the wind in my earlobes
If you read the last entry and felt a little uppity, this should calm your spirits. I do lead a mostly normal life, still. This semester I've been attending:
Monday 9:15-10:45 Grammatik (Grammar)
Tuesday 9:15-10:00 Nationalismus und Vertreibung in Osteuropa in der 1. Haelfte des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Nationalism and Expulsion in Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th Century)
Tuesday 9:15-10:45 Tutorium fuer Liternatur nach 1945
Tuesday 11:15-12:45 Literatur nach 1945 ([German] Literature after 1945)
Wednesday 9:15-10:45 Grammatik
Wednesday 11:15-12:45 Introduction to Modernism (ironic because although its my 'cop out class,' because its in English, I actually have the most work to do for this one)
Thursday 12:15-1:00 Nationalismus und Vertreibung in Osteuropa in der 1. Haelfte des 20. Jahrhunderts
And a couple of weeks ago I enrolled in classes for Fall Quarter at Santa Cruz. It felt a little early for me to be doing that, too:
MW 10:30-12:00 Ballet II
MWF 2:00-3:10 Spanish 1
MWF 3:30-4:40 Medieval Spain
F 11:45-1:45 Jazz III
TuTh 2:00-3:45 Ancient Japan
I was really excited about the classes when I signed up, so hopefully I will still be that way in a few months.
Apart from the youthful antics and school, I have been doing my best to attend a couple of gym classes a week. The gym classes are what I imagine aerobics classes to be like, but it took me a good couple of weeks to be able to handle myself so I wasn't bursting out laughing at all the ludicrous stuff we do. I don't know if that sort of thing is inherently funny, or if the fact that its all in German compounds the ridiculousness. Either way, it all is a step in the right direction. I tried once more this semester to take some dance classes, but the jazz classes are below my level and the ballet ones were all full, so I decided to wait until it was all back in English again.
So instead of going to dance classes, I sort of happenstancedly started attending the ultimate frisbee team practices. With a sport like ultimate frisbee, one would rightly imagine that the practices aren't really super official or anything, and pretty much anyone who feels like spending a few hours Tuesday and Friday evenings running around in soggy grass is welcome. So far it's been a lot of fun, and I hope to be able to go to one of the every-so-often weekend tournaments one of these times. I started going, with Jacky, mainly because our friend Eileen plays back with the team at Berkeley, and so has thus been involved with the team the whole year we've been here so far. It feels a little late to get started, but its just now that the weather is becoming decent, and even saying that is highly arguable, especially on days like today.
Most of this semester we have also been playing sports on Sundays, a big pack of us Americans with a good amount of Germans tossed in as well. It started off as Football Sunday, and after some prodding (from myself, among others), we got frisbee and soccer included as well, and now we basically just play frisbee. It's generally a lot of fun.
Last night I went out for food with Lee and Scott at a place called Cartoon. They are notorious for sort of poor service, but on Sundays things are a good deal cheaper, so we went in the spirit of not having to cook ourselves. After some pasta we rented some movies on Lee's account, which was a foreign feeling. I've rented a movie I think once before here with Andi and Matthias, but its still strange to walk around that place and look at all the titles that change in translation. Then we went back to Lee's place, where we watched L'Auberge Espagnol (The Spanish Apartment), a french movie about a kid from Paris participating in an exchange program in Barcelona. The movie, which we watched in French with German subtitles, has been out for a couple of years and I have been wanting to see it for awhile, if only because it deals with the Erasmus program, which is the european equivalent of what I am doing right now. All in all it was a little topical of a movie, though I still enjoyed it. Once the credits began to roll, Lee got up in the dark to turn it off and he said, "God, that was depressing." It's depressing because it is the highly dramaticized version of us, if we were all europeans, and living in one tight apartment together. We're not, we're all from California and we live in single rooms in student dorms, but last night we three, as would all of us, recognized every feeling portrayed--- that of indescribable excitement, of sink-your-insides disappointment, frustration and confusion, despair and finally homesickness, not really for what we left behind but what we thought we would be going back to. And its just now that I realize that today is the two month marker, that by this time on August the 5th my plane will have already left the ground, my last moments on german soil already departed. For those of us who feel the fire at the back of our heels, its not something we're looking forward to.
Monday 9:15-10:45 Grammatik (Grammar)
Tuesday 9:15-10:00 Nationalismus und Vertreibung in Osteuropa in der 1. Haelfte des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Nationalism and Expulsion in Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th Century)
Tuesday 9:15-10:45 Tutorium fuer Liternatur nach 1945
Tuesday 11:15-12:45 Literatur nach 1945 ([German] Literature after 1945)
Wednesday 9:15-10:45 Grammatik
Wednesday 11:15-12:45 Introduction to Modernism (ironic because although its my 'cop out class,' because its in English, I actually have the most work to do for this one)
Thursday 12:15-1:00 Nationalismus und Vertreibung in Osteuropa in der 1. Haelfte des 20. Jahrhunderts
And a couple of weeks ago I enrolled in classes for Fall Quarter at Santa Cruz. It felt a little early for me to be doing that, too:
MW 10:30-12:00 Ballet II
MWF 2:00-3:10 Spanish 1
MWF 3:30-4:40 Medieval Spain
F 11:45-1:45 Jazz III
TuTh 2:00-3:45 Ancient Japan
I was really excited about the classes when I signed up, so hopefully I will still be that way in a few months.
Apart from the youthful antics and school, I have been doing my best to attend a couple of gym classes a week. The gym classes are what I imagine aerobics classes to be like, but it took me a good couple of weeks to be able to handle myself so I wasn't bursting out laughing at all the ludicrous stuff we do. I don't know if that sort of thing is inherently funny, or if the fact that its all in German compounds the ridiculousness. Either way, it all is a step in the right direction. I tried once more this semester to take some dance classes, but the jazz classes are below my level and the ballet ones were all full, so I decided to wait until it was all back in English again.
So instead of going to dance classes, I sort of happenstancedly started attending the ultimate frisbee team practices. With a sport like ultimate frisbee, one would rightly imagine that the practices aren't really super official or anything, and pretty much anyone who feels like spending a few hours Tuesday and Friday evenings running around in soggy grass is welcome. So far it's been a lot of fun, and I hope to be able to go to one of the every-so-often weekend tournaments one of these times. I started going, with Jacky, mainly because our friend Eileen plays back with the team at Berkeley, and so has thus been involved with the team the whole year we've been here so far. It feels a little late to get started, but its just now that the weather is becoming decent, and even saying that is highly arguable, especially on days like today.
Most of this semester we have also been playing sports on Sundays, a big pack of us Americans with a good amount of Germans tossed in as well. It started off as Football Sunday, and after some prodding (from myself, among others), we got frisbee and soccer included as well, and now we basically just play frisbee. It's generally a lot of fun.
Last night I went out for food with Lee and Scott at a place called Cartoon. They are notorious for sort of poor service, but on Sundays things are a good deal cheaper, so we went in the spirit of not having to cook ourselves. After some pasta we rented some movies on Lee's account, which was a foreign feeling. I've rented a movie I think once before here with Andi and Matthias, but its still strange to walk around that place and look at all the titles that change in translation. Then we went back to Lee's place, where we watched L'Auberge Espagnol (The Spanish Apartment), a french movie about a kid from Paris participating in an exchange program in Barcelona. The movie, which we watched in French with German subtitles, has been out for a couple of years and I have been wanting to see it for awhile, if only because it deals with the Erasmus program, which is the european equivalent of what I am doing right now. All in all it was a little topical of a movie, though I still enjoyed it. Once the credits began to roll, Lee got up in the dark to turn it off and he said, "God, that was depressing." It's depressing because it is the highly dramaticized version of us, if we were all europeans, and living in one tight apartment together. We're not, we're all from California and we live in single rooms in student dorms, but last night we three, as would all of us, recognized every feeling portrayed--- that of indescribable excitement, of sink-your-insides disappointment, frustration and confusion, despair and finally homesickness, not really for what we left behind but what we thought we would be going back to. And its just now that I realize that today is the two month marker, that by this time on August the 5th my plane will have already left the ground, my last moments on german soil already departed. For those of us who feel the fire at the back of our heels, its not something we're looking forward to.
posted by Meredesu at 1:37 PM
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