A lot has happened for me in the last couple of weeks. I got really homesick, I met my host, the intensive German class started, I went away for the weekend, I gave a presentation in class, I'm supposed to be picking my classes for the semester, and I went (back) to the Deutsches Historisches Museum.
The homesickness was weird. I didn't want to go home and I didn't wish I was home. What did happen was I became overwhelmed by how unfamiliar everything was, and how insecure it made me feel to not know my surroundings or be able to find things in the grocery store. Even things that should have been familiar were upsetting. For example, coke here is less fizzy, has a different bottle, and tastes different because it has sugar instead of corn syrup. Something that has been the same my entire life and looks like it should be familiar here is suddenly unfamiliar, and these experiences en masse are destabilizing at a very deep level. I take for granted my ability to navigate basic things in the US, both general (like grocery stores) and social. Reading Nibelungenlied, Goethe, and Mann didn't prepare me for answering the door when the man came to fix the boiler, or asking my host if she has an extra clothes drying rack or more hangers.
At this point, I'm settled in better. I still haven't explored my locale as much as I probably should have. Usually when I'm out and about, I'm in Mitte near the IES center. I haven't walked around much around my apartment, but I have explored Edeka, the grocery store. When my host's friend took me out walking, she carefully stayed in the residential area and avoided the big commercial streets. I think it's important for me to just go look at it and see what's around here. I haven't because by the time I get home from class or hanging out with people, I'm ready to stay home.
My host, Lisa, by the way, has been very nice to me. She seems to be constantly busy, leaving home early in the morning and coming back late. She's a social worker at an elementary school and often has appointments after school. Every weekend, and sometimes during the week, she goes to Reppinichen, where she has a small woodland settlement with bungalows that she rents out. I have an open invitation to come with on the weekend, and that's where I was last weekend. It was really nice. There's internet in Lisa's main house, and at night, they build a pretty big fire in a thing that looks like a very large bird bath, and we all sit around it and I try to understand the Berlin dialect they all speak. It was nice to hear the wind in the trees and enjoy the last of the good weather. For this weekend, a couple of fellow IES students invited me to join them hitting the town, so I'm not going to go to Reppinichen, but I may again soon.
I had to do a presentation in class. Because this class isn't quite as seriously academic, I did Tanz der Vampire. Everybody was thoroughly amused by how Total Eclipse of the Heart was translated into a seductive vampire duet. And we had an orientation meeting about signing up for Humboldt classes. I'm supposed to be in five classes this semester: German as a foreign language, (my two IES classes) theater, Germans and Jews, and then I can pick two more. I'm debating whether I should take a linguistics class and a literature class at Humboldt, or if I should continue with French and then only take one Humboldt class. I'm slightly concerned that I don't have a strong enough linguistics background to actually take a German linguistics class, but when else will I have the opportunity? I'm strongly considering taking the Tieck class, but I need to look over the offerings again.
Today, we went to the Deutsches Historisches Museum. It's a really good museum, but I've been there before and I wasn't particularly interested in going again. Luckily, they wanted us to focus on things from the 20th century, which is where I spent the least time last time I was there. So I spent a few hours this morning looking at Nazi propaganda and concentration camp artifacts. It was suitably sobering. Afterward, I came home and chilled out. Sometimes it's nice to just have peace and quiet. With that said, I'm definitely planning to go out swing dancing soon.
Excellent post. Yeah, homesick is not at all about wanting to be home. Cola bottle sounds minor, but when everything you reach for is alien, even momentarily, its exhausting and disorienting even when you know the language (e.g., me in the U.K.).
ReplyDeleteReally? They took American German students to view an exposition on WWII and the Holocaust? Just to orient you to Berlin? Here in Iowa we take everyone to the Living History Farms and The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover. Let's say you're a computer science major from Turkey, and you come to Iowa to better your English. Guess where we take you? Ah, but let's say you're an American history major who has spent years studying the Great Depression, especially commodities. We take you to...
Because I pick the longest books I can for my two book credits with Audible, I'm in the middle of yet another WWII war epic, the third in the last for months, and independently I ran across an article on that display at that museum. Of course, I thought, I want my daughter to go and look at the propaganda, especially Signals magazine, that keeps making an appearance in my current Holocaust epic. Oh, please please please go look and describe...well, maybe you should go find out about where you can swing dance and what students do around Humboldt.
Sounds like culture shock instead of just homesickness alone. homesickness is a part of culture shock. culture shock feels like everything is disconnected and you have to figure out most stuff from a basic level to get it to work for you. some things work, others don't. It's intensive and tiring, but it gets better. the best advice I got regarding culture shock was to search for the best equivalent to what you would use, etc when at home and take the good with the bad/roll with the punches. then when you go back to the US, you get reverse culture shock. by that time, you have grown accustomed to German culture, language, grocery stores and Coke which makes going back to the old stuff alternately a great relief, not as interesting as before, or utterly repellant. And the odd feeling of figuring it all out again when it's your own culture is, to put it mildly, disconcerting. But I found reverse culture shock shorter lived but more intense. give yourself a chance---and try to not expect to do as much as you would in the states--you are doing more than you think you are....Gwen
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