Whoa it has been a while

Warning: I wrote this blog post over the course of several weeks, as I kept forgetting about it, writing parts, getting distracted, and never finishing. So this may be one of the least cohesive posts I've written, but now it's done! So that's that.


Ah. So long, so sorry. I got back into the US at the end of July and I'm not really sure what happened to the last 8 weeks. I wrote once on my blog and outlined some of the things I wanted to do while I was at home and then the next day I deleted it because I didn't want to turn my blog into a stupid to-do list. Especially a to-do list of things that most people who read this don't actually care about. If I had an awesome to-do list like Get Gnarly with Charlie, that would be a different story... So maybe I should just write some things that I noticed are new/different. One thing for sure is that I had to readjust myself to the humor at my dad's bike shop. Everyone there has a pretty good sense of humor, but it often involves a heavy dose of sarcasm and a fair bit of strange voices and obscure references to customers or famous people that I am not used to. I think I've managed to adjust adequately, but it was a steep slope.

Other cool things about being back in the US involve riding my old bicycle, which was superbly upgraded by my dad while I was away. And in addition to riding bikes, riding bikes in Ames is soooo easy. There are so few people here that I can ride much faster, especially late at night, because there are no people, cars, trams, cobblestones, or complex intersections.  Also I have enjoyed a lot of good American traditions like drive thru Mexican food, bourbon whiskey, and tequila. Not like these things don't exist in Germany but it's just so much more plentiful here.

That being said, I am very much looking forward to my return to Germany. Erika and I have done long-distance stuff for so long that you would think we would be used to it by now. However, that is not the case and the last few weeks especially have seemed to last forever. My brain won't let me be in Ames peacefully and as a result I have been slowly piecing together all sorts of items to take back with me. A few more bicycle related accessories, a few more documents, and hopefully a goddamn internship waiting for me in February would be perfect.

Did I mention I still haven't found an internship yet? I am not sure if I am just terrible at applying, or that I'm applying for positions out of my area/qualifications, or if I just have bad luck.  Maybe some of both? One of the lazier people I know recently picked up an internship, so what does that make me?

Die Mannschaft

And now I would like to take a moment to describe my World Cup experience, which has been absolutely fantastic.  It's great being in a country where soccer is the most popular sport anyways, but when its a World Cup year and the national team is doing well, then even more so. Our program director is a big football fan, so the school gave some spare keys to students so we can go into the school at night and watch the late games on projectors. Most of the group games were either at 6, 9, or midnight, which is actually perfect timing as people finish work and classes just in time to watch. And of course, beer is a staple for any football match here, including in the schools. Awesome. However all the matches, especially during the group stages, led to some long days and late nights. For example on the US's first matchday I had class from 10am to about 5pm, then Germany played at 6pm, and a few hours later the US played at midnight. That was a long day...

And in order to make the the whole thing more exciting, a bunch of my classmates entered a betting pool. So every put in 5euros and we try to predict the outcomes of the matches. It has been really fun and I was in 1st place/near the top for awhile, but now it's too late to come back. The winner would end up with like 150euros or so. 

Now Germany is in the final after thumping Brazil 7-1 last night. I went to a public viewing area to watch the game with a bunch of classmates and I even met up with some of the guys I go Kegeln with. Expectations are high all around for Sunday's match and I really really really want Germany to win. How crazy would it be to be in the World Cup winning country?! Sehr verruckt. I would have liked to go out and party last night after the game because everyone was in such a good mood, but I couldn't muster the energy.   

Also when I was in Munich Erika and I had a chance to watch the Germany vs. Ghana game at a huge Biergarten. It was a really nice setup, lots of benches, 10 liters of beer came with our reserved seats, and a whole lot of Germans cheering. It was a really great experience, something that I don't think happens very often in the US.

EDIT: I just found this video and thought it was awesome. Merkel shows some real passion for her country.

 Reppin'

 So the 2 girls on the left behind Erika are her old friends from Uni who are living/visiting Munich. The 4 on the right are the people from Erika's new internship.  They were all super nice and the guy was impressed by my football knowledge as an American. 

This is actually the Argentina game, 2 hours before Germany. But the place was still pretty full. Got crazy at kickoff.

Anyways, I think if Germany wins the World Cup this year, I will have to buy a Thomas Muller shirt, number 13. 13 is actually a "good" number for German football. It was the number worn by another Muller, Gerd Muller, who had the game winning goal in the 1974 WC finale. Gerd Muller also has the 3rd most goals in WC history with 14, and he only played in 15 or 16 WC matches which is pretty incredible.

Munich!

Ah sorry I haven't written in awhile. I have been somewhat busy with classes wrapping up, but I should have written sooner. It's been so long I can't remember what to write first. I think I should start with uploading some pictures of my trip to visit Erika in Munich.

Erika lives pretty far away from the city center, so we walked through some rustic scenery to get to a nearby lake my first day there 

Downtown Munich at the Marienplatz. The big building in front is the old Rathaus (city hall) and the big building on the left is the famous Frauenkirche too bad it was under construction

The weather was a little gray this day, but it turned out sunny in the end.

Obligatory photo. Erika is not a common name in Germany, so this is nice.

Beer and Brezeln! So Bavarian

Bavarian breakfast. This is a classic meal to be consumed before noon. White sausages, prezels, sweet mustard and beer.

When people talk about how awesome the beer is in Germany, I think they mostly refer to Bavaria. I was very pleased with the selection and variety and the grocery stores here. Love the labels

 This is the walk way towards the Schloss Nymphenburg about 15 minutes away from the center of town. I don't know much about it, but I assume some old rich white guy had this place built.

 It was beautiful weather and a beautiful location. I can only imagine what this place looked like when it was new... Huge gardens, horses and wagons, and maybe a hedge maze somewhere.

We finally got the hang of taking good pictures together! The garden grounds go all the way to the through this building's gates and onto the other side with another huge canal and more gardens.

All in all a very successful and enjoyable trip. Munich is beautiful but I don't think I could live there myself. It is pretty expensive living and there are sooooo many tourists I could see myself getting frustrated by them if I was a long time resident there. I have a few more pictures on my Facebook album, but this should do for now.

Some comments on social media in an international school

Well, the day we knew would come for several weeks finally came. Yesterday Erika got on a bus to Munich to begin a 6 month long internship...boo. We have had a great last few months together and it seems like we never get to spend a summer together, which is no good because summer is the BEST time be hanging out, especially in Germany where the public parks are everywhere and the beer flows like water. As a result, I spent a lot more time on Facebook in the past 24 hours trying to fill some time and create the usual distractions from responsibilities. But I recently begin noticing more the kinds of things that come up on my feed, specifically the number of news articles and links to stories around the world that are coming from my international classmates. Makes sense, people are most knowledgeable about their own countries and still have family there so their local news is more important to them. Perhaps even more so because my school is for public policy and my classmates are very much the type of people who are interested in politics, news, social upheavals and international organizations. And the more I think about it and try to remember, the more I discover that a growing portion of my news is coming from news articles that people post in Facebook. The immediate response is "Duh, of course! That's why social media is so amazing, because you can learn about stuff happening all around world and the information is disseminated by individuals." And I admit, it is pretty cool to see what different classmates care about and to gain more information about the world, provided the news article and responding Facebook comments are written in English.

But then I start to realize that maybe this isn't as one-sidedly good as I originally thought because many of these international and political (social, economic) news stories are actually quite controversial and complicated issues. Yes it's great to gain information, but being informed is not the same thing as understanding. And when I read news from a colleague about their home, I inherently begin to formulate opinions as if I was also from that foreign land. The news my classmates post, whether it is good or bad, optimistic or critical, encourages me to take sides on an issue (or at the very least to share a perspective) even though I don't have the same background or comprehension of the issue. 

Perhaps an example would help. Yesterday I read a post from a Pakistani friend it was about how a girl in rural India was raped and her body was hung from a tree while the police did almost nothing to find and apprehend the attacker. It should come as no surprise that India has problems with sexual violence against women and girls, or that Indian politics and police can be pretty corrupt. These are well-known facts. But the ultimate, emotional appeal is simply: "India is bad." or more fantastically "India shelters corrupt police and rapists". A few days before I read this post, I saw another post, this time by an Indian friend, about how a girl in Pakistan was stoned to death by her own father and brothers in front of a state courthouse because the girl wanted to marry a man she loved, rather than the man she was arranged to marry. The final remarks in this article mention how perpetrators of honor killings usually receive a slap on the wrist, even for such violent acts. Again, an emotional undertone tells me "Pakistan is bad" or "Pakistanis would rather kill their own children than have them disobey orders". 

Now I don't know very much about India or Pakistan, I have never been to either place, but I know they have a long rivalry that often resulted in violence, and the border territories are still tense. So it's not surprising that my two classmates would have lingering negative feelings about each other (despite the fact that they get in along well in our class). Both of these news stories of course show just a piece of the country as whole. The same thing happens when the world heard the news of the Newtown, CT school shooting and they begin to see Americans as a gun-crazy dystopian wrecking ball. The underlying message in all these is to spread information to bring out an emotional response, instead of actual understanding. And that's where I see the failure of individualized social media. 

Perhaps I am actually just pointing out the obvious. Of course there are expressed biases on Facebook. Of course I am exposed to this same kind of subliminal messages all the time, and not just on social media. Of course I have to filter out the good information from the bad, assess it, and formulate my own opinion of it through a critical lens. We are taught to do that in school, since childhood. And I feel like I have been reasonably competent at it, but all of sudden this last 6 months I have been experiencing a new kind of exposure to it through Facebook and an international framework. Perhaps this struck a chord in me because all my previous experiences at filtering were aimed against mass media, The Man, or even someone or something my parents have taught me to be wary of. I didn't have to be so critical of my friends. My friends growing up were all excellent people, whom I could trust not to mistreat me (in real life and online). Now I have new "friends" on Facebook. They come from all over the world and I haven't adjusted to their new perspectives and intentions, whether they be obvious or far from it. 

Unfortunately, the world is just too big and the amount of information is so great that I will probably never get a real understanding from the time I spend on Facebook. It's much too easy to gloss over it, that's all.

Temporary Transportation

First few weeks of classes are over with some positive results. I will be taking one class that has a trip to Bonn planned to visit a NGO for a day, and another class we will conduct a study on our class using cool surveying program, and the rest of the classes will likely be sufferable. Aside from school I've made some nice improvements to my life, such as getting a bicycle! 

It's the same frame and size as my commuter bike in Iowa City.

Thanks to my fellow bicycle enthusiast, Markus, I now have this baby. He loaned it to me for the semester because his brother left it at home. It was in great shape and had just had a tune up, and it rides pretty nice on bumpy sidewalks. Rock on Markus!

Still need to think of a good name for it.

Classes in a week

So classes start again next Tuesday for me. Yippee! No really, I'm actually looking forward to it. Well at least some classes. Mostly I'm looking forward to being busy with something again, because this break seemed to last forever. I feel like my brain has been slowly deteriorating due to my own...shit. What is that word I'm looking for? Oh right, lethargy. It will be good to be engaged in something, and be around my classmates again. Many of them will have some good stories about the cool places they've been to, while I can only respond with the movies I've watched, and perhaps some new vocab I've learned. That'll carry on for about 2 or 3 weeks probably before conversations will drift back to academia. I already have an assignment that's due for my first day back, which is actually what I was expecting out of this particular professor. Cool.

In other news, Erika's childhood friend came to visit last week for a night. She was traveling through this area of Germany visiting some friends and relatives and it was nice to have her company. We spoke in German pretty much the whole time (cept for me, but I tried my best) and went out to eat and this pretty nice restaurant. Well, the food was a bit overpriced in my opinion, especially the BS chicken sandwich I ordered. It was disappointing to be presented with a nice plate and big burger bun only to find out that the chicken inside covered about 1/3 of the actual bun. But apparently on Tuesdays they have all you can eat ribs for about 10 euros. Next time we go on Tuesday. Definitely.

Also I found out that I'm a home decorator! 

Local friends

I haven't written on here in a few weeks, so that probably means I haven't been doing anything. That is fairly accurate, but there are still some news items to share.  Let's see...

I made some local German friends during the past few weeks. Some guy named Michael I met a bar was friendly enough to invite me to watch some soccer games with his buddies, which is nice because they don't speak English very much so I'm forced to practice my German when I'm around them. Which is a good thing because I didn't get into the 3 week intensive course I wanted to take (too many applicants, not enough teachers/space). There were of course a few confusing moments, like after some of the soccer games were over, he told me he and his friend were going to "wetten",  and asked if I would come with them, then later come back to watch the Bayern Munich game. I heard the wetten as "betten" because the v and b sounds are pretty similar sometimes, thinking that was some way of saying they were going to go home and take nap. Betten, go to the Bett. Made sense to me. But it was a bit strange that they would ask me to join them to take a nap... it seemed like a good idea cuz I was really tired so I was planning on making my leave to go home to my own bed. As we walked out I asked them again where they lived blah blah and walked with them a bit further, and soon we walked into a building and I realized that wetten is not betten, but pretty obviously, "betting". They were going to put some money down on the Bayern Munich game. "Ohhhhh...Alles klar". I don't bet on sports, so I didn't even think about it. I didn't even know that were were sports betting buildings, I thought everything was online. That was an interesting place to visit even though I had no idea how it worked. There were lots of TVs with numbers scrolling down them with scores and odds and turnouts kind of Matrixy. We were the only ones there except for some Turkish looking men standing around in silence and black jackets smoking cigarettes, and a tiny little woman with red lipstick and red hair behind a desk taking the betting cards. It was a good day and I learned some new words. 

Later Michael invited me to go "Kegeln spielen". I didn't really know what that was even after he explained it to me. After telling Mom and Dad about it, I found out it was called 9 Pin bowling in the US. But I've only heard the name 9 Pin before, never seen anyone play it. Apparently it was really popular in the GDR (German Democratic Republic/East/Commie Germany), second only to soccer for many years. It's a really fun game actually, more so than bowling because instead of bowling in 10 frames, you get 100. The pins are much smaller and more spread apart, and the bowling ball is also about half the size of a standard bowling ball, but still pretty heavy. There are also no finger holes in the bowling ball so you just kinda heave it down the lane.  The place that we play at is pretty cool too, it's a sport club in a neighboring town that exists entirely for Kegeln. It has 2 lanes, a little kitchen, and a sort of anteroom with tables and chairs that you can watch the players through a big glass window while you sit and drink your beer. Also in that room there are posters and news clippings from past players, and bunch of trophies on shelves. The other guys I met there were all very nice and gave me some tips for playing. I've gone twice now and improved immensely. Hopefully I can go again tomorrow. I'll also take some pictures of the club, cuz it's pretty cool.

UPDATE: I went Kegeln spielen again yesterday and took some pictures of the club!

Yeah 322 points on my 3rd game, apparently that's pretty good for a beginner!