So let's start with the basics. My German has improved vastly. Really, I'm quite proud of it. I still can't really, you know, make friends, but that would literally take much longer for me to really work up the confidence. It's the hardest thing, to just approach someone in German. And besides, like everywhere, people stay in their little niches here. I just unfortunately don't have one because of the whole no-one-else-on-my-program-this-semester thing. Poop, right? But as far as making myself clear as well as responding to people and properly reacting to what they say, I'm golden (see, right there, I almost said 'reacting on' because that's how Germans would say it. yay?).
My classes are fine except for physics, which is brutally hard, boring, totally foreign and completely bereft of human interaction. If I don't weasel my way into another approach (as in, make it clear to the professor that I'm almost incapable of taking a class at this level in a foreign language by myself, and it's harder than anything in Middlebury), I'm well on my way to flat-out failing. And not Bergen Academy/Middlebury failing, like I got a C+...literally F.
So that's bad, right? Let me explain why I almost don't care. I mean, I hope it works out better than that, but there are so many better things going on in my life right now. I mean, let's play the "one of these things is not like the other" game: currently I'm reading German books, working on my vocabulary, learning about German history and culture through conversations and class, travelling around in Germany, singing in a German choir, meeting with someone who's going to America to exchange language abilities (more on that later), meeting (although not totally successfully) with some Germans to try to put together a little a cappella group, travelling to Greece, Italy and Amsterdam, composing and writing music, practicing mandolin, learning to cook...and DOING SUPER-DUPER FUN PHYSICS PROBLEM SETS!! BY MYSELF! YEAA!! So I made that round of the game a little easy, but my point should be clear. It's literally a weekly vacuum of joy in my life that has nothing to do with the rest of the fantastic stuff that's happening here. I haven't done the last, uh, three problem sets. Partly because I don't care to, partly because I'm lazy, and mostly because they're bloody impossible. The only one I managed to do myself I spent hours pouring over math and methods I'd never encountered, instead of bettering myself in much more important ways. No, excuse me, but fuck that. But let's go more into these good things, ey?
1) Acappella group. I use the term here quite magnanimously. Really, it's just been three people or so meeting and singing canons. But that in and of itself is so beautiful, right? The girls I've met through this have all been totally wonderful and nice, and the meets so far have been full of happiness for me. Music truly connects everywhere. We've been singing little canons, like I said, and hopefully we can keep working stuff up as we find more people.
2) Tandem partner: So Berlin has this totally sweet program called Tandem, in which you (through a university or just on specific websites) post a message stating what languages you speak and what languages you're looking to improve on. So I found a really nice girl from a smaller village outside of Berlin who is going to America to work next year as some sort of engineering liaison. That means that have a hard time translating some things, but generally it's been going really well (besides this guy being late, dumb). For example, yesterday we wandered around a grocery store and went through the names of various products, me for the German names and her the English names. It was totally fun, enlightening, hilarious, and exactly what an abroad experience should consist of. Germans around us were totally getting a kick out of it too, as I'd stare at potatoes wide-eyed like a toddler and then all of the sudden excitedly yell out "KARTOFFELN!", which is the german word for potatoes. Shameful, by the way, that I forgot that one, yet had no problem with the word for pineapple ("Ananas"). I also enjoyed explaining the concept of the word "like" to her, which proved to be a double-edged sword, because then I was like totally conscious of like every single time that I would like say the word like...like, you know?
3) Choir. Well, a little boring, but honestly pretty ambitious for a random choir. We're performing the finale of Mahler's 8th Symphony, Brahms' Nänie and and also Brahms Schicksalslied. A personal note: now that I'm trying to write music myself, and I've done some arranging and such, I've started to fully appreciate just how ridiculous a bro Brahms was. Every chord and measure in his songs works together in such an artful way, and then he simultaneously builds in these beautiful melodies into each voice, plays with rhythm and expectations constantly, keeps a general form and progression to the whole song, and yet makes it all sound so easy and beautiful. Like, how do you DO that? Goodness. I've met some people there, all nice. Germans are nothing if not nice and open, literally without exception. But here's the kicker of it all: we're performing all these songs with the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra - like, Berliner Philharmoniker. Holy hell. More info to that here: http://www.collegium-musicum-berlin.de/konzerte/59-mittwoch-30610-20-uhr-und-donnerstag-1710-20-uhr-philharmonie-berlin.html. I only wish I had not missed the auditions for the chamber choir, those Debussy songs are awesome.
Trip to Weimar. Subtitle: GOETHE SCHILLER GOETHE SCHILLER GOELLER SCHITTE ad nauseum. I finally got to meet the Mainz students...let's just say their lives are a little different from mine right now, lucky punks. But we all got along swimmingly and had a merry time that weekend. We saw a play about Goethe and his women, which I understood...some of. But I had to do a lot of that cued laughter, like other people laugh and then I nervously FAWFAWFAW along with them. I hope I didn't stumble into any traps there. We ate legit Wurst, drank beer (go figure), saw a LOT of museums and generally much merriment was to be had.
Then we went to Buchenwald the next day, which was a concentration camp just outside Weimar (as in, the point wasn't extermination, but it might have as well have been, ya know?). Somber stuff, of course. I felt like I kept having the wrong reactions though. Cue everyone getting images of me laughing at some terrible thing. No, it was more...I think I kept intellectualizing everything, rather than drowning myself in the overwhelming stink of misery that pervaded the camp.
I also kept noticing the greyness of it all - the human things that make the camp much more understandable. Well, not the camp itself...it was obviously a terrible thing. But I always hear people say things like "How could this have happened?", and in my mind it's pretty obvious. The rationalizations, the forced hands, the situational things, the necessities of every day life, the fears and worries, they all had their fingerprints all over the camp. And then there's one or two terrible and ambitious people at the top who conduct and manipulate the confusion towards terrible undertakings. I walked away from that not only understanding how such a place could've existed, but also marveling at the symptoms of the camp's imminent founding (the things people "should've stopped, should've seen coming") and how many of these symptoms can easily be found in our world nowadays. People hold up the Nazi's actions as pure evil, and marvel at how it could've happened. And then those same people fail to see the symptoms of such things in their own world - the manipulation of facts, words, fears, everyday issues. All it takes is a charismatic group of people with a strong vision of something, people with silver tongues who can talk about anything and make it seem acceptable, and then it's too late, too late. People everywhere would do well to stop looking at the Holocaust as this one-time act of pure evil, perpetrated by men and women of pure evil, and would do better to look at how it unfolded and how many of its' symptoms can be found in our own societies. And then we address those symptoms, and stop them.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be heavy-handed here. It's just, the more I learn about things, the more I find out how human and complicated most things are. You learn about these terrible absolute things when you're young ("The Holocaust could never happen here", "Osama bin Laden is just a bad man who hates us for our freedom", "America is the best country on the planet", "Drugs are bad period, and so are the people who do them", "He stole/killed/did this-and-that and he's just a bad man", "God and hell exists" OH SHIT I WENT THERE), and now it seems like I keep feeling foolish because the truth behind such statements is ugly, complicated, difficult to understand and just way too human.
But I want to close this blog with some optimism...it really wasn't my intention to turn this into a little diatribe. Hand-in-hand with these life lessons and demonstrations of how complicated life really is, I've been learning beautiful things. Beautiful people, good intentions and works of art are everywhere, and no one is really just evil or something. The world's a wonderful place, yea? And there's so much to learn in it. It seems like the only terrible thing in this world is apathy, this horrible lazy tendency people have to just wave their hand complacently at life and go back to FarmVille or video games or some shit. Now, I'm just as guilty as anyone of that (not FarmVille specifically, forget that crap), and sometimes we need that laziness. And I'm not advocating we all start campaigning for president here. But when people are complacent and literally just live their life day-to-day with no ambitions, passion, interests or whatever...that's no life whatsoever. Such people could actually die and it wouldn't matter. They'd be forgotten and that would be it. History is defined by people who weren't complacent. Sometimes we wish they were apathetic, like in Hitler's case. But I guess that's the main lesson here, and something I really struggle with as well. Not to be apathetic. Because if you're not apathetic, you find out that life is complicated and fascinating and gray and beautiful and ugly and invigorating and so on.
It helps that I'm listening to a very inspirational-sounding song right now. Thanks Jamie Cullum!
Sorry that this blog wasn't as funny or as goofy to read as the others. But so it goes.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, the chick who started the a cappella group was totally inspirational on one front. She detailed out a giant trip she took around eastern Europe and Asia, all the places she'd been to, and rattled off the like 15 languages she knew how to say hello in. I was like rock on chica, you do that cultural experience. New life goal acquired.
