#head in hands i’m sure SOMEONE in the city will have in person c1 classes but good god can i get ONE win this year

[morgenlich]

god speaking of life not lifeing like it was supposed to, i’d told myself if i didn’t get into grad school i’d do german classes with the goethe institut since they have a physical location in chicago, finally get my fucking c1 certification etc etc

only to learn all their north america locations no longer do in person classes!

[ichhabeschwein]

Life Update

I’m pretty terrible with keeping up with this blog, huh?

Well first I’m going to give a general update on my day to day, and if you stay tuned, you’ll get to read a kind of life update/new goal of mine! Isn’t that exciting? I hope so.

“SO” (this is how most Germans start off a sentence when they’re really getting ready to do something with/for someone. The “S” is usually kind of drawn out and half-sounds like a “Z”). 

Here’s what my day to day looks like.

7:00-7:20am: Up and at ‘em. Gotta get ready, maybe pack a gym bag, scarf down some Müsli (cold oatmeal popularly eaten all over Europe, but mainly in German-speaking countries, I believe) and catch the 15-minute train to the city. (If you remember from my last post, I’ve moved in with a host family that lives in a dorf (small village) outside of the main city, Magdeburg). I watch the horses go by, oogle at the Barleber See (a lake north of Magdeburg), and show my month-ticket to the ticket checker when they inevitably come around and say, “So, ihre Fahrkarte, bitte.” Which basically means, “May I see your train ticket” (And if you don’t have one, you will have every eavesdropping commuter judge you while you get a ticket for 60 euro).

8:30am: Most mornings I go to the University gym, which is a little dungeony, since it’s in a basement with no windows, but it’s cheap, and that’s what I’m after while on my minimum-wage budget. When you walk into the locker room, you’ve got to say the classic “Guten Morgen” (Good Morning/formal greeting) to all of the fit grandmas getting ready for whatever fitness class they’re taking there. They’re a happy bunch and inspire me to stay active and create a band of fit older women when approaching my old age. 

Now, I live in former east Germany. This was the part under the soviet rule when Germany was separated into East and West after WWII. This introduced many practices and general moods to the German culture, and one of these was a general acceptance of nudity in East Germany. Enter FKK, or “Frei Körper Kultur”, which translates to “Free Body Culture.” This basically means Ossies (shhhh, I know Germans living in former East Germany don’t like this term) are pretty cool with the naked body.

Now that you’ve gotten this lil’ cultural tidbit, you probably get where I’m going with it. 

There are no barriers in the shower area keeping any one of these fit grandmas from seeing all your natural goodness when you want to wash your pits. I’ve gotten used to it and like to think that I’m a pretty open-minded person (* waves my big old Women’s Studies Minor flag *), but sometimes it’s hard to shake the culture that informs the way you interpret the world-- the main one in this situation being the EVERYTHING-INVOLVING-SEXUALITY-IS-BAD one from that one country with apple pies and stuff. And what embodies the symbol of sexuality from the US better than the naked, stereotypically-female body!! I’m beginning to rant. I’ll get back on topic, I swear. 

10:00am: So after I expose my goodies to the grannies (the alliteration was too good to pass up, sorry mom) then I just hop right on across the street from where I work out, swipe my cool, little electronic key on a pad, and let myself into the Max Planck Institute for the Dynamics of Complex, Technical Systems (MPI). An interesting thing here is that the institute is very international, which I guess shouldn’t be so surprising, since this reflects scientific research in general: very international. I’m pretty sure everyone here tries to follow Germany’s cultural rules, but because it’s so mixed, I can never be sure if the cultural practices I’m learning pertain specifically to German work-life or not. One of these practices is that everyone greets everyone, even if you don’t know them, even if you just pass someone in the hallway or if you’ve walked into a kitchen, etc. I’m not the expert on this, but this hasn’t been common practice anywhere I’ve worked in the US. (Another random side note and weird formality in Germany is that people address and give a sign off for text messages here. So, every text starts with a greeting, which depends on how formally you want to address the person, and a sign-off like “Sincerely, Megan,” for example. And this is expected even if you’re texting someone your own age!)

Other than that, I make up samples, test solubility and different crystal formation behavior of a specific substance and report to a young PhD, whose project I work on. Sometimes, I wait long periods of time on crystals that never behave how I want them to! Crystals are can be very unpredictable in their behavior, and this one behaves especially unpredictably, which is why industry has handed its issues over to us to standardize. But in this down time, I usually sit on skyscanner and plan trips to different countries, “huhu” (this is how Germans type out “haha” if they want to sound cheeky. I imagine is sounds something like “hyuhyu” in their heads, but I’ve never heard a German actually say something like this out loud.).

I share an office with a bunch of other HiWi’s (”Hilfswissenschaftler”, or research assistants that are paid through the University) and it is usually dead quiet in there. People are coding, typing furiously, reading through research articles, etc., so this isn’t exactly the place to chat. People usually gather in the kitchens on their respective floors and chat over lunch or breakfast, but no one really uses my kitchen! I’ve slowly figured out that most of the Master’s students stroll on over to the Uni Mensa (cafeteria) for lunch in packs at specific times. I’m trying to work my way into one of these lunch possies and have had some invites to come along, but remember how I said crystals are unpredictable? Yeah, I usually have to babysit them and/or work through lunch to tend to them. Yay, work social life! 

4:00 - 6:00pm: Once I decide there’s nothing left to be done for the day (this time varies depending on what was on the work-menu for the day), I usually wait until I can catch a train home (it only runs every hour). When I get home, my host dad is usually cooking dinner or cutting up our appetizer of various fruits. I give Momo, our cute lil’ miniature Bernese Mountain Dog, a couple scratches and then try to get something done before getting called to dinner. I have no idea what my host mom and host sister do beforehand, but once dinner has been called and my host dad and I are sitting at the dinner table, it takes a solid 20-30 minutes before they mosie on down the stairs, maybe slowly making a cup of tea, or checking their phones at the counter before they sit down. In Germany it is rude to start eating or even to serve food until everyone is ready to eat, so, as you can imagine, my stomach is like, “whaaaaaaaaat’s the hold up.” The TV is usually on during dinner, so there’s not usually a lot of conversation until we’re all done eating and someone turns on the news. They meckern ( “to gripe” kind of fits this translation) about politics, and this is my time to grasp some German and try to get involved in some German conversation. We’ve talked about gun control, driving laws, the western-hemispheric drug war, the (related) refugee crisis in the US (most call this the immigration crisis), the change in the cultural climate in Germany due to immigration from Turkey and refugees from Syria, etc. 

8:00 - 9:00pm: After dinner, the mom or dad takes the dog on a walk (interesting tidbit: if you own a dog in Germany, you are walking this dog 2-3 times a day, automatically. I have yet to meet a German who does not walk their dog at least 2 times a day.), and this usually signals the end of dinner. I head upstairs and usually talk to my boyfriend about travel plans, our days, etc. and then hit the hay.

NOW. I was just talking to a few friends about this, but with this schedule, I’m trying to fit in a new piece, namely, studying for the TestDAF.

What the hell is the TestDAF? 

This is a language test that evaluates how well you can wield Deutsch als deine Fremdsprache (German as a foreign language). 

Why would you want to do that, that kind of sounds like a lot of work? (What my brain says to me every time I think about taking the test, really)

Well, I want to apply for a master’s program in Germany. 

To anyone from my program reading this statement, it’s kind of like, Na klar, ich auch. But to friends and family, hey yea what’s up I might live here a little longer term. 

There is one program in Germany, specifically in Hamburg, for Cosmetic Science, and all of the classes in this program are in German. This means I have to take the TestDAF, prove that I am C1, or basically fluent, in order to apply and have my application considered. One of my huge motivators for pursuing this opportunity is that school is free in Germany. 

You read that correctly. And anyone can apply to their schools, as long as they can fluently speak the language that the program is taught in. They have small administrative fees, which also include a student transit ticket that covers all of the transit in the city the school is in (some tickets cover multiple federal states!! What a deal!!), but the semester fee is less than ($250) half the cost of cheap rent in Ann Arbor. 

So why not try?

I wouldn’t usually post about something exciting that isn’t a sure thing yet in a public space, but seeing as I haven’t started pursuing TestDAF preparation materials, etc., getting something concrete out there to hold me to my goal seems like a good motivator. 

I hope all is well on the other side of the pond for y’all! I fly back July 17th and will spend some time in NYC with my little (who I miss so much, shout out to Ryan Gentil) before I’m back in Michigan, but I hope to post a few more updates until then!

Alles Liebe

Megan