Paris

One of the great things about living in Europe is how accessible travel is and how so many different countries are so close. In the US, you can drive 1000 miles and still end up in the US, and while yes, cultures vary from state to state, you end up seeing the same things, meeting the same kinds of people, and hearing the same language and expressions. Travel in the US is like changing your bedroom wall color from white to pale yellow, whereas travel in Europe is like getting rid of the walls all together. At least, it seemed to be so with my single trip outside Germany.

Last week I took my first trip to a European city outside of Germany and went to Paris, France. Of course I loved it and was wishing pretty hard that I had a cute little apartment overlooking some small Parisian street, but then I kept thinking, what if you lived here and could see the Mona Lisa whenever you wanted and the Eiffel Tower was just a building you saw every day? And let’s face it, my fashion sense is not up to par and my shoes aren’t stylish/high-heeled enough. So, I was happily a tourist and could shamelessly abuse my photo-taking privileges as such. If anyone wants to look at a few dozen pictures just of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night, I have you covered.

Unfortunately I was only there for three days and didn’t manage to fit in everything I wanted to do (namely see Monet’s Water Lillies in the Orangerie, it was closed when I tried to go), but it gives me a good excuse to go back.

Enjoy the pictures!

Sacre Coeur - We went to Paris by bus, drove 17 hours through the night, got off the bus around 7:30 am and began our bus tour of the city. The Sacre Coeur was our first stop. At least the early morning light looks pretty.

 

 

 

A view of Paris from the Sacre Coeur

The famous dome of the Lafayette

The Notre Dame - no Quasimodo sighting. Or talking gargoyles.

Looking a little uncertain here outside of Versailles, but don't be fooled! Versailles absolutely floored me, it was so gorgeous. I also have way too many pictures of the interior that I'm refraining from posting.

The Louvre - I found the exterior alone extremely beautiful and overwhelmingly big.

I thought the Mona Lisa looked very different in person. The face, the background, the posture - everything was strangely unfamiliar. It just goes to show that copies are no replacement for an original.

The Eiffel Tower is honestly a big ugly in the daytime, but when it's lit up at night, it looks like a completely different building.

Wichtige Wörter

• reisen - to travel
• französich - French. I managed to get by with bonjour and merci, which is about the extent of my French.
• Fotos machen - to take pictures. In English we say to take a picture, in German it’s to make a picture.

The Halfway Point

As of today, I have lived in Germany for exactly five months, with five months left to go. It’s hard to believe my year is already half way over; I can’t imagine getting on a plane and flying back to the US. These were some of the fastest five months of my life, and I’m sure the next five are going to fly by as well. Living in a different culture has gotten increasingly easier, but I still have tons to learn, especially language-wise. Still, I no longer have to actively translate everything in my head to understand and speaking comes much more naturally. Since I’m bad at tracking my own progress and I know Germans to be a little more blunt and honest than their sugar-coating American counterparts, I decided to ask people at my school how they felt my Deutsch was improving. Here are some of my German friends delivering the honest truth on my language advancement:

“Well, at the beginning I couldn’t understand anything you said, but now we can talk to each other really well.”

“It’s better, it’s like you don’t have to think about it as hard.”

“Now you can say whatever you want to. You still have an accent, but that could take years to go away.”

“You’re a lot more fluent, at the beginning you spoke half English and paused a lot more, but now it’s easier.”

“At the beginning you had to ask what people were saying and to have them repeat things, but now you understand everything that we say.”

“Nope, not better. Just kidding. I don’t know, it’s hard to compare because we were all impressed by how much German you could already speak. But it’s easier for you know, isn’t it.”

So there you have it. On another note, yesterday I signed up to give a presentation on the Amish in my Religion class. Just spreading the Lancaster wealth.

Wichtige Wörter:

• am Anfang: at the beginning
• fließend: fluent
• die Sprache: the language
• verstehen: understand

What Germany Really Thinks About America

Germany is completely fascinated with America. Teenagers run around with American flags on everything, from shirts to shoes to pants to phone cases. If you ask someone where they’d most like to visit, New York is always on everyone’s list. No one really understands when I say that Germany is way more interesting than America, because America for me is just everyday life. In fact, coming here and listening to everyone talk about how cool America is makes me realize how great, albeit sometimes a bit strange, it really is to live here. To live in America is embarrassing at times, but to hear others’ impressions is completely entertaining. Since we just listed words we associated with America in German class the other day, I thought I’d share with you a few favorites.

Here's what comes to mind when Germans think about America:

• Barack Obama
• Hollywood
• Coffee shops
• Statue of Liberty
• Golden Gate Bridge
• 9/11
• Terrorism
• Church
• Friendly people
• Fat people
• Gun laws
• Death penalty
• Fast food
• Diversity
• Big country
• American flag
• Patriotism/pride
• The American Dream
• Freedom
• Opportunity

Most Mentioned Cities (in order of how frequently I hear about them):
1. New York
2. Los Angeles
3. Miami

Most common questions people ask me about America:

• Are you a democrat or a republican?
• Do you like Obama?
• Have you ever been to New York?
• Why are your gun laws like that?
• Do you have your driver’s license? (To get a driver’s license in Germany you have to be 18 and pay thousands of euros)
• Is high school like High School Musical?

And that’s a look into what Germans think about America.

Christmas in Germany

When it comes to Christmas, Germany really knows what it’s doing. In the US, Christmas is overhyped, over commercialized, and there’s too much stress leading up to this one day, suddenly to have it be over. Germany has managed to keep the charm and excitement intact. The Christmas season began with the setting up of the Weihnachtsmärkte, or Christmas markets, on the first of December. It was hard to go 100 feet in the city without running into a Christmas market, and they were always full of people drinking Glühwein, eating roasted almonds, and playing music. They were open every day from morning till night, and so charmingly German that it was hard not to stop every few moments and take it in, because I knew nothing even comes close to this back home.

St. Nikolaustag was the next event in the build up to Christmas. On the night before December 6, children in Germany put out one clean shoe. If the shoe is clean enough, St. Nikolaus fills it with candy and little presents.

Christmas here is celebrated on the 24th, not the 25th, although because of the markets and the amount of lights and decorations (in stores, not as much on houses, like in America), it’s like the whole month of December is Christmas. On the 24th, most families attend church during the day, eat nice meals together, and then open presents after dinner. There aren’t stockings, but the amount of treats that go into advent calendars here make up for that. Here, advent calendars consist of small bags, one for every day of December till Christmas, filled with candy and small presents.

Even though I like waking up on Christmas morning to presents, opening stockings, and most of all, spending it with my family, Christmas in Germany was pretty spectacular.

Wichtige Wörter

• der Weihnachtsmarkt - Christmas market (die Weihnachtsmärkte - Christmas markets)
• Glühwein - warm, spiced red wine
• das Geschenk - present
• das Krippenspiel - nativity play
• der Weihnachtsbaum - Christmas tree

The Movies

The other evening I went to see Catching Fire in theaters with my host mom. We brought in bags of snacks and chocolate, because unlike in America, people here don’t stop you from bringing food into movie theaters. Food at the movies is as expensive as back home, but the selection is different. You can buy RitterSport bars (a kind of German chocolate), ice cream, and the popcorn is sweet, not salty.

It takes some getting used to to watch dubbed movies. Since America has Hollywood, a lot of popular movies here were originally filmed in English and later dubbed in German. Not only do the words not match up with mouth movements, but it’s a bit strange to hear an actor with a distinctive voice have a completely other voice, and furthermore speak in German.

There are some theaters that play movies in its original English, but we went to see the German version of Catching Fire. That actually worked out well for me, at this point I can follow most of movies and TV shows. That, and the fact that I have basic knowledge of the plot from reading the book once and being mildly disappointed. I can tell my German is improving, even though people still sometimes wear patient little smiles of endearment when I talk. R’s are still especially hard, a lot of people think I’m Russian when they first meet me because apparently they don’t have strong R’s either. Also someone thought I was Irish. I was in a cell phone store trying to sort out my phone difficulties and realizing my vocabulary includes surprisingly few technological words. Eventually the salesman said, “Do you want to speak English?”
    “Yes, I really do.”
    He also spoke English well, with a Texas accent, and told me he had relatives in Texas, and he told me my accent sounded Irish “because a lot of people who live in America come from Ireland.” I told him that was true about 100 years ago in New York, but today in Pennsylvania there are almost no first generation Irish people. To compensate I told him Pennsylvania was pretty close to New York, so maybe I did have an Irish accent. He seemed to take it.

Wichtige Wörter

• das Kino - movie theater
• der Film - movie
• Panem - what Germans call The Hunger Games series. It took me a while to figure that one out.
• der Vertrag - I still don’t really know. Something phone contract related.

der Dom - a carnival in Hamburg, one in the winter and one in the spring. It lasts a few weeks and there are lots of rides and food.

Weihnachtsmarkt - sneak preview!

Rügen

Last weekend my host family and I visited Rügen, an island in the Baltic Sea in northeast Germany. I believe it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, even in extremely cold, windy, dark-at-five weather. Honestly, the pictures I have don’t do it justice. The leaves were changing, but there were no brown leaves in sight, so even the forest floor was carpeted in red leaves.

On Saturday we hiked through the woods along the coast to the next town, where we did a bit of shopping and a bit of cake eating. We bought an inexpensive kite and ran around the beach with it for a bit, something I haven’t done in years. We also went in a kind of capsule underneath the Ost See and saw lots of jellyfish. We walked back along the beach and, since it gets dark so early, spent a pleasant evening at home. On Sunday on our way back we stopped at an aquarium, Ozeanium Strasiland, voted Europe’s best museum in 2010. There, we saw more jellyfish.

Wichtige Wörter:

• die Ost See - Baltic Sea
• das Meer - sea
• der Drachen - kite (ours was a friendly looking blue jellyfish)
• die Qualle - jellyfish
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

The Quarter

Today I found a quarter in my backpack. It was...surreal.

On one hand, it's nice to see that I'm becoming completely accustomed to German living, but on the other, it's a little sad that I no longer find everything new and exciting. Adjusting to a culture means things become a lot easier, familiar, and less awkward, but I also miss the novelty. It's not that I'm growing bored here, I still see things every day that I think, "wow, that's different." But I can feel myself settling into a routine, which can be comfortable, but also dull.

There are still plenty of things I need to see here. The great thing about Germany is that you can hop on a train and go anywhere, which I love taking advantage of. However, I usually go to the same places: Bergedorf, die Innenstadt, the Alster...it's time a branch out a bit more.

Wichtige Wörter:

• to get used to something - sich an etwas gewöhnen. Zum Beispiel: Ich gewöhne mich an deutsche Kultur.
• die Innenstadt - downtown. I can take the train to Hamburger Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, and that puts me right in the middle of downtown Hamburg. 

Hamburg is a port city, so there's lots of industry around. There are many big ships carrying cargo containers, and the blue cranes in the background lift the containers on and off the ships. The large ship in front is the Queen Mary 2, a cruise ship.

This is the cargo ship. The smaller boat helps guide it out of the harbor.

The buildings on the left are very expensive apartments where many wealthy people live. Land in Hamburg is very expensive, and views overlooking the water are worth more. The building on the right is a hotel.