When we last spoke I was headed outbound to Munich in Bavaria. Bavaria is, I’m told, the Texas of Germany, in that it’s southern and distinctive and conservative and has an ongoing rivalry with the rest of the nation. It is also the home of FC Bayern München, the Yankees of German soccer. They’re easily the richest, most talented, and most evil sports franchise in the country. Their golaie, Oliver Kaan, is a hairy beast of a man who helped them beat the US team in the last World Cup. They play at the stadium built for the Munich Olympics, and when we visited it we got to tool around in their locker room. We’ll find out in the coming weeks if my Voodoo has gotten any better since I came overseas.
We did a bunch of touristy stuff, visitng medieval churches and the Deutsches Museum, tooling around in the central park and centuries-old biergartens. We even visited an old Roman-style bath, and its nine different spas. Somewhat awkwardly, at least at first, bathing suits were not allowed. We’re all much closer now. The whole trip was on Helen Bing’s dime, and we got to eat tons of delicious Bavarian food. This is mostly potatoes, cabbage, and roast animal. And apple strudel. I am especially fond of apple strudel.
All of my classes decided that we had to make up the class time lost during the Munich trip, and were unreceptive that this should have been built into the original schedule months ago. Its not like it was a surprise weekend getaway. So this week was full of work, and I’m glad to finally have it behind me. Midway through the week I became frustrated with what an aesthetic and logical catastrophe the German language is, but then I read Twain’s “The Awful German Language” and felt better. He told me I was right. I heartily recommend the essay – it’s certainly better than trying to work out these blasted adjective endings.
For one of my classes we read a newspaper interview with an old German politician who’s been living in Germany. He said that his main feeling of the German Zeitgeist (literally: time-ghost) is listlessness. I am inclined to agree. I haven’t yet met a native German who seemed to have a sense of purpose or direction. Maybe that’s just because I’m comparing Freie Univserity students who are approaching their third decade with hard-chargers like Mike, but maybe not. Apparently the Germans were the lazy dreamers of Eurpoe until the late nineteenth century, so maybe the whole efficiency/punctuality/fussiness/world war thing was just a hundred year itch. Time, as always, will tell.
So last week I’ve had it up to here with evertyhing German, so I decided to spend a night down in Potsdammer Platz. Back in the day the Berlin Wall ran right through it, and now that we’ve taken it back from those pesky Ruskies we’ve turned it into a gleaming monument to American-style Capitalism. So any way, I went with some friends to a diner. If Vegas wasn’t in America, and there was an America-themed hotel/casino there, this is the kind of restaurant they’d have in the lobby. There was, for example, a giant plastic and neon American flag mounted on the ceiling and a ‘50s Harley bolted to the wall above the bar. We loved the place. It seems like every other country’s citizens would be vaguely offended by tacky and inauthentictakes on their culture. But we’re Americans – we practically invented tacky and inauthentic. It made me homesick. I ate a bacon cheeseburger and went across the street to see Kill Bill 2 in the original English and without subtitles. They have a giant wooden Trojan horse outside the theater, which faces the Sony Center plaza, covered by a glass evocation of Mount Fuji. Tonight some people went down there to see another movie, but the theater was closed because Brad Pitt had to show up to watch his own movie (in the European premiere of Troy). What a jerk.
I’ve found out this whole ‘nightlife’ thing they do here isn’t really my thing. It basically involves wandering around from one noisy, smoke-filled club/bar to another, paying too much to get in and too much for a drink to stand around in music you can’t dance to with people you can’t talk to. Then when you’re tired and want to go home, you ride home for an hour and a half on the subway. So I’m going to try the whole early to bed/rise think this week instead.
Sunday, May 09, 2004
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Second Letter from Berlin
The students at Freie University were on break for the first three weeks that we were here, but now their semester has started so there are plenty of German college students about for us to try to chat with. I met a couple of cool kids in my basketball class and I’ve met a water polo coach who’s going to hook me up with a team to play with in the bundes liga when the season starts in May. The other night we met a group of FU students way out in the East side of the city, at this place where you pick up a wine glass for 1 euro, eat and drink whatever you want, and pay what you feel like you owe when you leave. All on the honor system, and the place is still in business. Incredible. I talked for a long time with this one political science student about differing perspectives on world affairs and each other’s cultures, and we both agreed that The Big Lebowski is among the finest pieces of cinema ever produced. I swear, the Germans love that flick. No idea why.
So last summer when I was living on my own away from home for the first time I read a lot of websites and a few irreverent cookbooks promising to teach me, the young bachelor new the kitchen, how not to starve. They all focused on making the actual cooking very simple, which it turns out was a waste of time. Cooking is easy; it’s the shopping that’s hard, especially when we’re cramped for fridge space and the markets are open about 10 hours a week. I am pursuing ever more creative ways of preparing spaghetti, rice, and sausage. Also, I love frozen pizza. For some reason the Germans use salty salami instead of good, honest pepperoni on their pizzas, and I haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of anyone as to why.
Yesterday I saw my first European football (ie soccer) match. The home team went up 3-0 and sat there the rest of the game, so that was exciting, and some fans lit their seats on fire with about five minutes left to play in the game. By the time a fire extinguisher had been passed up from the field, another section was ablaze as well. Luckily, the crowd of 45,000 only filled the Olympic Stadium to about half capacity, so people could easily put some distance between themselves and the burning seats. Other than that the crowd was well-behaved, so the arson was a bit out of the blue.
Wednesday we head out to Munich for a few days on some cultural field trip. I have too much to do before then to look into exactly what we’ll be doing, but rest assured I’ll let you know when I find out.
So last summer when I was living on my own away from home for the first time I read a lot of websites and a few irreverent cookbooks promising to teach me, the young bachelor new the kitchen, how not to starve. They all focused on making the actual cooking very simple, which it turns out was a waste of time. Cooking is easy; it’s the shopping that’s hard, especially when we’re cramped for fridge space and the markets are open about 10 hours a week. I am pursuing ever more creative ways of preparing spaghetti, rice, and sausage. Also, I love frozen pizza. For some reason the Germans use salty salami instead of good, honest pepperoni on their pizzas, and I haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of anyone as to why.
Yesterday I saw my first European football (ie soccer) match. The home team went up 3-0 and sat there the rest of the game, so that was exciting, and some fans lit their seats on fire with about five minutes left to play in the game. By the time a fire extinguisher had been passed up from the field, another section was ablaze as well. Luckily, the crowd of 45,000 only filled the Olympic Stadium to about half capacity, so people could easily put some distance between themselves and the burning seats. Other than that the crowd was well-behaved, so the arson was a bit out of the blue.
Wednesday we head out to Munich for a few days on some cultural field trip. I have too much to do before then to look into exactly what we’ll be doing, but rest assured I’ll let you know when I find out.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
First Letter from Berlin
If you’re receiving this it’s because you’re special and I care about you and what you think, and I’m optimistic or conceited enough to think that you’ll care what I’ve been up to here in Germany. Unfortunately, I don’t have an exhaustive list of such people handy or even access to my usual e-mail address book, so please feel free to kick this along to anyone you think will care, and tell them how I’m doing. I promise to try to make it entertaining. Pictures to illustrate can be found at stanford.edu/~taustin. Right then, without any further ado:
Life in Berlin so far has been very busy, both because there’s a lot of stuff we wind up doing, and because going anywhere requires commuting for usually at least half an hour on the subway, or U-Bahn. At first I was enamored with the public transport system here, since it allows a pedestrian with a monthly pass to easily travel freely throughout the city, but I’ve grown increasingly ambivalent about it. The trains run predictably on schedule, but that schedule stops shortly after midnight, and many evenings seem to end with a hurried rush to the nearest station to avoid being stranded at one in the morning in front of some Soviet-Bloc apartment building. If you were the paper-writing type you could talk at length about the automobile as a metaphor for self-determination, but I’m not so I’ll just simply say that sometimes it’s a pain to have one’s location be at the whim of some unfeeling metropolitan transit authority. Lots of interesting-looking people ride the U-Bahn, but apparently talking to another human being on the trains violates some ancient code of German subway ridership, and is heavily frowned upon. Perhaps in merely trying I have already brought great dishonor to my ancestors. Sometimes you never know. Some students at the center met an aspiring model/actress/pop star on the subway who handed them glossy promotional materials, and now you see giant posters for her upcoming concert and her face at newsstands on the cover of German Maxims.
Usually we get along fine with a mixture of English and pre-schooler German, but there are always little things to reminding you this is a foreign and sometimes very strange country. I had a girl about my age ask me something about the train schedule the other day on the platform and she’d got through three or four sentences of what must have been a complicated question before I remembered how to say I didn’t know anything about anything in German. Earlier that evening we went out to a bar with sand on the floor like a beach where you can order beer from Ghana that’s served in a plastic coconut half. I saw a kid there with his friends drinking Smirnoff Ice out of a straw. A lot of the teenagers look like they’ve read about Berkeley in a book and are trying just a bit too hard to look like they’re from there.
I wind up spending most of my time at the Stanford center here on the outskirts of the city, since I have to be here for classes or to use their kitchen, and it takes a while to get anyplace else. It’s also where I can connect to the internet and read e-mail, so naturally I’m there right now. The center is a historic villa that’s been remodeled inside to give it a set-of-this-season’s-The-Real-World feel. I sleep at my home stay—a room in a kindly old woman’s apartment. Frau Lafferenz lives on the fifth floor of the building with two Siamese cats; one who leapt into my suitcase like he owned it while I was still unpacking, and one who still runs, terrified, under the furniture when I walk into a room. She does my laundry and doesn’t mind if I come home late (or like Tuesday, when I was at the center until four writing a paper, not at all) so it’s okay if the shower is a little short or there’s no elevator. Between the nine-hour time difference, extended travel, and irregular work habits, my internal sleeping clock is completely haywire, but I seem to be finding my stride at last.
The hardest class I’m taking is one on German sports culture. It’s taught entirely in German, and requires weekly two-page papers (also in German) analyzing a sporting event we’re gone to see as a class. We’ve watched the Berlin Eisbären (or Polar Bears, a hockey team) kick the snot out of the team from Ingolstadt 5-0 in the semifinals of the playoffs. We also saw the local Alba Berlin pro basketball team (last years national champions and currently ranked number 1) lose badly a team from Frankfurt in what looked like a badly-coached college game. They even had a Dollie-esque Alba Dance Team instead of traditional cheerleaders and a short game played by area children at halftime, just like back home at Maples. We have to take a sports class at the local Freie University as part of the course, and though I was disappointed water polo isn’t offered this quarter, I’ve been inspired by the pros’ awful play to take basketball. That doesn’t start for a few weeks, but I’ll let you know how it goes.
In addition to that and some language classes I’m taking a course on Globalization that will take us to a conference with a bunch of other Stanford overseas students at the end of the quarter. There’s an architecture and art history professor who takes us on fabulous walking tours of the city and explains the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic significance of what we see. One of the students here has said of him, “I’m pretty sure that he’s just God and knows everything.” Yesterday we toured the Charlottenburg castle and he could tell us all about what the shape of the gardens means, why the walls were painted a certain color, and what the furniture can tell you about the books Frederick the great liked to read. If I could take Berlin von Ort every day for fifteen minutes, I would in a heartbeat.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got a job over the summer working on a computational linguistics project in the University of Potsdam. That’s only a short ways from here and I’d be living in a college town, so I’d have a chance to spend more time with German college students and hopefully learn a bit more language. I’m going back down there next Friday to take a look at what they’re doing and finalize things with the professor, but they seem to really want me there.
Tomorrow morning we’re going to head off to Prague for a four-day weekend. It’s supposed to be an amazing city, and round-trip train fare was only 75 Euros. I’ve been pretty bad about taking pictures of things, but I’m going to work on that. Happy birthday Jason, and good luck to Dylan, and y’all let me know what’s going on stateside from time to time. So that’s it for now, and Tschüss until next time.
Life in Berlin so far has been very busy, both because there’s a lot of stuff we wind up doing, and because going anywhere requires commuting for usually at least half an hour on the subway, or U-Bahn. At first I was enamored with the public transport system here, since it allows a pedestrian with a monthly pass to easily travel freely throughout the city, but I’ve grown increasingly ambivalent about it. The trains run predictably on schedule, but that schedule stops shortly after midnight, and many evenings seem to end with a hurried rush to the nearest station to avoid being stranded at one in the morning in front of some Soviet-Bloc apartment building. If you were the paper-writing type you could talk at length about the automobile as a metaphor for self-determination, but I’m not so I’ll just simply say that sometimes it’s a pain to have one’s location be at the whim of some unfeeling metropolitan transit authority. Lots of interesting-looking people ride the U-Bahn, but apparently talking to another human being on the trains violates some ancient code of German subway ridership, and is heavily frowned upon. Perhaps in merely trying I have already brought great dishonor to my ancestors. Sometimes you never know. Some students at the center met an aspiring model/actress/pop star on the subway who handed them glossy promotional materials, and now you see giant posters for her upcoming concert and her face at newsstands on the cover of German Maxims.
Usually we get along fine with a mixture of English and pre-schooler German, but there are always little things to reminding you this is a foreign and sometimes very strange country. I had a girl about my age ask me something about the train schedule the other day on the platform and she’d got through three or four sentences of what must have been a complicated question before I remembered how to say I didn’t know anything about anything in German. Earlier that evening we went out to a bar with sand on the floor like a beach where you can order beer from Ghana that’s served in a plastic coconut half. I saw a kid there with his friends drinking Smirnoff Ice out of a straw. A lot of the teenagers look like they’ve read about Berkeley in a book and are trying just a bit too hard to look like they’re from there.
I wind up spending most of my time at the Stanford center here on the outskirts of the city, since I have to be here for classes or to use their kitchen, and it takes a while to get anyplace else. It’s also where I can connect to the internet and read e-mail, so naturally I’m there right now. The center is a historic villa that’s been remodeled inside to give it a set-of-this-season’s-The-Real-World feel. I sleep at my home stay—a room in a kindly old woman’s apartment. Frau Lafferenz lives on the fifth floor of the building with two Siamese cats; one who leapt into my suitcase like he owned it while I was still unpacking, and one who still runs, terrified, under the furniture when I walk into a room. She does my laundry and doesn’t mind if I come home late (or like Tuesday, when I was at the center until four writing a paper, not at all) so it’s okay if the shower is a little short or there’s no elevator. Between the nine-hour time difference, extended travel, and irregular work habits, my internal sleeping clock is completely haywire, but I seem to be finding my stride at last.
The hardest class I’m taking is one on German sports culture. It’s taught entirely in German, and requires weekly two-page papers (also in German) analyzing a sporting event we’re gone to see as a class. We’ve watched the Berlin Eisbären (or Polar Bears, a hockey team) kick the snot out of the team from Ingolstadt 5-0 in the semifinals of the playoffs. We also saw the local Alba Berlin pro basketball team (last years national champions and currently ranked number 1) lose badly a team from Frankfurt in what looked like a badly-coached college game. They even had a Dollie-esque Alba Dance Team instead of traditional cheerleaders and a short game played by area children at halftime, just like back home at Maples. We have to take a sports class at the local Freie University as part of the course, and though I was disappointed water polo isn’t offered this quarter, I’ve been inspired by the pros’ awful play to take basketball. That doesn’t start for a few weeks, but I’ll let you know how it goes.
In addition to that and some language classes I’m taking a course on Globalization that will take us to a conference with a bunch of other Stanford overseas students at the end of the quarter. There’s an architecture and art history professor who takes us on fabulous walking tours of the city and explains the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic significance of what we see. One of the students here has said of him, “I’m pretty sure that he’s just God and knows everything.” Yesterday we toured the Charlottenburg castle and he could tell us all about what the shape of the gardens means, why the walls were painted a certain color, and what the furniture can tell you about the books Frederick the great liked to read. If I could take Berlin von Ort every day for fifteen minutes, I would in a heartbeat.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got a job over the summer working on a computational linguistics project in the University of Potsdam. That’s only a short ways from here and I’d be living in a college town, so I’d have a chance to spend more time with German college students and hopefully learn a bit more language. I’m going back down there next Friday to take a look at what they’re doing and finalize things with the professor, but they seem to really want me there.
Tomorrow morning we’re going to head off to Prague for a four-day weekend. It’s supposed to be an amazing city, and round-trip train fare was only 75 Euros. I’ve been pretty bad about taking pictures of things, but I’m going to work on that. Happy birthday Jason, and good luck to Dylan, and y’all let me know what’s going on stateside from time to time. So that’s it for now, and Tschüss until next time.
Friday, April 02, 2004
About the Author
Trevor is an engineer for Palantir Technologies in New York City. Previously, he co-founded an internet startup called Udorse and worked at a hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management. He is not a football player or metal detecting enthusiast. Those are other Trevor Austins.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)