spazieren-gehen.

So you know how there's always a herd of bite-sized children in their tiny mini parkas parading around the Dark Side of Hamilton? And how they go sledding on that slope right beside Keehn? And when they climb to the top, which is all of 8 feet from the bottom, they shout in complete honest glory, "WE MADE IT!!!" and then they sled away in Victory with a Capital V?

I do that everyday here in Schwaebs. Because, let's face it, in addition to a bad leg from the car wreck of 2005 (which suprisingly hasn't been aching as much as I expected) and my history of inhaling carcinogens, I'm not in the best of shape. Fingers crossed, this half-year hiatus from Diner food and Super Pies will aid my quest to be Topfit, though the Nutella and Hefeweizen consumption may completely counter my epic walks up mountains. Point being - I take epic walks up mountains. Despite what you may think, I've never been one to go marauding around the Glen (I can count the times I've breached those woods) and in Tulsa there's absolutely nowhere to go by foot - but I sure love a good walk around.

Conveniently, in German, there's a verb for that: spazieren-gehen. Every morning, all through class I watch the sky out the window, hoping it will be blue by the time lunch is over, and then I take off into the hills - my own pace, my own two feet in my ugly Chucks, nothing but my own traumatized lungs to stop me. On Tuesday, I asked my roommate Stefania (who is Italian and Chilean and ten years older than me but we still stay up too late giggling and gossiping and it's great) what happened if you went up the mountain behind the dormitories. She said she didn't know, but if I wasn't back by nightfall she'd alert the authorities. I said thanks and off I went.

You Hamilton kids know nothing of hills. Hamilton's hill is a bump on the horizon compared to the behemoths I trekked up that day. But still - I did make it to the top, and not only was there a park (with swings!) and benches (with old people!), there were panoramas galore. Eventually I saw another mountain topped with a field - some random bald patch in the middle of forest - and I thought, man, I bet it'd be nice to go stand in the middle of that.

So I did. I probably shaved a few years off my life in the process, but there's nothing comparable to the feeling of seeing a sudden treeless spot through the woods, of breaking from the denseness into nothingness, pure, Midwestern nothingness - flat and field and nothing but you and the sky. I found Nebraska in Germany.

Today, with hardly an inkling of where I was actually going, I dragged myself up another hill and found a ruin - with dungeons and walls and turrets and I don't know, but it was pretty awesome to go running around alone and look out over the valley and feel like a mountain goat adventurer. Which I did. And then I walked home and ate brie and honey on some bread and realized I've got five and a half more months of this. Unglaublich.

If you've been reading, I apologize if these posts are getting long or dull or whatever - and if not, thanks for keeping up. I'd say 'see you soon' but - well. You know. K TCHUSS.

hangovers, parades, and trains.

Weekend wrap-up: OH WORD?

Schwaebisch Hall isn't very big, so the Goethe-Institut likes to provide fun for us. On Mondays we have Stammtisch, where we march down to a nearby bar and get adequately schwasted, on Wednesdays there are film screenings, and on Fridays, it's GOETHE PARTY TIME. Goethe Party is a hilarious exercise in international awkwardness - and the beer is cheaper. So, this past Friday, we had a little too much fun - had a beer with a fine Italian dinner, and another when we saw I Am Legend AUF DEUTSCH (zombies are zombies, though, regardless of what language they're screaming in), and then three more when we finally got to the Goethe Party. 2.5 liters of beer is too much for a tyke like me, and I was pretty sure I'd died come Saturday morning. At Hamilton, you stumble into Commons for as much coffee and awful pizza as you can stomach, or you load up for Minar, but here - that was my first real bout of homesickness, brought on by a hangover from hell.

It was completely worth it, though - at the party, Bosco, the resident dreadlocked African, is dancing with Reira, the 19 year old Japanese boy, and the nation of Brazil was out in full force. "IN BRAZIL--" shouts Bernardo into my ear, "WE DANCE TO THE FLOOR. YOU. DANCE. NOW." And so we danced like Brazilians and it was hysterical and my legs are still aching, two days later. After the party, the other two American girls and I went off to an alleyway to set off some drugstore fireworks and finish a bottle of Strawberry Wine, and the photos speak for themselves. Far too hammered to be playing with fire, but I was also invincible at that point, and when the bottle was empty, we pitched it into the construction site. Unfortunately, it did not smash. Even more ridiculous, as we're walking to the Josenturm to retrieve the fireworks, some man leans out from his third-story window, asks us where we're from in English, I start shouting back in German, he says "Come up and have a drink!" and we decline, politely, but then his Frau pokes her head out and the following dialogue takes place:

Frau: Girls?
Us: JA?!
Frau: Go away.
Us: OKAY TSCHUSS.

So I wake up on Saturday in pain and queasy, but I manage to rally myself in time for the trip to Stuttgart in the afternoon - again, totally worth it. We saw the ballet and it was incredible, wandered through an art museum, and spent most of our time looking at ducks. I love ducks. In my next life, I would like to be a duck. We made friends with a swan, too. I am rapidly regressing into childhood, and it couldn't be better.

Then, today, to add nonsense to more nonsense, we went to the Carnival in the next town over. 20,000 Germans in costumes that bordered on the physically impossible - giant wooden masks, elaborate face-paint, marching bands and innumerable brigades of marching girls high-stepping in tri-cornered hats. Even better, they shouted HALLO at us, and as HALLO is my favorite German phrase of all time (as in, "Hallo church," "Hallo breakfast," "Hallo ducks"), I was beside myself with little kid glee. And then they threw candy at us.

Just now, we tried to plan out our holiday for the week-long break we have between January and February's classes, and the stress of trying to find cheap UK flights plus feasible hostels plus translating Euros to dollars to pounds made us finally decide fuck it, we're going to Berlin. And Poland. And the Baltic Shore. And that's still pretty awesome, but I was definitely more agitated than I'd been since Hamilton. And, of course, it felt familiar, it felt normal to be that stressed - to have to plan the WHCL meeting and check the IMF email and write a paper and go to work at the Writing Center and I should be working on a story but I have to do my laundry and there's these books I need to read and - you get the point. I suffocate myself at school.

That is why I love trains. We usually fall asleep on them, and we always sequester ourselves into our iPods, but I just stare out the window at the German countryside - giant windmills, hills and fields, occasional castles and little red-roofed towns - and just dream the ride away. Watching the ducks paddle around the river has the same effect - they're not going anywhere. They don't care about next week or even the next day, or at least, they don't seem to. They just paddle around, happy to be paddling around, and maybe somebody throws some bread at them. And riding the train is so simple - just the mere act of going, regardless of where.

So it's a new goal this semester, along with seeing Scandinavia and not dropping my camera off a mountain or into a river - be more like a duck. If I can do that, that's all I have to do.

let me tell you about ludwig.

This entry is going to be about Ludwig, and it's a story I've already told half a dozen times, so pardon me while I preface with some other thoughts that just intruded as I was sitting here, adamantly not studying for my test tomorrow.

This is all fucking crazy when you think about it - when I think about it. I'm in the middle of Germany, wandering through supermarkets where none of the labels are in my mother-tongue, eating Doner sandwiches and drinking Hefeweizen beers from .5 L glasses, going to class with a Whitman's sampler of the entire world, and I'm two weeks away from 21 years old. These pictures, like that one of Ludwig's hat, are honestly personal proofs that this is all actually happening, but even then, I don't think I'll believe it until it's over, six months from now. Heavy thinkings, I know, but sometimes it all seems so routined - class from 8 to 1, lunch, wandering, dinner, homework in the kitchen, a bar in the evening - and then it all seems completely strange and foreign and impossible.

But let me tell you about Ludwig.

In Germany, open seats at coffee shops are free reign; you can be sitting, much as I was sitting, minding your own business, drinking coffee from a giant cup and trying to write some postcards, and anyone is liable to sit down right next to you and share your table. In Oklahoma, we talk to perfect strangers in line at Wal-Mart, but it's casual, polite, distanced. On this particular Tuesday afternoon, I was stationed at the first table I saw when an old man asked me if the seat across from me was free. And I said sure, why not, thinking I'd have my coffee, he'd drink his beer, we'd sit together in amiable, quiet peace.

But he starts talking - about the weather, at first, and how it's so nice out, and how there is "first winter" and "second winter" in Germany, and I try to tell him I'm only here for two months before I go to Vienna, but he is completely deaf and I'm a little nervous anyway. Point being, he keeps talking, and he's got a thick accent in addition to a sweater-vest, a healthy head of spiky gray hair, crow's feet around his eyes, and I'm both mesmerized and terrified and eventually give up on leaving anytime soon. I figure I'm trying to learn German, and here is this German man delivering an uninterrupted monologue, so I listen hard and glean what I can.

He's 84 years old, he tells me, but he doesn't think he looks that old. His birthday is on Sunday. He lives alone, because his dog is dead. At this point, I lose track of the conversation, but then words start jumping out at me: ananas, which means pineapple. Schiessen, which means shot. Panzer, which means tank. Bombe, which means bomb.

And then it dawns on me, he's talking about WWII. He shows me a photo of his friend, shot in Russia at age 19, and a prayer card he carries around with his name on it. And in my American mind, I'm thinking of crazy, shellshocked veterans, but this man seems completely sane, just eager to relive what was probably the most terrible war in the history of the world.

Only after he's halfway through with his beer and I'm completely done with my coffee do I finally put the pieces together: WWII. A German veteran. A German soldier in WWII.

I was sitting across from a former Nazi.

Of course, he could have not been a Nazi, and I knew for a fact he wasn't one anymore if he ever had been one, but there's a pretty good chance he wore the uniform, belonged to the party, fought for the cause, what have you. And I was completely stunned - this poor old man, who keeps staring out the window as if his entire life is on the other side watching him, was what Americans believe to be the personification of evil, something so horrendous and inhuman that it's become cliche, and he was chatting with me like we were old friends. I wish I had understood more, but my German, though much improved, is still fairly flawed, but I could tell it was hurting him to think about these things, and that he meant everything he said - about plants growing and the end of the world coming, about his birthday and his friend dying as he held his hand, about terror today and the world at large - and I just wanted to say something back, but of course, I couldn't.

Then he flagged down the waitress, held out his wallet while she picked out the coins for him to pay, told her about his birthday, said goodbye to me with a grin and simply left. That's his hat in the photo, taken when he went over to the bar to return his empty beer glass.

The shadow of the war is pretty apparent in other places - Berlin is a schizophrenic city due to the damage from WWII, and Vienna had its 4 quarters - but here, in Schwaebisch Hall? I don't have any real thesis from all this, can't sum it up in a nice little moral or fortune-cookie phrase, but it did happen - both to me, and to him.

stumbling into fairytales.

"Go through the park." Those were our only directions, and so we met outside the Institut and took off, down to the river, past the playground that we frequent (there's a mini zip line - after half a liter of beer, a ride on the mini zip line is about the best thing ever), while it's raining and sleeting and generally cold and wet. But it was an adventure, so we kept going, over bridges and across paths, until we came to the next town.

"That's a castle." Tommy spotted it first. Up on a hill, surrounded by a wall, getting closer all the time. And we wandered through a new city center, another little village with candy-colored houses and narrow twisty streets and cats on doorsteps and dozens of ducks trying to swim upstream. Fields and hills gone electric green from the rain with the sun bursting through every now and again and the sky fresh-washed blue, and then a road lined with bare-branched trees and next thing we know, we're walking through these enormous gates into a completely still, completely open castle - it turned out to be a church, but it was still humongous and silent and incredible.

The Neuschwanstein was amazing, sure - but there was a whole busload of us and a hundred other international tourists (so many Russian women in incredible make-up and furry hats) and horse-carriage rides for only 5 Euro - and today, today it was just the 5 of us, adventuring on our own and stumbling onto this giant church-castle. All we needed was a picnic. We only stayed an hour or two, but it felt like weeks - and the sun really came out then, right as we reached the top, overlooking these little cuckoo-clock villages, trains puffing past, clouds zipping across the sky.

I've had some amazing days in my life - the flight back from Harrisburg, the Big Blue Whale of Catoosa, the Oct. 6th Man Man Grizzly Bear show, the exclamation point day in Rome, the zoo in Berlin (and birth and all that, too) - but today was up there. Really up there.

we all bought nutella.

Elisabet: "What should we do with these noodles?"

Rob: "Throw them in the air and shout NOODLES!"

Me: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

At the Goethe Institut here in Schwaebish Hall, we get free breakfasts and lunches Monday through Friday, but we're on our own for the weekends, so tonight, after our day trip to Bavaria (nicht Munich) to see the Neuschwanstein, we hiked down to the Supermarkt and made a lovely little dinner - spaghetti, strawberries, Nutella, beer and wine. It was delicious and adorable - so I am making friends, believe it or not. We have a little gang, and tomorrow we're headed to the park to go hunt down a castle. It's a lot like writing camp at this point - these kids remind me of the Mercks - and a little like my Italy trip in 2005 - because there's a fair number of Americans who would rather stay in the dorm watching South Park than go down to the river. Mini-golf is closed until Spring, but we might ford the river and go anyway.

GERMANY LOVES CASTLES. What Germany doesn't love: normal-tasting water, even without bubbles. But the coffee's good, the beer is cheap and ever-flowing, so I can't really complain. And Nutella. Always Nutella. Today, we loaded onto a bus to find the Neuschwanstein, which is this gorgeous, fairytale castle on top of a mountain in the middle of the Alps (the ALPS!!!). Unfortunately, it really is on the top of this mountain, and I damn near died on the way up. The interior is all decadence and gold-leaf, completely surpassed by the views outside (the ALPS!!!). So we climbed an Alp, took 8000 photographs (including jumping photos!!!), and had some fried dough "Snowballs" on the way down - not my idea, honestly.

Coming back was a little odd, because it did feel a bit like coming home. The other Central Abroad kids are quickly feeling like a replacement friend circle, and it's odd to think they're not the kids I go to school with or go bowling with in Tulsa. And tomorrow will be strange, because we don't have to wake up for anything - a day to wander, write, and yeah, do some homework. But Schwaebisch Hall looks like a Christmas card, the cold is not as severe as at Hamilton, and I'm already having trouble phrasing things in English.

Alles sind gut.