Well, isn’t she something!

This semester I’m living with Jackie, my uncle’s marvelous mother-in-law. I’ve always been close to her daughter, my Aunt Nana, and it’s fun to spot similarities between such distinct people. Jackie and I met briefly in May when I visited overnight, but this week we’ve certainly gotten to know each other better. She is a force to be reckoned with: opinionated, outgoing, and lively. Her favorite phrase is "I'm so lucky." She finds most people around her "delightful" and pours herself out for neighbors and friends in tough times. One of the first to earn a master’s degree in linguistics, she taught reading and high school English for decades, mostly to non-native English speakers. The house is filled with her watercolors, most based on photos she’s taken in her world travels.

She’s passionate about athletics and the outdoors: she bikes three times a week, sometimes with a club called the Cycle-Paths. Twice, she’s biked from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. and back. After college, she danced professionally for a year. When her daughter got serious about gymnastics years ago, Jackie became a national-level judge, judging Mary Lou Retton from age 6. Years of skiing and hiking hut-to-hut in the Alps inspired her to take up German in the last ten-odd years. When I wake up, she’s usually returning from the gym.

During the lull before student teaching, I’m enjoying the chance to be included in some of her interests. We solve the New York Times crossword puzzle together - I contribute 3 answers; she gets the other 27. She takes me biking around Pittsburgh and walking through the woods behind her. (We got home from biking 20 miles yesterday; while I took a rare nap, she swam laps.) She shares her “Economist” magazines, her Wall Street Journal, and her library card. I chat with the mostly-retired neighbors in her condo complex about their upcoming events in the Bulgarian Cultural Society. I eat sweet corn on the porch with her and her “special friend” Ben, pleading to help clean up for once.

It’s also neat to see her nearly Internet-free lifestyle. For years, she’s had four hours per month of dial-up. Since I’ve gotten here, she’s used a biographical dictionary, a 1974 World Book Encyclopedia, a catalogue of bird species, an atlas, and other paper-based resources. She says she does Google her crossword clues on occasion, but generally the Internet is superfluous for her.

I hope Jackie rubs off on me this semester.

Remember Uncle Louie’s polka party?

I came out to Pittsburgh last Monday in my family’s new standard transmission car. I don’t especially enjoy driving: it's an area where my "Space Cadet" reputation can kill people. I also do not learn quickly with most things mechanical. So even after three stick shift lessons over a year, I still lacked the ability, one week prior, to consistently start on the smallest of hills. I'd never driven in traffic. But I am pleased to report that following an intensive week of training, I successfully drove alone to Pittsburgh. (My area’s not called South Hills for nothing!) Let me define success: No mechanics were involved. I have since upgraded the definition to “no tears,” and “no honking” is coming soon. By December, I might get to “no stalling.”

Tuesday, I drove (again successfully) to Penn State McKeesport for the orientation with other student teachers and our supervisor. It confirmed my initial impressions in two ways: this will be a tough semester, and my supervisor seems excellent. Supportive and competent – what a combination! I also learned that my school starts a week later than anyone else’s. I’m not even meeting my mentor teachers for In-Service days until after Labor Day; everyone else starts this Monday or sooner with In-Service.

During our lunch break, I walked down to the PSU library and was surprised to hear a band playing nearby. My first thought was marching band practice, but I realized it was all polka music. I was further confused because the sound seemed to be simultaneously coming from an empty field, two different classroom buildings, and a nearby church. They even played the “Pennsylvania Polka,” which you might remember from “Groundhog Day.” As I drove away hours later, strains of the “Pennsylvania Polka” further baffled me until I finally spotted a hill above campus, covered with colorful tents. If anyone knows more about McKeesport’s Annual Polka Festival or whatever it was, please share, because it seemed to be an impressive production. Maybe even the top polka scene in Western Pennsylvania.

P.S. I figured Penn State McKeesport was diverse, but I was taken aback when a campus map showed “White Student Lot,” “Brown Student Lot,” and “Yellow Student Lot.” A green one proved that race wasn’t meant here, but you’d think they could choose better colors with this phrasing.

What happens to a memory deferred?

(Warning: This entry contains serious quantities of navel-gazing. If you want to cut to the chase, skip down to the bottom.)

This summer, especially in Munich, I was more alone than ever in my life. In the twenty years since learning to talk, I’ve grown accustomed to telling at least one person about events in my life each day. Sometimes the main purpose in talking is to stay close to those people. Other times, it’s an important way for me to process what has occurred. In France, for example, I came to value my friendships with Americans because we drew conclusions together about differences between US and French culture. They could tell me, for example, whether something about my host family was typical in theirs as well, or whether something I’d never seen in the US actually existed there.

I missed that in Munich. There were no Americans sharing my experiences, and other foreigners were surprised by different aspects of German culture. My infrequent e-mails and phone calls home weren’t nearly enough to describe half of the events that had puzzled, delighted, or irritated me. And while I sometimes asked Germans about phenomena I had noticed, much more went unsaid. Journaling helped me keep track a bit, but much remained merely an internal monologue.

Now I’m wondering how that affects my memories from this summer. Explaining something to other people demands that I reconstruct the details in a way that emphasizes the aspects that I see as important. This moves me toward a conclusion about the event, whether or not it’s an accurate one, and makes me remember the story in a certain way. With many puzzling events that I never discussed, I wasn’t sure what conclusion to draw, so I never decided anything about them. Now I’ve either forgotten they ever happened or lost too many details to make them worth discussing.

In June and July, I felt as though I was bursting with stories to tell, and it was frustrating to remain silent. Now that I’m in the US, I wonder where these stories went. Some of them seem too insignificant to mention six weeks later. Others seem a bit hazy and hard to describe. Still others come to mind at unexpected times, startling me after lying dormant for months. I think I need to keep processing them in order to learn from them.

The moral of my woeful tale? If you want to do me a favor, ask me about this summer, and wait for me to unfold some good stories! I’ll do my best to make it interesting and/or educational. But you’ll actually help me to grow from my overseas experience. If you want ideas, here are some topics that I haven’t gotten to share much about:

Austrian culture
-differences between my time in Innsbruck and Munich
-importance of Austria and Germany to each other
-why World War II affected Austria and Germany very differently

German culture
-adventures in grocery shopping
-an impromptu sleepover with neighbors I'd never met
-influence of the English language

International culture (with my classmates at the Goethe-Institut)
-life in former Communist countries
-norms for guy-girl interactions
-income disparities

With a laughing and a crying eye

I came home recently. In some ways, I'm delighted to be back. Honestly, it was hard sometimes to have so little consistency - there were only one or two people that I was around longer than three weeks. It's given me a new appreciation for the relationships I've built here, which have had time to mature. But my 10 weeks overseas were filled with so many interesting events, opportunities for growth, and intriguing people that I think back wistfully on my experiences. I would be thrilled to return. My co-worker used the perfect idiom (seen here in the title) to describe how I'm leaving.

Like I learned after my semester in France last year, the language follows you long after your immersion in it ends. A few times, I've been irritated that I had to stick to English, because the perfect German phrase was on the tip of my tongue. I love that my family knows German, so I can get away with a lot of it. In case I slip up and use them by mistake, see if you can figure out these German compound words and expressions:

German expressions with literal English translations
1. der Ohrwurm (ear worm, earwig)
2. langsam auf die Socken gehen (go slowly onto the socks)
3. nicht alle Tassen im Schrank haben (to not have all the cups in the cupboard)
4. da liegt der Hase im Pfeffer (the rabbit lies in pepper there)
5. der Hammer (hammer)
6. durcheinander (through each other)
7. Urlaub in Balkonien machen (to make a vacation in Balconia)
8. Sauerstoff (sour stuff)

Figurative English meanings
a. that's the root of the problem
b. to get going, to head out
c. the limit, a doozie
d. oxygen
e. to be crazy
f. catchy song, song stuck in one's head
g. to stay at home
h. jumbled, mixed-up, chaotic

Answers
1.f 2.b 3.e 4.a 5.c 6.h 7.g 8.d

How I Know I'm American #3: Numbers

Among all the tangled ways of German that I knew would trip me up this summer, I never expected so much trouble from stuff I learned in German 1. Namely, the numbers. Somehow after spending a third of my life practicing, I still get confused by the idea that Germans say "fourandseventy" instead of "seventy-four." It's not a problem when I'm speaking, but it definitely comes up when I'm listening to something fast enough to prevent reflection. I'm really a major fan of processing numbers left-to-right.

One area where I notice it all the time is at work. Since I'm constantly typing numbers in one place that I saw in another, it makes it easier if I say the number in my head. But if I say it in German, I have to treat it as a list of one-digit numbers. (ex. one-three-nine-eight vs. one thousand, three hundred eight and ninety.) Otherwise it takes me about three times as long. Even with the one-digit method, saying it in English is definitely faster, even though I've known German numbers since early childhood. This observation ties in nicely with linguists' findings that second-language use takes up a lot of short-term memory: even when you know the words well, you're still more likely to forget the content that they expressed.

Of course, another major reason for aggravation with numbers has to do with units. Much of it could have been avoided if the US had shown common sense a few decades back and switched to the metric system. As it is, I haven't dealt with it much in the US since 11th-grade chemistry class. I'm now quite comfortable with Celsius temperatures (in the range I've experienced), and I'm OK with kilometers and increasingly with grams. But when people compare their height in centimeters, or apartment area in square meters, or monthly salaries in Euros, it takes me a little while to catch up. At least metric is logical - I pity the poor internationals who come to the US and have to tackle the English system. (Side bar: it was an odd feeling with my international classmates when I translated a dollar amount to Euros, only to realize that they were more familiar with dollars. Only two of them, among 14, use Euros at home.) Even when the German is not an issue, I'm working on a new language.

How I Know I'm American #2: Transportation

In Doylestown my life is in the car; at Penn State I always went by foot; Montpellier's trams saw a lot of me; and in Innsbruck I biked everywhere. But here in Munich, it's all about the Bahn.

It took me a while to associate the German terms with English equivalents instead of just the actual objects. Technically, I suppose the U-Bahn is a subway, S-Bahn is a regional train, and the Straßenbahn is a trolley. But since I haven't had much experience with those in the US, I've been like a little kid this summer. I'm flabbergasted by the swarms of people moving on, off, and around the U-Bahn at each stop. I'm chilled catching glimpses in the darkness of the cavernous tunnels in between stations and fascinated when we zoom by another U-Bahn full of people heading the other direction. I'm tickled by the drivers' voices muttering station names in thick Bavarian accents and their million variations on the requisite "Zurückhalten, bitte." I'm terrified, waiting outside for the S-Bahn, when the long-distance trains storm through and shake my bench just two meters away. I'm delighted when people break the routine of blank faces and non-descript actions, like the guy who brought in a lawn chair and promptly plopped down in it next to me.

My German course ended last week, but it was fun having a precise schedule every day during that time, because I started recognizing people. A co-worker was sometimes on my morning U-Bahn, so we could walk together to work. On the way from work to the station, I always passed the same 2 or 3 people from another company, napping in the car during their lunch break. Where I got out for class, a nasal male voice always filled the corridor, trying to sell a magazine called Biss. And right before the Goethe-Institut building, I was always confronted by the entreating face of an old lady begging. OK, so fun's not the word for that part - more like troubling. (I've seen fewer immigrants begging here than in France, but each makes me wonder a lot about my role in poverty.)

Munich's Bahn system has a couple of neat features, like the news updates and 1-minute cartoons playing on the TVs at every station. But from what I've heard, it can't touch the Moscow metro. A Russian classmate gave a German presentation on it, in which I learned:
-It's the second most-used system worldwide, with around 7 million riders daily.
-It's renowned for the artwork and architecture in most stations: the most famous painting requires the constant vigil of 2 guards.
-It's considered a tourist attraction, with guided tours and even a special dinner car that meanders through.
-There's apparently a hidden Stalin-era line, Metro 2, connecting several key government buildings to an underground town. Buried deep underground, it may be even longer than the regular Metro. Rumors fly around about kids and teens stumbling onto it, then never being heard from again. My Russian classmates wouldn't put it past their government.

My new friends Mascha, Dascha, and Natascha

It's been over a week since my latest transition, but I wasn't sure at first how I felt about it. Last Monday, I started my 4-week course at the Goethe-Institut and moved downtown with a German woman named Dorothee (housing arranged by the Goethe-Institut). I had been super-excited to meet her, get to know some international students, and finally have formal instruction to complement my day-to-day practice. The thing was, Dorothee was gone all last week, chaperoning her elementary school class on a field trip. And I was miserable in class because I was slightly better than my classmates and the lessons largely consisted of things I already knew. This was not what I had signed up for.

Now I can say, though, that I am delighted with my new situation. I switched to a higher level mid-week, and my new class is very stimulating. I haven't had such a language-oriented German class since high school, and it's great. (My PSU courses were more content-based, so I never had to memorize lists of words, as long as I could express ideas about the literature or history we were studying.) It's good for me to work on my weakness: German verbs and their dizzying combinations with prepositions and nouns. Since I got here, my philosophy in speaking German has been "fake it till you make it:" say things in a way that makes sense to me, and hope others figure out my meaning. But the daily structure of homework and being called on in class is a powerful motivator. Plus, the teacher makes it really fun, with lots of discussions and comparisons to our own cultures and languages.

There's quite a mix of people, though most are college-aged and about half hail from Eastern Europe. Among my classmates and others I've met are an Egyptian mother of two, an Italian monk, a Peruvian architect, and a Mongolian college professor. 7 of my 14 classmates speak Russian (1 from Tajikistan, 1 from Ukraine, 1 from Kazakhstan, and 4 from Russia, including the rhyming ones in the title). In their honor, with Ukrainian Katerina's painstaking translation and constant laughter, I joined the Cyrillic-alphabet equivalent of Facebook. I love the fact that I've only met 2 other Americans here and nobody tries to speak English with me.

After a week alone in her apartment, I finally met Dorothee on Sunday. As I had suspected from her furnishings, we had more in common than teaching: she loves French language and culture as well as classical music, and walks around singing fragments from Johann Strauss' opera "Die Fledermaus." What I hadn't guessed was pretty fascinating: she spent twelve years in the theatre, released a CD, and founded a Montessori school (!) before planting herself in a roomful of seven-year-olds the last several years. Her daughter is following in her footsteps: she's studying modern dance and theatre, and has won several German film awards. I have the impression that Dorothee knows how to thoroughly enjoy life, and it seems contagious.