Quitter

Some people quit their jobs because they find the work too stressful or because they just don’t like what they do any more. The favorite reason for given for the disgraced politician or out-of-favor aide-de-camp is that they want to “spend more time with family.” Any of these excuses would have been perfectly acceptable had I used one of them to justify my quitting German school a few weeks into the new semester. Instead, announcing my decision at a get-together hosted by my former German teacher and attended by group of my closest friends and classmates, I just told the truth. “I want to have the time to read more novels and take more bike rides in the country.” Well, that didn’t come across as very creditable.

My teacher was “very disappointed,” and thought I was missing a “rare opportunity" to master German. My classmates were horrified. They were sure that I was making rash decision that would have disastrous consequences for my university and professional careers. I explained that, actually, I’d already completed my university education and that, believe it or not, a passing grade on the German fluency exam was not going to be much of an asset in my career in North America. “Well, you just never know what the future may bring,” they said. I understand their reasoning. In the unstable political and economic climates from which they hail – Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia – the future can bring all sorts of unpleasant surprises, making fluency in another language and quick access to a foreign job market a real asset. But I’m an American, and in America we suffer from quite another problem.

I suppose you could call it the “oppression of stability.” America is so prosperous and stable that almost everyone can be employed, continuously, throughout their entire lives. So a gap in one’s resume can flash at prospective employers like a neon sign saying, “spent six months in a mental institution” or “spent a year doing nothing and living in her parents’ basement.” Even new mothers feel unable to leave the job market for just a year or two for fear that such a break will make them irrelevant or unemployable. And they would be right.

Well, for better or worse, I’m stuck with just such a blank on my resume: the entire 2007 calendar year. I’ve tried to fill it as best I could with a little freelancing back in the States and the plausible deniability that I’ve been studying German at the University of Würzburg for the past nine months. It would have been nice if I could have rounded it out as a solid year of study and capped it off with a 3 (the best score) on the DSH exam. But as my time in Germany winds to a close, my priorities have begun to shift. My bookshelf sags with books as yet unread and the golden days of an Indian summer keep extending their offer of endless country bike rides. And suddenly the raised eyebrow of a prospective employer matters so much less to me than it once did.

Instead of worrying about how I can fill this unusual absence from the workforce with meaningful activity, I’ve begun worrying about how I’m ever going to fit in all the things I want to do in the three months of freedom I have left. When I return to North America, I’ll immediately begin looking for a new job, and then I’ll likely be working non-stop for the rest of my professional life. And once I began looking at it that way, I felt more and more strongly that sitting in German class for four hours a day and staring glassy-eyed over my grammar book for another two hours each night, was just not how I could best be using this “rare opportunity.”

At the tea party that day, I tried explaining this as best I could in my broken German, each grammatical mistake yet another sign that I was making a poor decision. My classmates were unconvinced. But I think it’s because they are young – much younger than me – and don’t yet have a sense of the endless stretch of work that lies ahead of them, unbroken by summer vacations. But I think my teacher understood. After all, she once lived in the United States for several years and has some sense of our uninterrupted grind of employment, so unlike the patchy work history of most Europeans, who routinely take three years off to care for a child or go on government assistance while they pursue dreams of being a poet or photographer. Also, she’s a rather adventurous lady, who plans to relocate to China for a few years. Of course, she is still enduring four hours a day of grueling Chinese lessons, but to each her own.

In the weeks since I quit German school, I’ve not cracked a German book once – not even that German novel I started reading back in August. But I still practice my German conversation at the Wednesday soirée I host at a local Biergarten and at other weekly get-togethers with friends and classmates. Already I’ve noticed my German is slipping, or at least it’s falling behind that of my friends, who are still going to class every day. It is a painful reminder of where my German would be if I’d stuck with it. But on a sunny Monday morning, when the open road stretches in front of me and there’s a unread novel stuffed in my knapsack, I don’t mind being a “quitter” at all.



Looking back over this blog, I realize that I haven't written much about Germans school or my classmates, although they have played such an important role in my life here in Germany. So, here's a little slideshow I put together of some of our adventures this past spring a summer. Hopefully they will not be the last.

Bike Riding in Bavaria

I used to have a bike back in Boston. I bought it because I thought it would make my commute to work more enjoyable. After about a month, I realized that cycling in the city is no fun at all: The rush hour exhaust along Harvard Ave. is enough to make you gag and pass out; and the other drivers are so incredibly pushy and self-absorbed that it’s really only a matter of time before one of them knocks you off the road.

Cycling in Europe is a whole other matter, as I’ve already mentioned, but it wasn’t until this summer that I made it part of my own daily routine. Now it’s my passion. A few months ago, Kevin’s boss gave me his wife’s old bike. He was getting her a new one for her birthday and needed someone to take the “old one” off his hands. Turns out, the old bike was a nearly new, purple-violet Conway city bike without a speck of rust on it. It is by far the nicest bike I have ever owned. In part because I wanted to make good use of such a nice gift, and in part because there is nothing to do in Bavaria on Sundays, I started taking long Sunday rides on my new bike. They changed my whole perspective on Sundays and Germany.

Sundays in Bavaria had long been a tedious time for me. By law all shops are closed. Only churches, museums and a few cafés are allowed to stay open. But I don’t go to church here, I’ve seen all the museums a dozen times, and there are only so many hours you can sit in a café sipping espresso before you get a little restless. In retrospect, I’m kinda surprised how long it took me to figure out how to make good use of my “day of rest.”

On previous trips to Corsica and Jamaica, I learned pretty quickly that if you want to get along in a foreign culture, you have to adjust your schedule to fit the local customs. Taking a siesta from 11 to 2 in Corsica, for instance. Or in Jamaica, using the hours between 6 and 9 am for all major activities. Even though you’re on vacation, it’s just too hot to do anything later in the day. This must seems pretty obvious. “When in Rome …” right? But as an American and a young adult, I guess I had one or two things of such clear-eyed cultural understanding. It took six months before I began noticing the Sunday exodus from town to the country of whole families and gangs of retirees (the latter wear matching “team” T-shirts) – an all of them traveling by bike. And another month or so had passed before I finally joined them.

The Main River, which bisects Würzburg, runs almost the width of Bavaria, and boasts some of the prettiest bike paths in all Germany – hundreds of kilometers of them. Vineyards, orchards, wheat- and cornfields, and hundreds of tiny walled villages that only appear on the most detailed maps: Sommerhausen, Winterhausen, Margetshöchheim, Veitschöchheim. Over a number of Sundays I began exploring them all, without a map, just riding the Mainradweg first in one direction and then the other. There’s something so satisfying about finding your way to a new city without a map, and once you’ve “discovered” a place, it becomes part of your permanent lexicon, and you feel a sense of ownership for its church steeples and town squares in a way that you just don’t if you’re plopped into a town by car or train.

Lately, with the help of my friend Sergey, a Russian student from my German class, I’ve been expanding my territory. Sergey is a hard-core cyclist, and within months of his arrival in Germany, he’d already ridden the length of the Main and all along the northwest coast of Germany to see the primeval forests and chalk cliffs of Rügen. A daytrip covering 80 kilometers (or about 50 miles) of mountainous terrain is nothing for Sergey. But I must confess, it was a first for me.

One Sunday in August, we biked South from Würzburg, over the steep mountains and valleys of Höchberg (literally, “the high mountain”), and then through miles and miles of the prettiest little farmlands you’ve ever seen, right up to the old Gothic city of Tauberbischofheim – and then back home again. It was seven hours of back-braking riding, and it took me two or three days to recover. But once I did, it’s like I’d been initiated – or rather infected. I’ve caught the biking bug. No destination seemed too far nor any road too treacherous. I’ve been back to Tauberbischofheim several times since then – by myself – and now I’m planning even farther journeys to Rothenberg ob der Tauber and Bamberg.

I’ve heard that exercise can become addictive, that intense physical energy releases adrenalin and endorphins that create a “high,” comparable to drugs or sex; however, I had never thought so myself. Jogging just leaves me with shin splints and a painful stitch in my side. I am completely un-athletic. Last summer I spent a weekend at the New Hampshire lake house of a friend of a friend. When I arrived, the patriarch of the family, a 65-year-old lawyer, asked me, “So, Sarah, what sports do you do?” I had to confess that I didn’t do any sports. This came as a shock and a disappointment. “Well, by the end of this weekend, we’ll having you doing something!” he promised. Every member of that family, from the grandparents to the 30-year-old daughter who’d just had a baby, were fanatic about sport and exercise. In one day alone, I tallied that they’d run 20 miles, bike another 30, and then take a hour-long swim in the lake. Afterwards, they were still as geared up as sports fans on game day. But the enthusiasm wasn’t catching. I spent the weekend in the hot tub.

But now, I understand at least part of the appeal. I still hate running and my swimming is pretty pathetic, but I just can’t get enough of cycling. I don’t know so much if it’s the endorphins or rather that spicy scent of manure and river grass that hits your nostrils as soon as you leave the city limits, but it does feel like a “high.” I now go cycling almost every day, not just on Sundays, and a day without it is a very bad day indeed.

Here are a few photos taken on various bike rides in recent months. Sergey is the tall, lanky fellow posing by the sunflowers.

And the Oscar goes to ...

Lest you think that I just sit around all day blogging and eating bon-bons, let me remind everyone that I really spend 4 hours everyday in German class. And here's the evidence to prove it:



Actually, that might not be the best case for my defense. I'm not really as drunk as I look here (that's acting!), and my German accent is usually a lot better than that. I was just nervous about having to film that scene in the busiest café on the most touristy street in Würzburg.

Anyway, I case you're wondering, these were clips are from a project I did with friends from my German class. The semester's almost over, and as a farewell gift to our beloved teacher, who's retiring this year, we've made her a video outlining all the things she's taught us. Each student gets to say something. They whole thing runs about 20 minutes. Some of the skits are earnest, but most like the ones above are meant to be funny. And as writer, director, and *star*, my goal is to make sure there's not a dry eye left in the house -- one way or another.

(Credits for the video clips here go to my friends Eunkyung, Erika, Sergey, and of course, yours truly.)

Fassschlupfen

This past weekend was the Würzburg wine festival and the major local wineries opened their doors for tours and tastings. As part of the “cultural studies” portion of my German class, the entire class went on field trip to the Staatlischer Hofkeller in the basement of the Residenz, the “oldest continuous winery in all Europe.” (School is sooo much more fun here!)

The visit included a lecture by a local wine master (shown above) in his traditional garb), a wine tasting, and a tour of the actual wine cellar, with its several-hundred-year-old, hand-carved wine casks, or Weinfässer. But my favorite part of the day was a chance to try my hand at Fassschlupfen, crawling in and out of the tiny door at the bottom of the Weinfass.


Believe it or not, this is actually a normal part of the wine-making process. After every bottling, some poor soul has to crawl in each Weinfass and clean it out by hand from the inside. This was the unfortunate task that befell my friend Jack when he worked in a winery in Baden-Würtemburg last year. Still it’s pretty tricky, and you can’t be predisposed toward claustrophobia. But as you can see, I managed to crawl in and out and was awarded an official “Fassschlupfen Diplom,” signed by the Kellermeister himself.

Although it looks difficult, apparently anyone can do this if they learn the right moves. According to our tour guide, an American woman attempted it last year – while she was 8 months pregnant! The way he tells it, she crawled in without any problem, but then became stuck. Apparently they had to wait a whole month before they could get her back out. (Buh-dum, pum, pum)

Wide open spaces

The other day I was having coffee with my friend Eunkyung, who's in my German class. She’s from South Korea, and as far as our rudimentary German would allow, we were having a heart to heart about the difficulties of life in a new country:

Eunkyung: Do you find that life in Germany is similar to life back home in America?

Me: Yeah, sure, for the most part. I mean, I don’t have many friends here and so I don’t go out as much as I used to, but that’s OK, because the clubs kinda suck and all the American movies are dubbed into German anyway. [That sound you’re hearing is the the world’s tiniest violin playing the world's saddest song just for me!]

Eunkyung: No, that is not what I mean. I mean, is life the same here as it is in America?

Me: Yeah, sure. Is life so very different in Korea?

Eunkyung: Completely different. For instance, I have so much more space here in Germany than in Korea.

Me: More space? You mean, like you have your own room and stuff?

Eunkyung: Not just that. I can breathe and move around more freely. In Seoul, you’re always packed in like sardines. Everyone breathes on you, and coughs on you, and blows their nose on you, and elbows you in the ribs. You have no personal space. It’s really wonderful here, don’t you think so?

Me: [Laughs] Actually, I’ve never felt so crowded in my whole life!

Downtown Würzburg at noon on a normal Friday:

Deutsche Schule III

So, Friday was my last day of German class -- for now. I'm due to start another intensive course in Würzburg next week, but not until after a much-needed vacation. (Kevin and I are in Dresden right now, where he's attending a conference.)

As an amusing finale to my two months at the Frankfurt school, I was handed two pieces of paper on my last day of class. One was survey about my experiences at the school. The questions were in English, and I answered them in English. Go figure. The other was a Zertifikat stating that I had completed 184 hours language instruction and zertifying that I can "speak spontaneously and fluently with a native speaker of German without burden." Or at least that's what I understood it to read, after I looked up all the really big words in my German dictionary.

Anyway, as I wrote before, I won't miss the two-hour commute to Frankfurt or my second-rate little German school, but I will miss the first-rate students who suffered through the whole experience with me.

When I arrived in Germany and couldn't string together a single sentence, they would helpfully finish my sentences for me. And when the teacher would read aloud my test scores -- almost always the lowest in the class -- and lament, "Well, Sarah, it's clear you didn't understand anything we've been doing for the past week," they would look at me with sympathy instead of superiority.

Among my closest friends at the school were an Argentinian bassoonist; a basketball-playing, break-dancing Chinese undergrad; and a hydraulic engineer from Madagascar. It was a hodge-podge group, but intensive language courses -- and probably anything with the word "intensive" in the title -- have a way of binding you to people to whom you have little in common. (I watched more than one romance bloom in this hothouse environment.)

But I suppose it's not really surprising that relationships progress quickly under these circumstances. We basically spent five hours a day doing verbal exercises designed to help us practice that day's grammar lesson while getting better acquainted with one another:

"What was your happiest/saddest childhood experience?" (past tense)

"What are your dreams/hopes for the future?" (future tense)

But, in many ways, it's a false sense of closeness. For all of these "personal" discussions, I still didn't know the essential truth that my classmates had been struggling through the whole experience just like me. Then, on my last day of class, they invited me out to lunch at the local Asian restaurant, where, over our Thom Kah and Pad Thai, I learned that the Argentinian bassoonist had spent her first week at the school in a state of constant anxiety, that the Chinese student was depressed over having hit a serious language plateau, and that even the hydraulic engineer -- by far the best student in the class -- was terrified of progressing to the advanced class. Best of all, I learned that they didn't think my German was nearly as bad as I did.

Well, that would have been really useful information, much more so than knowing that if he won the lottery, Yusef would buy a house for each member of his extended family (conditional). Perhaps if I had known that everyone else in the class was just as insecure as I was, I would have performed a little better myself (past conditional).

But "es geht immer so," as the Germans say. Still, I'll try to keep this little lesson in my pocket when I start at my new German school.

Deutsche Schule II

Today, for the first time in more than three full weeks of German class, I understood what the Hell was going on. Everyday I sit through five hours of class in a dense fog, understanding only about 1 in every 10 words my teacher is saying -- and only about 1 in 20 of what my classmates are saying. (It's difficult to parse the German through their thick French, Spanish, and Chinese accents.) I only make it through the day by the grace of German-English cognates, my teacher's elaborate pantomimes, and the generosity of my fellow students.

Most of the time, when called upon to speak, I repeat verbatim the examples listed in the book, only improvising with the addition of a few impressive nouns that I've committed to memory: Monatsfahrkarte (monthly pass), Staatsangehörigkeit (nationality), Gemeinsamkeiten (commonalities), u.s.w. (und so weiter, i.e. etc.). Still, I'm often surprised at the end of an exercise to learn that I've completely misunderstood the topic we've been discussing for the past half hour. That graph we were looking at wasn't about Arbeitslosigkeit (unemployment) but about the planned professions of a bunch of high school students (however these planned professions are a little optimistic, as unemployment here is over 14%).

So, you can imagine my thrill today when I understood everything -- everything! -- that was said in class. Granted, today's topic was pretty elementary: Leiblingsfarbe and Leiblingsfeiern (favorite colors and favorite holidays), but damn if I didn't describe my deep and abiding love of Thanksgiving (Erntedanktfest) and the color purple (violett, not to be confused with the German purpur, which is actually magenta) -- with ziel!

Still, I've not deluded myself into thinking that I've had some major language breakthrough. I still can't get the waiter at the neighborhood restaurant to understand what I'm saying when I say, "Die Rechnung, bitte" ("The bill, please"). Instead I've settled on the less polite, but easier to pronounce, "Ich möchte bezahlen, bitte" ("I'd like to pay."). More likely, I've just reached a narrow language plateau. But reach a few plateaus, and I guess you've scaled a mountain.

The class celebrates a Geburtstag (birthday).