beginners classes were booked through April. Forever away from January. She sent me home with a list of other schools nearby, and I got to work.

Next up was a visit to the Mitte school – I dragged the stroller through two train changes and up a winding flight of stairs to the Mitte office. Booked through May. Next – Charlottenburg, where I got turned around on my route and basically sprinted (not cute) to make it in time. Booked. Dumb American feelings setting in big time. The sweet man I was pleading with took my email address and told me he’d let me know if anything turned up. Eventually I tried my hand at the Neukölln campus where I was told I was too late for even the April classes. Still optimistic that something would work out, I thought of these quests as a good way to get to know the city and improve my negotiating skills. Besides, I didn’t have a whole lot better to do than attempt to weasel my way into a class. I knew the next campus – Steglitz – would have an opening. They had to let me in – they were the first campus to agree to talk to me on the phone. Tilda and I set out on a freezing but sunny day and found the building without incident. This was it. I wrangled Tilda out of her stroller and carried her up the narrow staircase to the office (I don’t know how anyone with a physical disability gets around this city…wrangling a stroller puts a new perspective on everything) and found the administrative person – a cute British guy about my age. I was ready to sign up. “You’re in the wrong building,” he told me. “There are two Steglitz campuses – you need Steglitz-Zehlendorf, a few stops away from here, and they’re about to close for the day.” Of course. I started crying while Tilda took a shit in my arms. Perfect.

Claudia, one of Tilda’s grandmas and my personal hot mess hero, stepped in the next day and fairy-godmothered her way into the situation. She’d spoken to the other Steglitz campus, booked a spot for me and planned to drive me to the school to help me sign up…and it worked! I was in! It was three train transfers and a bus ride away, but I didn’t care – I was prepared to flail my way through a new language course in hopes that I could carry on a conversation with our Polish housekeeper and answer questions from strangers using more than one word.

When it came down to it, the timing of the class didn’t work with our schedules and I had to drop out before I even started. I’d pretty much resigned myself to seven more months of nodding and smiling when I found another school with classes starting in March. It would set me back a few more Euros, but I signed up immediately and have been in the class about a month, grateful that my first language wasn’t Thai, and learning that when it comes to language, I will always have to try very, very hard to make sense of things. The best phrase I’ve learned so far? “Das ist verrückt.”