the hardest weekend

Everyone is supposed to go through some sort of adjustment struggle when they study abroad, right? There's the predicted drop in morale after a certain amount of time...the realization that it's no longer fun and games, the moment when you realize life as an expat isn't all you cracked it up to be. Well, I guess that moment passed me by, but what came instead was in my opinion worse. This weekend, from Thursday through today, has been rough. I've been faced with this (what seemed/seems like a world shaking life changing) decision about what to do with my life from now out. I've fallen so deeply and madly in love with Germany, environmentally, socially, politcally...developed good friendships, close friends, that live here, and now I'm being faced with the reality having to give it all up, go home, and return to my life. The life that I love and have laid out for myself, but nonetheless, giving up the place (and the people) I love. So: I came up with options. Defer nursing school to come here and bum around for a year or so.
Graduate with a German degree in December, come back and do a midwifery program that also has a bachelor's degree attached. (starting in 2014 anyway). Then maybe come back and do American nursing school.
Graduate and come back, try to find an internship and a job. Then midwifery thing. Or master's program.
Graduate, do a nursing Ausbildung. Do the midwifery thing...
Variations on a theme.

Well, those options sound nice and free and like I have time to do it while I'm young. Like I'm doing something that takes strength and stick-to-it-tiveness. While I still know people in Bonn. Buuttttt...as idealistic and nice as that all would be, it makes more sense for me to get a nursing degree first so I can have a viable job...and I can still become a midwife in Germany (or in the states) and practice in either place. I assume the demand for English speaking midwives is probably high-ish here or maybe there's at least a niche. So that's my new plan. And, to top it off so I can try to have my cake and eat it too, I'm going to try to come back next summer for a few months to do a Praktikum at a Krießsaal in Köln. Or in Bonn. The way I see it, that's pretty necessary if I don't want to lose my German speaking ability.

Part of me (a large part if not a majority) feels really sad that I don't have the will and spontaneousness to just pack up and leave. To start a new romantic life in a new place without even looking back. I know I'm strong enough to do that, but the rational part of my brain just won't let me. I think that's what has been so hard about this decision: comparing the sane, responsible Becca with the independent, free idealistic vision of myself in my head. I don't want to be ruled by rules and regulations, but rather what makes me happy. I guess where it gets complicated is that sometimes what makes me happy is the success that comes from following the natural, responsible order of things. It means too much to me to just toss it to the wayside.

So anyway, now that I have that all off my chest...this weekend was fun-ish when I wasn't obsessing about my future. On Thursday I went out with a few girls to drink Sangria at a bar and called it an early night, Friday was the earth shattering political Euro Cup game where Germany kicked Greece's ass in football (4:2). It was crazy because a lot of the public transportation was completely shut down because of fans bumrushing the streets. Incredible feeling! Saturday was another of those notorious Ferdi parties...I found the whole experience a little creepy this time because of the creepy men and the drama...Today Amy and I spent the whole day up at Starbucks and I finished working on my Referat for my Geography class. I'm presenting about the German versus the American healthcare system when it comes to reproductive health, pregnancy and birth. Tomorrow is an exciting Monday full of studying.

Hope all's well that ends well...

Nachrichten der Woche

Before the German team won the third game (!)

This week...has been interesting. It's been mostly about football (soccer) and partying, but I did manage to squeeze out a referat in my class this morning. 20 minutes about Nietzsche? Done. I'm really happy that I chose a topic that I knew absolutely nothing about, because although it was extremely difficult to explain perspectivism and nihilism auf deutsch, I actually learned something so that was a plus. My German is definitely improving, I can understand stuff now, I have talked in depth with adults here and they understand me (sometimes I'm like, wow, they can understand me with this thick American accent?? props to me)
Side note: I just gave Marc's roommates some Twizzlers and they all hated them. Oh America. Land of the artificial.

Germany has won all three of the games they set out to play. I'm excited to watch the game against Greece on Friday, along with being just a sporting event I think a lot of people here have turned it into a political game as well. Which makes sense considering the current state of European politics...

Rayna and I at the show

Yep, that's Jay-Z.

Anyway, I thought I'd just give a quick update of what's been up here. Last Saturday I saw Watch the Throne (Jay-Z and Kanye West performing together) which was amazing and worth every penny of the 71 Euro I spent on it. Raina and I maneuvered our way into the front row!! I've been out clubbing a few times this week...been to all my classes, spent a lot of time thinking about the future, figuring out stuff for nursing school (or not...?) and being generally cool. Sometimes I miss home, but only briefly and thinking of Madison already gives me pangs of how much I'll miss it here.



My life. Mein Leben.

gedanken beim spaziergang

Today as I was walking home from class (which I will explain about it in a bit) I thought about how lucky I was to be able to speak English. English is really a beautiful language, I love how I can take words and mix them together to make meaningful thought provoking ideas come to other people's attention. I love that I can understand how other people are thinking and suggest things with such complexity that only certain words can convey. I love how you can take certain words and make them whimsical with additions or subtractions of other words, or twist the exact same words into something more with extra emphasis on certain syllables. I love making situational puns that can't be repeated because they fit so perfectly that it only works once, but it really works. I miss English in that I wish I would stop forgetting my non-everyday English vocabulary. Those words like gossamer, bombastic and capricious that can turn something so ordinary into an extraordinary explanation...I forget them so often when speaking German so much and every time I hear a nice English word I get a warm feeling inside...a feeling of nice recognition. I guess it's weird to get a feeling from just any old random word but hey, I'm going a little crazy thinking in Denglish all the time.

So my class today was just awful. The whole experience was terrible. Four students (ungefähr) gave presentations that they've had a month to prepare. 10 minute presentations about a pretty straightforward topic. Well, they didn't really do the work correctly, in the professor's defense, but in my opinion did nothing to merit the sheer volume of feedback given by not only the other students in the class but also the professor herself. She straight-up told one student that she was going to fail in front of the whole class. I would be absolutely mortified. The whole situation was rude. I can't even imagine getting such rude and terrible feedback from my classmates and teacher...that being said, my presentation is in a few weeks and I hope they go easy on us...

Berlin

After two long weeks of traveling, it's nice to be back in Bonn again. Sitting at Starbucks now, I've gotten really tired of my room because it's so small and lonely. And it kind of smells funky...

Berlin was a really interesting experience. In comparison to Madison-sized-German-city Bonn, being in the New York of Germany was a change of pace. I think what interested me the most about Berlin was the new-ness of the city mixed with the remnants of the old East Germany and destruction still visible from WWII. Basically, after the wall came down in 1989 all hell broke loose and the city was completely rebuilt. It's really an architectural wonder in that the city still has a "wall" going through it, meaning that wherever there once stood the Berlin wall now lies a double line of flat bricks. It was so interesting to see it because you realize that it really cut life in half. People living across the street from each other literally couldn't visit each other for over 10 years in the 50's and 60's, which is insane. My parents were alive at that time! It's not that long ago! It also blows my mind that my family lived in Germany during the weird time of East/West Germany. I wonder how different it was...

While we were in Germany, we did all the classic sight seeing stuff and also did the whole go to a techno club thing. (Berlin is famous for it's top of the line clubs, but I didn't particularly enjoy that experience as I had to pay TWELVE EURO eintritt).
The whole trip was sponsored by the international office here, so all of the Americans were there and a few of the other exchange students. We spent the first day exploring the area around our hostel, which was conveniently located really close to the Brandenburger Tor. We walked around that area, which includes this really amazing Holocaust memorial. It's a rectangle filled with 2711 large grey stones in a grid of all different heights that are meant to resemble tombstones. You can walk through it, and around the edges of the area (probably about one square city block) the stones only come up to your hips, but as you venture deeper into the memorial they stretch to about 3-4 times human height. They're all completely unlabeled and personally I think what makes it so interesting is the absolute abstractness of the memorial...how the architect (who also coincidentally also designed the 9/11 memorial in NYC) envisioned such a vague memorial that was so powerful and could strangely evoke so much emotion without a person even knowing what they were walking into. I didn't actually know what it was when I first walked in, but it was overwhelming in a really strange way that's hard to put into words. Totally interesting though.

We also of course enjoyed the local cuisine (supplimented by stolen sandwiches from the breakfast buffet at the hostel) which was currywurst and Berliners (but in Berlin the tasty jelly donuts are actually called Pfannkuchen). The donut you see me about to devour here was filled with the typical delicious plum filling. And I did enjoy half a liter of Berlin's finest brew...not as tasty as Rheinisch beer but hey, I drank it. :)

Anyway, other sights that we saw: Checkpoint Charlie, East Side Gallery (really amazing artwork painted on the wall in the old Soviet section of the city), we went to an old Stasi prison, which was really amazing because our tour guide was actually held there in the 70's for trying to 'escape' East Germany. He was a really fascinating guy.

Before Germany's Sieg

Friday was an exciting day here in Europe because the first games of European Soccer Cup started. Germany played on Saturday evening, when we had all arrived back in Bonn. Most of my friends here met up at a big stadium to watch a public viewing of the game on a big screen TV. I think after watching a couple football games over the past few days, I finally understand the rules. (mostly). Apparently Germany is in a really hard group (against Denmark, Portugal and the Netherlands, I think?) so it was a big deal that we won this game. What I like most about it is how inspiring the whole thing is, so much more than American Football. People get into the Packers, sure, but for Germany this EM (Europa Meisterschaft=european cup) is really a source of pride and hope for their country. It was really amazing to witness the craziness that ensued when Germany won 1:0 against Portugal, there were huge traffic jams, yelling, screaming, music, chants, flags...it was insane. I loved seeing how crazy people got at the end of the first game of 3 that Germany is guaranteed to play, I can hardly wait to see how the rest of the cup plays out.

Bis später leute :)

Crete

Although I am currently sitting in a hostel in Berlin, I thought I would recap on the week in Crete before getting into all the goings on here.

The past week was probably the best in my life overall so far. I couldn’t have imagined a better group of people or a better setting than what we ended up with.

We started out the week discovering our villa, which had four rooms with two beds each, and two boys slept outside on our patio. The villa was large with our own private swimming pool and you could see the bay of Chania (Crete's largest city) from our windows. Picturesque in every way imaginable. We arrived, went for a swim and figured out the car situation because we found that renting a car was necessary because the island was really much larger than I (and probably the others as well) had expected. We spent the first night without a car, discovered the local restaurant, the Cretian Corner, owned by British-Greeks, and had our first taste of Raki, the local liquor near where we were staying. It was pretty nasty, but when honey was added it was tolerable at least.

The next morning (after some minor injuries from a wild first night in the villa) we took the bus to Chania to discover the beach. We ended up just walking all around the tourist areas of Chania where the cruise ships dock where there are lots of interesting, cheap stores where people can buy junky souvenirs. It was nice but finding the beach was not as easy as we had anticipated either…we finally ended up on a small beach on the other side of the city, where the water was stunning but later it was discovered that swimming was not recommended within the city limits of Chania due to the high sewage levels. No one got too sick though…

By the next morning we had acquired one car, so five of us loaded into the tiny red car to go to the airport to rent a second car for the rest of us. Getting home was a fiasco, somehow there was a bee in our car which sought out my back to sting immediately, we got lost, and decided that making a U-turn on a high way was a viable option for getting home alive. After surviving getting the car, we headed to a long stretch of beach quite close to Chania. Again, stunning views and beach. We had more Greek food in a little restaurant near the beach and spent literally the entire afternoon laying out on the beach and playing in the water. Later in the afternoon, Hanna and I went to a little bar on the beach and chatted about how much we would miss each other at the end of these few months. It was depressing but also gave me a really amazing outlook on this experience because I realized what great friends I've made here and how I want to keep these people in my life for so many years to come. 

The third day we decided to go down to the other side of the island to discover beaches there. It was a long drive and we ended up in a cute little town with a mediocre beach. We decided that we may have better beach options if we drove a little way down the coast, so we all climbed back into the cars and started our ‘short’ journey to the next beach. As luck would have it, we ran into a sign after not too long that said the most beautiful beach on the island of Crete, Elofonsi, was ‘close’ by. I suggested that maybe since we had come so far we would be best suited to head to the beach we knew was a sure thing. Everyone thought that was a pretty decent idea, but unfortunately, the ‘road’ was unpaved, through the mountains, laden with goats. It was stressful; in our car, the fearless driver Matt did a fabulous job navigating through the steep, twisted roads of the Cretian mountains. After two and a half hours of hell, we arrived at the most beautiful beach I have ever seen. Elofonisi is unique in that to get to the prime location, you need to wade across the knee deep water. It was crystal clear and if you looked out into the distance you could almost swear that the ocean had been dyed blue. To top it off, there was a beautiful mountain landscape and strange stones raising out of the water. It was a view from a postcard. Reluctantly we left to get back to the villa and took a really nice road all the way home where you could catch beautiful vistas of the coast from up in the mountains. That evening our group of ten was joined by Kevin, also from Wisconsin, and we all returned to the Cretian Corner for another round of the meat platter.

The next day we went to a small town that one of the owners recommended to us with a nice beach and a beautiful white floating chapel. The chapel wasn’t actually floating, of course, but it looked like it was from far away because you had to take a small rocky footpath across the water. From the peninsula where the chapel was, little tidepools formed where you could watch the patterns of the waves ebbing and flowing. I love the sounds that the water makes and always feel a tinge of regret that there’s no way for me to bottle it up and take it home with me. I took the first of a pair of really wonderful walks down the long shore with Marc. It was a really strange beach though because the tides would alternate between hot and cold water and I would scream and then relax, scream and then relax. Lots of laughing. That day I also discovered that Kevin was the guy I sent a shout out to a couple winters ago because we both had broken transportation…it was a hilarious realization and I must admit my mind is still a little blown.

The next day we took a break from the beach to go hiking through the white mountains. I love hiking on vacations, I feel like some of the best memories are made from the endorphin high you get from the exercise. What was interesting about the mountains was really that even though the island was so hot every day, the mountains were still topped with snow. The path looked like something out of northern Wisconsin, and made me feel like home. At the bottom (it was one of those hike down then hike up situations) there was a babbling brook with clear cool water and boulders to sun yourself on. We sped up on the way home because we were battling the park closing at 5pm, which was a challenge but felt amazing and I wasn’t even sore the next day. On the way home we stopped at a restaurant at which a lot of us ordered rabbit…not I, but I must admit I tried it and found bunny rather tasty.

The last full day we returned with Kevin to Elofonsi. I think one of my fondest memories of the vacation was walking down the coast through the tidepools and rocks on the island you wade to. It was the second marathon walk I went on, the only crappy part was that I left my kindle out in the sun and it completely died, leaving me bookless. I miss Kipling already. 

Our last day we returned to Chania because a few of the girls really wanted to get these fish pedicures. (By a few of the girls I mean Maja and I talked about it pretty constantly until everyone else was persuaded). Fish pedicures was that we stuck our feet in these tanks of water where fish ate the dead skin off of our dirty feet. It was one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever had in my life. I laughed for literally the first 10 minutes my feet were in there. After a final lunch, and one last shot of Raki, we went back to the airport, finally making it back to Bonn around 11:30, exhausted, sad, and filled with fernweh. I must admit I still miss Crete, mostly the people, but also the environment and the experiences that will last a lifetime.

My weekend in Bonn was too short, and this morning we arrived in Berlin for the week. I thought I should post about Crete though first to make way for new memories being made this week with all the Americans who I love. I’m so excited to see another German city, which seems so more metropolitan than I would even have guessed. It’s also crazy to me to see the brick line where the wall once stood, can’t even fathom living in a city where you are confined to an area but can see how life goes on the other side. It absolutely blows my mind.

So anyway, until I get back to Bonn, enjoy the week. Ich vermisse euch alle!

This internet is being uncooperative so I regret to say that I can't share pictures right now. I'll try to make a picture post when I get home with a couple highlights.