Sundays

Despite being in Germany for a year now, I'm still not quite used to Sundays. Nearly every single shop, including grocery stores, is closed. On Saturday, you have to remember to go and buy any ingredients or food you might need on Sunday, because if you want to make pancakes and have no flour, you're out of luck. But it's also a challenge of occupying yourself, and finding ways to enjoy the day that don't involve going shopping. I'm not a big spender, but I tend to do small errands throughout the week instead of doing all my shopping on one day (which, incidentally, would be Sunday if I was still living at home). So when a small part of my day usually involves stopping at Rewe for bread or juice and Rossmann for toothpaste on the way home from the gym or work, on Sunday I have to think of something else to do. It sounds insignificant but I like habits and I've been struggling to come up with a Sunday routine. This has turned out to be kind of interesting, though, because it's clear that most Germans see Sunday as a day to enjoy life and relax with friends and family.

In my attempts to figure out what the hell to do with myself on Sundays, I've fashioned a rough sort of routine. I generally wake up early, so the day starts with dragging out my breakfast by painstakingly constructing my Brötchen (the rolls Germans like to eat anytime, but especially for breakfast) with various spreads and toppings. I usually can't decide between tea or coffee, so I make both and that takes up a good chunk of time just waiting for the boiling water to become drinkable. The only other things I always do on Sundays are my 4:00 fitness course and my weekly phone call home, and maybe some lesson planning for the week ahead. This is all well and good, but there are a solid twelve hours or so that I try to fill with reading, catching up with emails, or vacuuming. Sunday is a test of occupation, of whether I am an independent enough person to occupy my time when I'm essentially alone for a whole day. Most of my roommates are occupied too, either at work or with their boyfriends/girlfriends, so other than the occasional breakfast together, I'm stuck staring at the elephant tapestry in my room. I never used to have problems keeping myself busy, so it kind of worries me when I look around my room and just feel at a loss. What's stopping me from being like these Germans with peaceful and content looks on their faces as they eat their Sunday apple cake and drink their milk coffees? Watching them just makes my love-hate relationship with Sunday grow even more. It's like a Rubik's cube with very clear directions you can read if you want to solve it, but I'm too stubborn to read the directions and out of frustration fling the cube at the wall instead.

blog resurrection!

Have been back in HH for a few weeks now and I guess it's time to resurrect this thing. But first, off to Köln!

update part 1

Man.  I'm sorry I've been such a slacker about updating.  It's just that lately I've been finding it difficult to find the the motivation to sit myself down and type anything.  Even e-mails.  Maybe I'm slowly entering the process of becoming a hermit?

I guess I will just make a list, since the caffeine hasn't kicked in yet and my brain is still tottering around like a two-year-old who occasionally bangs into the coffee table.

1.  The arm is almost healed.  It looks suspiciously different from my other one, though.  The doctor said that if we hadn't put a cast on it right away, it would have had to be operated on.  This is my last week of Krankengymnastik (physical therapy), so amen to that.  

2.  The weather has gotten to be very pleasant, so whenever possible, my WG piles into Ricky's cabrio and we depart Hamburg in search of a quiet meadow.  Last weekend we found one with a creek nearby and laid out blankets and basked in the sun and ran around full of glee.  It was awesome.

3.  The big thought that has been occupying my brain lately (I know, sometimes it's only capable of one task at a time) is what my relationship to my WG would be like if I understood every single thing that is said.  My fluency is decent, but I still miss stuff when something is said too fast or too unclear, or when there's a pesky verb in there that I don't know.  This is partly a good thing, because it forces me to be very neutral when judging my housemates.  I am pretty certain that if I had the fluency of a native speaker, my opinions about my flatmates would be very different.  More background information, stuff like that.  This also means that every day is incredibly interesting for me, because the process of getting to know my WG is never dull and constantly changing.  I've noticed, for example, that Anne is slightly OCD and very easily annoyed by lack of orderliness.  So when she's mad, she cleans feverishly.  Timo will go to great lengths to avoid conflict.  Lydi is almost never in a bad mood, but always talks to someone when she's angry and afterwards is cheerful again.  Ricky, on the other hand, always peaces out when he's angry and takes a drive or a walk.  And since he has a new job (his old job at Cafe Gnosa left him constantly pissed)  he is much happier and more relaxed.  Also, he recently cut all his beautiful curls off and looks very, very different.  For the better, I think.

To be continued, because it's time to go earn my meager living!

sleepy

I am sleepy.

That is all.

Also, Lydia broke her foot.

Will update later, calm down.  Jeez.

quick explanation

Ricardo and Lydia had to do this thing for university where they study communications design where they had to conceptualize and design a playground.  Then, one day in the kitchen, Lydia was lazily playing on the internet and realized that there are indoor playgrounds in Hamburg that might actually let adults play too.  Thus, my WG decided to go to Rabaatz in Hamburg-Stellingen, where they have an over-18 night once a month.  The word they chose to describe our planned mischief-making?  "Austoben,"  which roughly translates to rioting, scampering around in a wild manner, or "to rage oneself out."  

It was pretty awesome and we were jumping on trampolines and having good wholesome fun when I decided to try out this weird little thingy.  It was made out of wood with two small planks and four wheels, and it was something of a cross between a skateboard and a unicycle.  You stood on it and made cycling motions with your legs and apparently, if you have inhuman balance capabilities, you can move yourself along at a surprisingly snappy pace.  Unfortunately, I do not have such abilities, so what I did was fall, with lots of momentum, and land mostly on my left elbow.  Ow.

I didn't want to go to the doctor, even though I couldn't tie my shoes or straighten out my arm from the pain.  I figured it was just a bruise.  But I could barely sleep the entire night from the throbbing and in the morning I couldn't move my arm at all, so Anne called up this doctor in Wandsbek (one subway stop away) and Timo took me there.  After getting a sufficiently annoying cast and an MRI, it turns out that the one bone in the elbow joint smashed against the other one and made lots of hairline cracks in it, which is why it hurt so much to straighten the arm.  Anyway, I got a week off from work (apparently if the rowdy kids knocked into me it would not be good) and Lydia and Anne washed my hair for me after Ricky made fun of me because my head looked disgusting (I couldn't wash my hair very well with a cast on).  Luckily since then I've graduated to an ace bandage, but I still have to go to physical therapy so that I can eventually straighten the arm again.  Really, really annoying.

Yesterday I went with Ricky and Philipp to meet some other friends of theirs and grill outside in the fields of Meck-Pomm (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the state to the east of Hamburg).  The weather has been encouragingly warm recently and it was nice to get out of the city.  My goal this week:  learn how to make stuffed grape leaves!

at last

I'm back, man.  I didn't update for two reasons:  1) I was in Berlin for a week and 2) immediately upon my return I effed up my elbow, rendering typing painful and frustrating.  But now I get to ramble again and people can stop asking me if I gave up writing in this thing.

Berlin was a good time.  All the Fulbrighters in Germany and some from other countries (around 500 people total!) converged in one of the sweetest cities ever for a romp through wholesome lectures and panels interspersed with plenty of Berliner Weisse and general depravity.  And it was mostly free!

We were all housed in this ridiculously massive hotel on Alexanderplatz.  This hotel was monstrous.  Amy put it best when she said that it was like the Star of David for drunk people, because no matter where we were, we eventually saw the hotel shining like a beacon in the distance and hazily trudged toward it, being too cheap to bother with the friendly Berlin public transportation.  I accidentally got Dan's and my train ticket for a day too early, and since Dan got back from visiting his woman in Australia the day we were supposed to leave, I nearly had a very inconvenient crisis at hand.  Luckily, his plane got in early enough for him to make our train.  And our other Dickinsonian in Germany, Annie, just so happens to be stationed in Berlin and was awesome enough to let us bum on her huge couch overnight until we could check in at the hotel.  It was nice to see her again and she showed us around Friedrichshain and we met her hilarious British roommate.  

Most of the trip was filled with panels about political issues I don't really care about and lots of speeches by important Germans, including the former mayor of Hamburg (HH represent!) and the editor of the newspaper Die Welt.  It was pretty cool that important people cared about us.  Most of my time was spent with Dan and our friends based in other parts of Germany.  Eventually our little group solidified into a quintet of Dan, me, Jonathan, Zach, and Chelsea.  We accomplished important missions like visiting a bar called Klo (toilet), where we were greeted by a waitress handing out pieces of toilet paper.  Complete with an announcer whose job seemed to be to belittle everyone and seats made out of toilets, this bar was hilarious.  There were TV screens that showed absolutely ridiculous videos of people doing stupid stuff, and we snickered and giggled the whole time.  It was awesomely bad and the night was capped when we were waiting for the S-Bahn.  Dan guessed that the train would come in five minutes when in reality it was coming in seven, and Amy, who had been rather sauced since dinner (free wine got the better of her), declared, as if she had solved some kind of impossibly difficult math calculus problem, "Seven minutes... is more than five."  

I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, I have a bunch of stuff to do yet tonight, so I will continue with describing our epic journey tomorrow.  And how my elbow came to be, according to a very nice German doctor, "microscopically shattered."

will update soon

i promise i will update soon, once this stupid splint is off my arm.  until then it's just too frustrating to type with one hand.  i will have lots to write too!  berlin and injury and future plans and stuff!