annas abenteuer in der welt

this is it. or: credits & thanks.

2009-10-25T01:33:00.005+02:00

here's a few silly (and some not quite so silly) remarks about life in general and in particular, just some stuff i wanted to share. might get a little too emotional at some point, nevermind that, i wrote most of it at night on the plane so please excuse any weird, unexplainable or overly dramatic statements :)

so i guess this is it. i’m on the airplane while i write this so the fact that you can read it online proves that i’ve arrived home in some reasonable condition…
(update on that: yes, i have, and i got used to the new time zone after about two days, so today is the fourth and i do not feel particularly influenced by eastern time anymore. also, school has started, i'm taking it easy this semester - cause i've adopted a new philosophy: from now on i'm taking it easy and will only be doing things that i actually want to do and will not continue pursuing any activities that stress me in any shape, way or form anymore. that is an awesome philosophy and actually it demands a lot of consequence to keep my nose out of every single interesting activity that comes up, but so far it's given me the best days of my life, so i'm keeping it up, keeping my spirits high and swinging to the beat of life. i guess i'll need to have that tattooed on my lower arm or so :) )

people around me sleep and i wish i could do the same, but probably i’ll end up cuddling with my larger-than-life jet lag for a few days instead. or maybe i just exaggerate a little, here.

it was a very weird experience to be asked for help by germans – in english – and answer in english without them getting the point that i was german, or somewhat german, too. germans speak a funny accent as i now realize. now please don’t jump at me right away, i’m very well, you could say: painfully aware of the fact that i have it, too, but hey – at least i’ve started hearing it ;)

and also my german still is kind of bumpy, i guess it’ll get better once i’m back. i will miss speaking english all the time. (update on this: leo wants me to train her in english by basically speaking it at home all the time. that’ll be fun :) we once started trying this with french for me to finally resurrect my french skills but somehow that got lost along the way.)

airberlin is cool, too. they schedule flights in a way that they leave 15 minutes late and arrive half an hour early and they hand out fancy flight survival packages including earplugs and a toothbrush, that’s cute. and also their blankets are much cuddlier and much more worth stealing than the british airways ones (was it british airways? i don’t even remember). i’ll see what i can do. (update: mission complete.)

so, really, everything comes to an end, and i think it’s okay for me to go back home now. home. whatever that is.

i for sure want to go back to the states sometime soon, maybe next year or whenever – i might very well have had the best time of my life so far here in those past two months and being surrounded by germans even on this plane seems to depress me – why are they so grumpy and cranky all the time? it cannot be the weather, that’s not that different from where i just came from. it struck me that though people refer to new yorkers as being unfriendly and mean the meanest of them could never compete with an average german. interesting, isn’t it? sometimes you have to zoom out to see the whole picture…. i’m sure i’ll be just as cranky and happy to complain again once i’m back and have overcome my first week of school.

but til then, i’m happier than i ever have been and i’m looking forward to sleep in my own bed again, but i’m even happier i have had a chance to do this, to travel around, to see the world, to get to know so many awesome people, to train my english, to steal a british airways (and an air berlin) blanket, to get drunk with people i have only roughly known for hours and to see the new york (state) and massachusetts fall, to learn so much about myself, about life, people, the us and so many more things.

since every good movie has to end with credits (and this here is almost like a movie, right, it has pictures and when you scroll the site they even move, if you don't believe me, scroll faster!) i would like to add some thanks to this blog right here.

thanks to you all for reading up on this blog, for staying in touch and writing commentaries – i guess for a while there will be nothing exciting for me to tell you, the next big trip will be in at least one year from this point, or maybe it won't - life is full of surprises and weird stuff, right... so thanks a bunch for hanging out with me, mentally and/or emotionally, feel free to add further comments and contact me and of course i’d be glad if some of you kept surfing my writing blog every once in a while.

so:
first of all: very, very special thanks to prof. katja f. cantone who sent me that email back in february encouraging me to apply for that program and giving me the idea that i actually had a chance to get in. i would have never thought i had one. thanks to her and to prof. veronika busch for writing me recommendations in an instant.

thanks to dr. david bettez (thanks for the articles, too) and prof. john yopp, to andrea o’leary and karen slaymaker, who all have made our trip to kentucky an awesome experience. also thanks for getting me a new student id three days before we left…. and for taking me to the airport and getting coffee and breakfast, karen, and thanks a lot for those awesome brownies, andrea :)

thanks to jamie fairfield who is a great ta and will be an awesome professor someday, i’m sure.

thanks to the fulbright commission, that offered this huge opportunity to us all and is the only reason i ended up going to kentucky in the first place.

thanks a lot to the fellow fulbrighters: to bliss, not only for taking me on her plus account for my lost in space days but also for hanging out with me, dealing with all my strangeness and moods ;) , laughing our asses off and having loads and loads and loads of fun and a great time together.

to yuliya for playing durak and – again – laughing our asses off and thanks for your willingness to switch languages and for loving super mario and for surfing on the same wave with me. thanks to erdem who wrote a song for me. i’m very sorry i had to abandon klampfi in the desert – well, not quite, but it was kansas, close enough, trust me – but i’m sure all the three of us will get over it. please record a video with that song for me because it was so pretty and deep. thanks to olya for sharing her writing with me. i hope we will still have a chance to exchange our author intentions and styles at some point – writing club reunion? when? where?
thanks to lesha for showing me that it’s okay that my russian doesn’t flow quite as perfectly as some people and sometimes i myself expect and that i shouldn’t worry about it.

thanks to nelli for not trying to talk to me at 7 a.m. and for being the best roommate (in the literal sense of the word) i could possibly imagine and for letting me borrow your hairdryer (that would, unlike mine, actually work under altered power conditions).

thanks a lot to all the kentuckians who hung out with us and with me.

special thanks to trevor, who introduced me to not too sucky american beer and extremely hoppy american beer that gave me the third worst hangover of my life. also thanks for tolerating the troop of crazy germans invading your shop every day asking for strange things like herbal tea. we never got to play durak, did we? well, we should at some point.

thanks to lujza for taking us out of the college world and out to the movies and lex jazz, that was great!

thanks to krista for showing us around and taking me out to that bar where her fiance’s band played some good rock music. thanks a lot to daniel for being able to sing along to wir sind helden music and for amusing me with your ability to enter clubs with your bahncard 50 which doesn’t even say a birthday. and great thanks, obviously for finding my purse and getting it back to me, you in a way saved my trip here.

special thanks to kalan, who introduced me to the beauty of nonsense american cartoons and weird horror movies and that pretty southern accent, even though i still do not understand why you ask me about what kind of accent you have when i have just about two weeks ago started hearing accents (and trying to distinguish them) at all. thanks for helping me out with that whole purse issue and for calling me when i arrived in kansas city and while i was hanging out on the bus and in central park and wherever else and for discussing kleist’s thoughts and ideas with me. finally i have come to understand my role as a woman. yay. yay indeed. oh, and thanks for giving me the stolen umbrella which i then forgot in karen’s car before i left lex. and for providing everfreezing me with a blanket. i sure had a fun and great time hanging out with you :)

thanks a bunch to masha, who i know has so, so much on her mind but still always keeps her spirit up and fights like a tiger – thank you for driving, for taking care of me (and my kidneys, they say hi and thanks, too), for providing – everything. for having that awesome home that feels so comfy and cosy right when you enter it and for just being there. thanks for being the inspiration you are! i love you!

thanks to my grandma, too, who has told me a bunch of interesting things while i was in kansas, and as always cooked my favourite soup, you know how much i love soup :)
thanks for not worrying too much about my whereabouts and state of being or for at least not showing it too much (i know she was, of course.) so that i did not need to feel too guilty about travelling all on my own :)

oh, and big thanks to sanya IV for learning my name, even if by the time you read this internet will probably be old-fashioned and dead or something.

thanks so much to brett for organizing and taking care and providing me with food, warmth and a bike map which i never used, for not making me get up at 4:50 am, for convincing me to stay a few more days, for calling and mailing to all the comrades to make sure i get a roof over my head in other places, too, for making me laugh and relax and for always staying cool and laid back even through all of my weird organizational, health and mood issues. also thanks for taking me to the train station at 7 am on a sunday i.e. getting up at 5:30 on a sunday, i know that was cruel, sorry about that. i never got to get you that puppy, but i’m pretty sure i can arrange something for when you visit germany the next time. german shepherd or black caucasian? maybe i can even find a mix (or arrange one). oh yeah, and thanks for sharing my slightly creepy sense of humor. and for constantly making fun of me and my english. you’ll get it all back once you start speaking (and not only reading :P ) german.

thanks a lot to all the comrades who put me up:
bunnie (i’m sorry you now ended up having to pay for the movies – send me jasmine, i’ll take her out to the movies in berlin or wherever) who treated me like a family member and who convinced me of the tastefulness of chicago pizza, italian beef/sausage and weird popcorn. who let me ride a bike but wouldn’t let me walk in southside chicago and who waited and cruised around the chicago union station for two hours to pick me up. i appreciates our sightseeing tour greatly (he drove me around downtown chicago at about 10 mph, showing me all the sights and not caring for all the honking cars behind. he commented the honking as follows: "man, calm down, okay! what is it about today? can a person not even drive around anymore, doing some sightseeing and stuff? what is it? come on!"
also big thanks to jasmine who took me out to the movies and who will have to go to germany at some point.

bryan, who slept on the couch while i had his room – i would have easily taken the couch, you know… and who outlined boston’s higlights for me and stayed away from giving me directions so that i could actually find the subway ;), who noted down all the important stuff and provided me with breakfast and protection from the crazy kittens.

zoe, who took some of her very little time to hang out with me, see michael moore’s movie and eat vegan stuff, who let me crash on her couch and thus made my whole i-like-new-york-experience possible. also thanks for the bagels. keep in touch!

thanks to everyone who took time to hang out with me, i know everyone lives a busy life and i really appreciate it. of course you all are welcome to visit and i will try my best to give a little bit back – thanks to tim, genevieve, chris, nick and josh from boston, to vicki, heinz, ryan and dan from minneapolis, steve from chicago, maya and jesse from new york, hillary, kameron, bobbie and lex from lexington.

thanks to everyone who stayed in touch with me from far away – thank you for your moral and emotional and sometimes financial or organizational support: special thanks to leo and viv, who always tolerate the weirdest things about my life, moods or needs for support. i love you and appreciate your help and your being around in my life a lot! :)

thanks to h.h. penning, kathi, sophie, toddy, alex and sebo for commenting.

thanks to cat stevens (if i had a dog i sure would love it a lot, too, man! we’re soulmates!), amparanoia, culcha candela, kleist, monet, clueso, bob dylan, jason pollack, follow your true colors to the work you love, michael moore, kirchner, gauguin, matisse, cezanne, miró, howard zinn, frederick douglass and harriet jacobs, bob marley, wir sind helden, michael jackson, gerry mulligan, juicebox, thanks to photography, music, movies and literature (and beer along with fortune cookies) for keeping me up spiritually, mentally, intellectually and emotionally. oh yeah, special thanks to existentialism, cause discussing you after three hours of sleep sure is a lot of fun. and very special thanks to the internet that has made this whole blog possible.

thank you everybody, i really had an awesome, incredible time in the states. i guess this is the times we will look back to and enjoy recollecting forever.

have a good whatever time of the day it is where you are, take care and always keep in mind that there’s always room to grow and the world is full of beauty and unbelievable things, just look out and keep some space for them inside your minds and hearts.

bye!

some more new york

2009-10-22T08:51:00.010+02:00

okay, so here's some more ny before i sum everything up and leave you all to your real life - the weird thing is that i had never felt any particular desire to share my life with everybody in form of a blog but now i feel like i'm really gonna miss that. i'm thinking of ways how to redefine this blog elegantly so that i can not only write travel experiences into it...

but, anyway:
on sunday i went museum hopping, going to the museum of modern arts (moma)

and the international photography center. the moma was extremely crowded, that sucked (and they completely ignore joan mitchell which totally freaked me out). but it was fun to see the works they exhibited and also to people-watch, cause people in famous museums are rarely really interested in fine arts in general or in the place they're visiting in particular, that makes them even more fun to watch. the weather sucked, too, by the way:

(if you click on the picture to see it in full size you can actually see the rain coming down...that's about how rainy it was...)
so i got slightly grumpy at some point….. but that night zoe and i went to the movies to see capitalism: a love story. this is definitely worthwhile watching, it’s not half bad for a michael moore movie. you know, dear us friends and comrades, you are living in interesting times these days – thank you for finally getting angry and standing up against what’s happening, cause there’s enough, and it’s great that people actually start questioning the sensibility of this crappy system. we had vegan pizza afterwards – you know my relationship towards vegan food – but it was really good with artichokes and some indefinable soy stuff on it and there was so much of the topping that it was more of a quiche or something than pizza.

i decided to spend the second day in new york (and my first sunny day for a while!) in a more relaxed and easygoing way:

walking around (really something genuinely new for my style of travelling), seeing central park, hanging out there, i had one of these perfect moments: the sun was shining, i sat on a bench and had coffee and that saxophonist played all the great tunes: just friends, autumn leaves, take the a-train – kitschy? maybe. i don’t know. he played beautifully, i must add – i would easily buy his cd at any given time, and may i add: any street musician in nyc plays better than many of the professionals in germany. i’m not sure whether i should feel bad about my own sax skills or if i should laugh out loud about those jazz musicians in germany who always take themselves so seriously and feel so smart and cool about their music. i guess i’ll choose the second one, especially since i have never thought of myself as a great musician. so, yeah, sorry dear colleagues: any given street corner musician in new york, the one in the park must have been in his eighties, just simply plays better than you. haha.

perfection

central park was very nice, i spent half the day talking to friendly people over the phone, reading, writing, enjoying the sun – that was awesome. really one of those perfect moments. and very relaxed, too.

i had dinner somewhere between the upper eastside and harlem later on – i didn’t quite make it to harlem or the bronx or queens, ny is just too big for two days, or weeks, for that matter – in an italian restaurant. i only went in there because they served chicken penne a la vodka (and were about half as expensive as the other places around) and i found that really cool and wanted to try. i did, and it was great:

didn’t taste like vodka though. at all.

central park by night:

i walked around for a little longer and decided to go and see grand central station which is much bigger than i ever would have thought.

i will definitely need to come back to new york at some point and see all the other places i did not make it to this time – the comics and cartoon art museum, for instance, and so many more. it is a very cool place! and crazy, too.

zoe's apartment:

i'm in freakin fu**** new york city!

2009-10-18T01:38:00.001+02:00

wow, at some point today it just struck me - i'm in new york city, oh my god! how did i end up being here? woooooow.... i'm staying with comrade zoe and her two roomies maya and jesse, they pay 1200 $ each for their apartment which is in eastern village, each has a room of - say - well, maybe five square meters. it is a very nice place though.

so i started off walking from here, eastern village, went down on bowery and broadway and over to lower manhattan, that's where the ferries to staten and ellis island go. tomorrow i want to check out the moma, the comics and cartoon art museum, the photography museum and central park - maybe i'll even go to the zoo and meet my heroes from madagascar. wave and smile, always smile.
on monday i want to go check out harlem and the bronx, see what that's all about and have new york style cheese cake and egg cream that has neither eggs nor cream in it somewhere along the way.

i'm in new york, incredible! new york!

broadway

in memory of the fallen fire fighters at 9/11

stock exchange - any open questions?

brooklyn bridge

story of my life

boston, massachusetts: noch dreimal schlafen

2009-10-18T00:40:00.000+02:00

of all my different destinations and places to stay my boston arrival for sure was the least stressful. our comrade bryan picked my up at the station, showed me my room (i would have taken the sofa, too, of course, but who says no to an own room, right….), the crazy cats tried to bite and scratch me a few times and then we had beer. genevieve came over (bringing the beer) and we hung out for a while laughing about her overweight cat and other random things – the bostonians have a mean sense of humor. they’re nasty. evil. they’re great!

first of all, bostonians hate everyone else. sometimes they even hate each other. most of all they hate the harvard and mit (massachusetts institute of technology) kids. but they also hate rain, or snow, some of them hate the states or at least all the other states. they start sentences with “the only city i don’t hate besides boston…”

they like to drink (and smoke enlightening substances), they understand and actively use means of irony and sarcasm and despite all their hatefulness – or maybe that’s the reason why – spending time with them is extremely fun and i felt at home right away. it’s weird, isn’t it, that sometimes you just hit it off with people and places right away, no time for adjustment needed or anything. bostonians are awesome. boston is a nice place, too, especially in fall. it is comparable to bremen in its size, so you can walk to many places.

downtown is just downtown, i guess, like everywhere, shopping and whatever else.

there is a lot of stuff on the american revolution that you can see and find out about – i didn’t do any of that – and there’re parks and the charles river and the ocean is nearby. it’s got a subway, too, and people seem to be reading a lot around there.

they also have a science museum with a harry potter exhibition:

i think it might be a nice place to live in – not too huge, but still not that far away from new york (for excitement) while rather easygoing in itself. and the bostonians are great, have i ever mentioned that?

track george!

cause really, books, music, coffee is all we need or want, right?

the reason why i went to boston in the first place was that i wanted to see if it had the vibe for me – it does. i’m kind of thinking of applying for a fulbright year at the mit (because i really want to be hated by all the 50 of our comrades and everyone else there , and because they have that fantastic linguistics program where you can study under ancient Chomsky, and the buildings are all nice and pretty, too). so i found out what i needed – yes, boston is a place i could see myself living in, yes, the comrades are cool and fun and the political landscape and scene is interesting and good, yes, the weather is slightly better than in bremen and the fall is very nice

and they have that subway, i love subways.

lunch

so, on thursday i walked around all day, i went to the mit

and to harvard

(which both are technically located in Cambridge

which is just across the river and very proud of its independence – i cannot really see why:

if i were cambridge i’d try to be boston, really…)

that here is boston university. or maybe boston college, who knows. they both exist and are universities, but the name was already taken, so what will you do....
boston has like a thousand schools: at least five universities and a ridiculous number of colleges.

in the evening i went to a public meeting of the socialist alternative. i met some of the other comrades, we went out for beers and had a fun time.

on friday i finally went shoeshopping – remember, i hate shoesshopping. i bought sneakers on sale for fourty bucks instead of some decent winter shoes. not exactly what i was going for, but at least i completed my mission – i walked through two pairs of shoes here. both were almost done with the world even before i came here, but still.
later that day i met with tim, whom i had met the night before, and we walked around, then went to some irish bar, had food and beer, went on to the next bar with nick (yet another comrade) and so on and so on –

tim gave me a ride home that night and when we arrived at the sa office/bryan’s place/the place i had all my stuff in i found out i was locked out.
now, one peculiar thing about the people in boston is: never pick up their phones. ever. they all hate talking over the phone (among other things) and just never pick it up. they might text you (i found out texting costs me 10 minutes per text, sent or received, what a rip off!) back later on, but they do not pick up their phones.
we tried to call bryan (who does not pick up his phone) and then genevieve who lives around the corner and has a key for the place (and does not pick up her phone either). luckily she however called back, so we went over to her place and hung out there for a while.
i slept very little in boston, so i was quite happy when i could finally go to bed, the crazy kittens jumping on and off the bed all the time til i fell asleep.
so, all’s well that ends well – i’m on my way to new york, three more days and that’s it.

i’m kind of getting ready to go home, i mean, i have started preparing myself morally. that’s okay – constant travelling is inspiring, but exhausting, both physically and emotionally. i don’t know yet what is going to happen in new york and it’s only about three hours away – i’m on the bus and hoping for the best.
i’m looking forward to come back to the states and visiting all the great people i’ve met here, but for now i’m good with staying in one place for at least a couple of weeks. yeah, that will be good. i’ve found out that i will have my fridays off half of the semester, too, so if i skip fachdidaktik which i hate anyway (teaching methods, stupid busy work stuff) on tuesday and my one and a half classes on thursday i will actually have almost a whole week off of school –i’m planning that for the thanksgiving week, not, because thanksgiving played any role for my life, but because i’m going to berlin that tues- and wednesday anyway, so i might as well stay there for a couple more days or maybe go someplace else, munich maybe? what do you think about that, yuli? :)

as of now i will leave it at that – it’s not unlikely that i will post the new york update from the airport or even from germany on tues- or wednesday. i wish everyone a good time til then, thanks for hanging out with me to tim, nick (and thanks for the beer), genevieve and josh, for putting me up, providing me with all the information i needed as well as coffee and breakfast to bryan. i’m looking forward to seeing some of you at summer school next year or at any other time in germany, the us or anywhere else in the world. socialist travellers of the world unite! :)

werbung in eigener sache: commercial break

2009-10-15T01:42:00.000+02:00

i know that some of you here also read my other blog. just for your information: i've uploaded some of the more "artistic" pics - i'm not suggesting quality here, but their function was more aesthetic than documentary - of my stay in the us there along with photos that i took a while ago. you might or might not be interested in swinging by there and checking it out, and as always, i appreciate comments greatly, so feel free to speak out whatever they provoke in you :)

so. chicago.

2009-10-14T23:14:00.000+02:00

today, or, by the time i upload this it will be yesterday, i did not:

go up on the sears tower and take a pic on that glass floor thingy
go to the planetarium, the institute of arts or the museum of contemporary photography
go to the millennium park
buy shoes
recharge my camera battery before hopping on – i mean: boarding – the train
have coffee at intelligencia or whatever that coffee bar was called that trevor had recommended me
have real chicago style lunch as everyone i ever spoke to in the us urged me to have. well, maybe not every single one. but pretty much everyone.

all things that i more (photography) or less (willis formerly known and by me still referred to as sears tower) wanted to do. wow. i think i’ve missed the whole touristy program.
and here’s why:

i got up early after staying up late. i did not make myself coffee, which would have been a smart idea because it keeps me from being grumpy on such days. i had a nice plan, such a nice plan… i had googled where i had to get off the bus which made me feel really local and not touristy at all, apart from the fact, that i had trouble with the complicated money-in-the-machine-putting ceremony. i had drawn a map into my notebook that was supposed to keep me from getting lost. i had a vague idea of the geographical logic of the area. i wanted to get out near union station, take a couple of pics of that because i hadn’t gotten a chance to do so when i arrived as i’ve mentioned before, go to the sears tower, then to the millennium park, downtown, to the aquarium, planetarium and if i then still had time to the photography thing. bunny would get out of work round 5:30, so there was plenty of time, i thought. weather was supposed to be nice and sunny and ideal for taking pics. well, it was, for about the first half hour i was walking around, and then again from time to time – most of the time the light sucked.
anyway: here’s what happened: i got out at the right stop, and i felt pretty much touristy because i did not see how to open the door at first. no embarrassing moments there, but nonetheless: touristy, especially when going downtown from the chicago ghetto area (that’s what the people who live there call it), is not how i wanted to feel. i wanted to be all cool and local and stuff, damn it!
when i got out i realized i needed to do something about my grumpiness. since i was right at the station i went through with the first point on my masterplan: union station

but decided to skip on going up the sears tower – was not my highest priority anyway, and i thought, i might still do that later or never or whenever – and to go straight on to the aquarium, because i love going to the aquarium or, well, at least that’s what i thought at that moment. to make a long story short: i took a wrong turn, did not realize that and walked into the exact opposite direction of where everything of the above was located.

i would not call it “i got lost”, because most of the time i had the feeling to kind of know or be able to guess where i was – but, in the end, maybe let’s just say: i got lost. i was greatly surprised when i came out on canal street – wow. how on earth did i end up there?!? – but then again i didn’t mind at least knowing where i was: about another 2 miles away from where i wanted to be.

canal

street

normal ave

selbstauslöser

anybody tell me please - why no confetti?!?

lake michigan

when i had finally made it to the aquarium it was already round two o’clock – remember, bunnie wanted to pick me up round 5:30…. nice. i went in, it was community something something day which basically means free admission to some parts and discount on the fancy stuff of the exhibition (sharks, dolphins, whales, penguins, sea lions, otters and the like).

lunch

i walked around there and realized i’m not so interested in aquariums anymore, except for the fancy stuff and the giant turtles, cause giant turtles are awesome.

fancy stuff

well hello, handsome fellow - look at how green you are and all...

but what i’m even less interested in is having limited time to try and figure out a way to make my camera take good pictures in the dark with reflecting windows between me and the fishies while the latter ones constantly keep moving. not so much fun. i’ve never spent so much time on editing my pics afterwards to make them look halfway decent.

on the other hand – some of them turned out real fancy and somewhere between artistic and otherworldly:

so, hey, the glass is always three quarters full, right?

okay, so i walked through the aquarium for about two hours, then i had some coffee at the café there – sorry trev, i really had to sit down for a while (i do realize that sounds like i’m sixty-seven) after walking for 6 straight hours and also, to some of the folks who have known me for a while: remember my evil nasty no good knee? it’s returned today. welcome back.
yay, next crisis on – after losing my purse, cancelling my credit card, then having the purse found by daniel, then not being able to undo the cancelation and not having a chance of getting a solid new one around here, having the new card sent to my home, leo had to sent me the number but was on vacation at the time when it arrived – after getting that nice kidney stuff (which is over and all back to good now, as it seems) with my insurance bouncing back – running out of minutes on my phone right at the time when i needed it the most to organize chicago – after the death of my bank card and thus no access to cash – no kidding: i must have really spoiled my karma somehow. of course quite a few of these events – as not to say: almost all of them - were my own, well if not stupidity, then at least disorganization and maybe carelessness: i just somehow don’t really care for any of it, i keep my spirits up and laugh about it all and just hope to find a way of dealing with it and finding some sort of solution, but why is it that i can do that? only because there are so many people around here who constantly take care of me – literally like a net that saves me from falling while i seem to be nagging on it from all sides – without masha and brett and daniel and kalan and bunnie and brian and steve and bliss and leo i would probably be long sitting rolled up under some table or bed, crying. instead i keep having the best time thanks to you – at least now i really don’t see what else there is that could possibly go wrong anymore that does not involve… well, let’s not jinx it. oh my, maybe all that’s how i spoil my karma…. anyway, what i’m trying to say is: i think i’m good now and it’s only another week of anna collecting trouble in the us, so you’re probably off the hook :) just to let you know folks: i really do appreciate all your help, hospitality and generosity as well as your just being there and my friends. i really hope i can give something back at some point, no need to say that you are all welcome to come hang out with me in bremen anytime you like (or berlin from next year on, hooray! and - well. maybe not exactly aaaany time. if i have a major piano exam coming up i can be somewhat awkward ;) ).

but back to topic:
after having that coffee at the aquarium, i went downtown, just checking out the area, seeing what’s there – bunnie had driven me and us around on sunday already, and again on monday when we went to the zoo, to the Italian beef/sausage place, to get some cheddar and caramel popcorn – sounds disgusting/is fantastic – and cruised around the lake shore for a while – but i prefer walking places when i travel: i have the feeling i make the place part of me and myself part of the place, and i only feel like i really have seen it when i walk somewhere (bike might work, too, though): acquirement of area through pedestrian activity (footnote: maybe i should sign up for the army, i hear there are troops who walk a lot and it seems to be a talent of mine. i could get paid for that there).
so, anyway, when i actually knew where i was and there was some life around me (you see, while i was lost i was walking around in an area where almost no people were out in the streets) i felt like i kind of got chicago for the first time.

it is a place with a lively nightlife, famous for its shows and restaurants. i guess if you want to have a fun time with some good people or if you want to go shopping and spend a lot of money, this is a place to go – and it might also have an interesting subculture, but this i only guess from a couple of indications.
i did not get to know any subculture, i would say i had a rather family-like experience, i felt somewhat like a high school exchange student on a two week trip to some place – in a good way, though, i really had a great time in chicago thanks to bunnie and jasmine.
also it was quite fancy riding our bikes through the night time chicago ghetto, i felt all adventurous and such :)
the food is definitely very interesting there – the weird popcorn has been mentioned, but what about eating pizza with mushrooms, spinach and pepperoni (salami for germans) on it dressed up with extra parmesan cheese and shredded red pepper? that’s a whole new definition of extra cheese, and of pizza, for that matter: it might well be that i’ve had the best pizza of my life – or at least for a very long time – tonight.

i am under the impression that chicago has a lot of de facto racial segregation – you know, hispanics in certain parts, blacks in other ones though those two are probably more mixed among each other than any of them with the whites and so on, and that the shiny glass façade the city keeps up downtown is not what it really is about – downtown is a nice but expensive area, as in so many places in the world – but it does really not take a long ride to get out of the perfect picture. maybe that’s why there used to be (or maybe even still is? i don’t really know i must admit) a grand jazz scene there – we actually passed by a duke ellington elementary school, how cool is that! i suppose that today they might have a notable hip hop scene, cause there are a lot of young people there, they’ve got a variety of colleges, too. however i suspect that this is not where the genuine hiphoppers derive from – i’ve met those two friends of jasmine’s who are latinas and from what i’ve seen and heard around the garfield area and from what their perception of life is i take it chicago is not a shiny happy no worries man place.
interesting, because it is a very different part of the us culture i got to know there, i really appreciate that. not that i had never been to a ghettolike place before – come on, i grew up in gröpelingen and such – so i had been acquainted with the general way of expression, like speaking in a different manner, a different register as we linguists call it, than middle or upper class people, getting your cheeks pierced and your ears tattooed, having other expectations from life, hanging out at the gas station at night etc., if not in the exact same way so at least in some other.
still chicago is a whole lot bigger then bremen, but what struck me the most is that racial question, a thing that had never played a role in my life or where i grew up – i used to live in an area with a high turkish immigrant population, but i never felt out of place when i walked around there. interesting.

chicago for the rich

and the not so rich

the pool table at which i sucked playing big time

as of now i’m back on the road, heading to boston. i think i have forgotten to mention: wisconsin looks like podmoskovye (moscow suburbian and surrounding areas) with the exact same vegetation and landscape. look how small the world is, when you come to think of it.
oh yeah, wisconsin by the way connects minnosota and illnois – minnesota being northwest of it, illionis east, i guess. i’m particularly impressed with my newly acquired geography of the us-skills – is there any song or rhyme or whatever they make you learn in grade school to learn all the states by heart? cause there is none for the capitals of the german bundesländer (states) and obviously i cannot learn 16 cities by heart without a song, right, even if three of them are one-city-states and some other ones are pretty obvious. never.

and also i have forgotten to mention: anyone who wants to visit the states and plans on going by train there, do it, it definitely is worth a shot because those trains are extremely comfortable, you almost for certain get a double seat for yourself, they’ve got plugs at some seats (that’s why i had a chance to write this entry and to recharge my camera battery) and they’ve just handed out pillows to everyone, and with the isic (that international student id you get for 12 euros at the asta bremen for instance) you get a 15% discount on the tickets – it’s definitely worth it.

some more chicago for you - i like that one:

or marge, you never know...

scary

lol. yeah, sure thing.

thanks a lot to bunnie and jasmine and toni again, take care and send me your kid at some point – remember: we socialists gotta look out for each other :)

happy columbus day

2009-10-12T13:20:00.001+02:00

today, the us are celebrating christopher columbus, who, that's what people say, is the guy who discovered the americas. this is not only not true (try and google amerigo vespucci), but also here are some random facts about the guy we're honoring, taken from this wonderful book: a people's history of the united states

"They (the Arawak Indians) ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask."

also, when one of columbus' sailors saw land as the first man to do so - and the first man to see land was promised a pension of some ten thousand maravedis, apparently the currency at that time, for the rest of his life - our honorable man betrayed his sailor and got the reward for himself, claiming he had seen land before the other guy did.
columbus slaughtered, betrayed, robbed and exploited the people he found living in the "new world" which to those people probably was not new at all. yay discovery voyages and -gers of the civilized european countries. yay columbus.

so, i apoligize for any upcoming cynicism, but i just have to say: happy columbus day everybody. well, at least some people get a day off. why don't we celebrate a rosa luxemburg day instead? that would be much nicer.

on the road

2009-10-12T10:32:00.001+02:00

"Ich gehe wieder auf Reisen
mit meiner leisen Gefährtin
der Einsamkeit

Wir bleiben zu zweien einsam
und haben nichts weiter gemeinsam
als diese Gemeinsamkeit"

(Mascha Kaléko)

i’m on the road again, heading to chicago, going by train – i think, not a single one of the americans i have talked to has ever taken a train anywhere. crazy country! health care reform and public transportation, that’s what you need people, really – please schedule the revolution for some time before my next visit…

and it is a real adventure: first, you check in your baggage. i mean – compare this to my normal train catching routine: oh no. train leaves pretty much now. well. let’s see how fast we can move (quote from brett, but fits to my routine perfectly). here: you arrive at the station about an hour before the train goes. you check in your luggage. you don’t “hop on the train as long as it’s there” – you “board it”. and you’re not supposed to bring any liquids – “i mean, soap and shampoo are okay, you know, but don’t bring anything else” as the nice man at the counter explained to me – at least not in your checked-in luggage. I wonder what they'd do if i filled liquid nitro-glycerine into my 1l (about a quarter gallon) water bottle and took it onto the train in my hand luggage…. “two small personal items, including purses and laptops”, that is.

anyway, you can say what you want about the us transportation system but they do have extremely comfortable trains with legrests and everything.

no plugs, though, that’s sad, but: legrests and a lot of room to stretch out or roll up or do whatever.

and they serve lunch, if only for a certain number of people - you have to sign up real quickly or otherwise you won’t get any. i think for people travelling all the way from seattle that might imply a certain threat, but on the other hand: better a couple of people than none, right. i however was not interested in getting any because i was well equipped with half a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread and a couple of apples and my nitro-glycerine water.

the surroundings are extremely pretty. we’re through wild and rough nature here, a swamp or lake or river appearing on either side every once in a while, and hills by the horizon and autumn fondled trees all around, the sun is shining and the air-conditioning suggests a slight breeze, gently striking through the air.

i’m on the road again and will be, for another week – it’s not even amazing, it’s something beyond, that i have spent the last seven weeks here and now i’ll have to go back to school and life and normality and stuff – i kind of get what jack kerouac and his folks were up to when they kept on going back and forth throughout the us. i will spent an entire day in a train going from chicago to boston – i had to skip on washington, so sorry folks, no pics of me and the white house for this time – and i love going by train, so that’s cool, but still, it is amazing that now everything seems so far away and untouchable and out of sight out of mind but things will go back to normal in a little more than a week. i refuse to believe it for now and prefer staying in this bubble world. i'm on the road, listening to gerry mulligan, to bob dylan and cat stevens - i have a dog and i love him like my wife - or was it the other way around? anyway: if you want to sing out, sing out!

so, once we arrived in chicago – unfortunately the battery of my camera went low, so i couldn’t take pics of the amazing station, that reminded me of a crossing between a very pretty moscow metro station, a storehouse and a mine – i had to claim my baggage, literally like in an airport (cause how would i get it back otherwise, right? stupid sentence.)

anyway, i wanted to get rid of my gigantic backpack since i’m now travelling without klampfi, my beloved 20 euro flea market guitar, but instead with a duffle bag full of stuff (and the backpack, obviously), so i went on a quest to find one dollar bills for the locker. i did this a couple of times until i finally realized that there was a bill exchanging machine right in front of me. well.

i locked the backpack – and with it my camera battery recharger, so i might not be able to take pics of chicago unless i have a chance to swing by the station sometime today, doh! – and now needed to find comrade bunnie without having a number or a phone, for that matter. i needed to call brett in order to find out about that in the first place – remember folks, i had run out of minutes on my phone the other day, right…

and now i was running out of change – right, cause you never do, unless you really, really, really need quarters, of course. i bought some bubble gum and some other random stuff from a vending machine, called brett, who gave me bunnie’s number, who then either didn’t pick up the phone or maybe i’m just too dumb to use a payphone locally, i called brett again, but the phone was apparently broken cause he could not hear me – during this process i ran out of change a couple of times, bought some tictacs at a bookstore and asked the lady to give me as many quarters back as she could. she looked at me in a rather pitiful way and handed me over 7 quarters with which i finally reached brett again who then organized our get together, and without him the whole thing would probably have taken three to an indefinite number of hours (instead of one) to find bunnie or a place to stay. what would i only do without you? :)

well, we finally ran into each other.

so. chicago.

bunnie drove me around downtown and showed me some of the main highlights, then we went to his home. he lives in a neighbourhood that is 99 per cent black and that in his words “has gotten much better, after they built that apartment building over there, no shootings anymore and the constant police presence has scared all drug dealers away. it used to be worse, i had two people been killed in front of my house, they had some quarrel going on with their drug provider” – a genuine american city experience, i take it.

bunnie takes good care of me, though. he lives in a big apartment with his 18 year-old daughter, jasmine, they have a completely out of tune piano and a pool table and they cooked an awesome beens and cornbread and salad dinner yesterday, that was great – also, they try everything to make me feel at home and it works, too. only thing is, i sometimes have a little trouble understanding them – it is a very specific register they speak, one i’m not familiar with. i’m getting in there, but it’s not as easy as has been before – wow, for the past seven weeks i have come to understand a lot about how little english i really knew or know…. sad.

anyway, we played some pool (yes, i do suck.) and then i went to the movie’s with jasmine and a couple of her friends, who have very interesting piercings (spikes through their cheeks – never seen that before) and tattoos (on the upper ear? really? ouch!). we saw a scary movie and you all know how much i like scary movies, “paranormal” – the first half is intriguingly boring, but the rest freaked me out for the moment. was not as scary as the dark knight, though – on the other hand, the latter one has heath ledger starring, so it’s more worth it. well. after that we wandered around the theatre and went straight to the next movie, and yes, i was done with the world by then, but okay, whatever: couples retreat. okayish. funny, in a way, touching, at least it’s supposed to be, but well, i was up for about 20 hours by then and just tired.

so. whatever i’ve seen of chicago so far was interesting, it’s definitely very different from all of the other places i’ve seen here so far, it reminds me more of what i remember from seeing on the prince from bel air (yes i know that’s not chicago, still reminds me), but so far it also has not struck me with impressiveness. we’ll see, i was completely wrong about minneapolis, too, so maybe i’m just a crabby person who always regards things sceptically at first. i’ve never thought of myself that way, but you never fade to learn, right?

i hope i will have a chance to take at least a couple of pics and to recharge my battery – also, because i need something to do on the way to boston, man, 23 hours, my laptop will die after 3.5…. shit.

if i don’t have a chance to take pics, however, i’ll try to do it the old-schoolish descriptive way. for now, i need to get some breakfast. bye folks, thx for reading!

minneapolis

2009-10-12T02:21:00.001+02:00

back on october 2nd masha drove us – admirable: me, being sick and apparently at some point becoming cranky (sorry about that again!), grandma and our crazy two year old baby who mastered this tricky adventure in a great way but still is two and crazy, you can vividly imagine this fellowship – from kansas to minnesota, crossing missouri and iowa. we arrived in minneapolis/st. paul round eleven p.m. and stayed with friends of masha, vicky and heinz, who were very dear and kind and made us feel very comfortable right from the very first second.

when masha drove us around for a first tour of the city in broad daylight the next day my first impression of minneapolis was: wow, now that’s one of the ugliest places i’ve ever seen.
interesting, isn’t it, how quickly things can change and how nothing ever is what it seems to be? because i fell in love with this city. but let’s keep some chronological order here – that saturday i went over to brett’s place where i would spend another week (instead of three days as i had initially planned). that night we went to a spoken word (for germans: poetry slam without the slamming part) show that also had hip hop performances. the show was organized in memory of fong lee, who was shot by the mpls. police two years ago.
both the spoken word contributions and the music were awesome and we had a lot of fun there. i also got to meet another comrade, dan, who was not extremely talkative that day – but still, it’s always nice to meet people who dislike and distrust capitalism in the same way i do…

anyway: the next day, sunday obviously, we made use of the fact that brett did not have to work and went out to the mill city area, being an old watermill ruin that is somewhat natural and wild but still has this industrial charm to it.

that was probably the moment minneapolis and i started flirting, i think, the city asked me out on a very intense date that day.
we had lunch at a place called the spaghetti factory and then finished watching minority report which we had started watching the day before. we came to the conclusion that tom cruise has got exactly two facial expressions (stoic and yelling) which probably would have made it impossible for him to become a successful actor without scientological help.
we probably watched some more stuff – family guy or whatever, and i believe, brett made me watch the vikings vs. someone football game for at least 15 minutes – or was that another day? might very well be.

on monday i went uptown and walked around half of the day.

i got soaked three times, but i had loads of fun checking out the area, ending up walking around at the lake calhoun and lake of the isles area, taking about a trillion pictures – i’ve found out a lot about the settings of my camera this week, you wouldn’t believe, especially when taking the fact into account that i’ve had it for about one and a half years…. now i know how to get rid of that wide angle if i want to and how the focal width works and i’ve even learned some english photography terminology, yay! – so, anyway, i took lots and lots of pics and walked through the rain and obviously my kidneys weren’t all that happy about that, but i had a fun time and that’s all that counts in the end, right...

waiting for the rain to stop or at least slow down a little bit:

i think that night we got asian food, which we did a lot actually, watched something – something – maybe football or… whatever – and hung out. in fact, hanging out and relaxing is something i really learned to appreciate while being here in the states, i guess i don’t really do that too often when i’m at home.

on tuesday it rained throughout the whole day so we stayed in and watched some more tom cruise (the last samurai – tom cruise is the last samurai, great joke, isn’t it…? nice landscape though), some dave chapelle show, some family guy, and then we went to a branch meeting watching rethink Afghanistan, a documentary about the us intervention in afghanistan: all of you have probably by now heard about obama’s peace nobel prize, trust me, after watching this movie it becomes even more of a farce than it was in the first place.

i had bought a train ticket (yes, there are trains in the us! not very many, but at least they connect the largest places in the north and i guess around the coast areas, west and east) to go to chicago the next day. however, my affection for minneapolis, that had manifested by then, and the fact that i had way too much fun hanging out with brett to move on the next day led to the decision of just simply not going.
i stayed through sunday, missing out the chance of going by a cheap train ticket but instead having loads and loads and loads of fun, an awesome time relaxing and hanging out, getting to know some more comrades, being extremely well taken care of by brett and finding inspiration and new ideas and maybe even some new drive towards artistic as well as political work in minneapolis. i love this place.

however, wednesday and thursday turned out to be rather introverted days for me, i stayed in most the time and worked ( or rather: avoided working) on my leadoff for a branch meeting on thursday which i for some reason had promised to give (german stuff: history of the welfare state shredding, perspectives, development of die linke, youth stuff, far right development, you know the kind: a short history of everything in twenty minutes) – but things went better than expected – and on friday i finally went to see the minneapolis institute of arts to find some inspiration and to take another, well, maybe this time it was only a billion, pictures.

me and mia:

(i apologize for the fact that all pics of me look somewhat the same - it's just a simple fact that most of the time i take them myself and they tend to depend on the length of my arms which does not seem to alter to a great extent.)

i ended up going downtown hopeful to make it down to mississippi river but that didn’t quite work out and i got lost – only once, yay! – walked around for a while, sent a couple of postcards and went back home.

downtown:

that night we hung out with comrade ryan and i had my first back to business – out of meds-beer, that was fun.
saturday was fairly relaxed, we got brett a new fancy camera which is a model close to mine and which i have learnt a few things from, interestingly enough, and later on we went to khans mongolian barbecue, having asian food for the third time that week – it was great asian food, so definitely no complaints on that one, especially because the place was cool. you basically throw whatever you want to have fried altogether in one bowl and put some sauces over it and you hand the whole thing over to the cook who would then fry it for you. the place itself seems to be somewhat outside town, but i can never tell here. it is half fancy with those cool tables and the whole idea of having your asian crab-salmon-shrimp food with customized veggies (that’s what i did, yum) personally fried for you, and half homey-cosy-comfy.

fancy table:

fancy chopstick-technique:

so, after all: what is it that i love so much about minneapolis?
i love that it’s got those tall downtown glass buildings along with old churches right next to them, that it’s green and has all these lakes (“minneapolis, city of the thousand lakes”), the mill city area, the many many trees that will turn all pretty orange and red in a few weeks, days maybe, while it’s got this industrial charm. i love, that it is a crazy, liberal and fun place, that it is somewhat calm while it still has a real city feel to it – something bremen is lacking more or less – i love that there are places that make good coffee, that they have snow and real winters and summers, that it’s very earthbound while still somewhat freaky. people here are not as easy to approach as in the south, yes, i admit that. but then again – the admission to the arts museum is free. and there’s public transportation, at least they have buses and a light rail which is somewhat between a tram and an s-bahn.
minneapolis is awesome.

before i leave you with a couple more impressions i'd once again like to thank masha for driving and keeping spirits up and brett for making my life absolutely carefree and more than enjoyable this week - thank you!

first snow, awesome city, to be continued

2009-10-10T20:57:00.000+02:00

minneapolis is wonderful, i totally have fallen in love with this place and i'm pretty sure i'll be back at some point. however, this blog entry is only here to tell you: practise patience, folks, i'll write some more stuff tomorrow while i'm on the train to chicago - and then hopefully will upload it tomorrow night along with about a trillion pictures that i have taken. for now i only want to let you know that my phone balance is low so if anyone tried calling me and have failed with that - sorry about that, i'll try to load some money up there as soon as i get my new credit card number sent to me.... til then: stay tuned, people, minnepolis is what we call hamma and i really want to share my adventures here with you!

ouch

2009-10-01T05:29:00.004+02:00

hey folks,

i'm just quickly putting up some pics and telling you the great news: yay, we're moving on to minnesota on friday, i'll be visiting brett and the other comrades and before that we'll meet with vicky and heinz and other people, and yay, i got myself a nice big kidney infection with the doctor threatening me with hospitalization and everything if i don't stick to the rules :/
so here i am, chilling out in ks, taking antibiotics, feeling sleepy and not as full of energy as i had hoped to feel for this trip. that's what you get, folks, for being stupid. oh yeah, and dear us citizens, as much as i love you all - and i have met so many cool people here - you definitely need a health care reform. cause it sucks big time to pay 98 bucks just for seeing a doctor for five minutes to get the prescription and the threatening and then go get the meds for 4 - four!!!- dollars. i mean, come on - four dollars? ninetyeight dollars? not fair!
and i mean, okay, my situation is kind of specific, no questioning that, but masha said there are 30 millions of people here that can never see a doctor for that reason - folks, you so need a health care reform!!!

i'm still working on finding a couch for dc, but brett, whom i owe big time because i keep shifting the dates for my visit back and forth and he only replies "well, okay" or "yeah, cool" or "sure thing", which leaves me even more ashamed, seems to have found me places to stay in chicago, boston and ny, so my road trip is all in dry towels as we germans say.

so, here come the pics:

the big game:

blau blau blau ist alles was ich habe, blaublaublau is alles was ich mag...

poor little louisville fans. there are so few of them...

look, how angry we can get at the louivillians, as not to say louivillans! cause we hate them, yes we do, and we love uk, yes we do!

that's the evil nasty no good rain that soaked me again and again and that i have to thank a big deal for the kidney stuff, i guess... grrr

i need to get a license. it was so fun to drive that thing!

bye people, next week i'll hopefully have more amazing stories to tell you....

oh, what a day

2009-09-27T06:18:00.004+02:00

i'm off from lexington and have safely arrived in manhattan, kansas, which is place of about 45000 people and a bunch of kansas state university students. i got to know lil sanya, my sweet and very, very wild two year-old cousin, who after some shy time warmed up and by now has not only learned my name but also announced that from now on she'll be sleeping in my bed.
i've driven. a tractor. pictures have been taken so that i'll be able to prove things to you once i get them. wow. i haven't driven a car in years, but who cares: now i can officially state: i can drive a tractor.

yesterday morning i got soaked twice before leaving for the airport. kentucky rains never cease to amaze me, even though it has been raining there for quite a while now. they're not just rains like in water falling from the sky in small bits. they give you the feeling of walking through a waterfall. i got soaked walking with an umbrella, actually. not quite as soaked as i might have got otherwise, but still soaked.

those last few days in lex were wild. we had very little sleep. we tried to compensate for that by drinking beer. all in all a mind-altering combo, especially when you get to bed at four a.m. and have to sit in class at nine. apparently this does not exactly help to stay all good and healthy, so i'm still in a foggy state of mind. but maybe also, because it is a little surreal being here in the us with people i normally see about 9 time zones away from here.

my flight here was pleasant, i slept through most of it, although it was very weird getting on the plane in lex and literally getting out twenty minutes later in cincinnati, like getting on a tram or a bus. no discussions about my whereabouts this time, in fact they did not check my documents at all - do they do that on german domestic flights? i'm not sure.

so. now i'm hanging out in kansas, and after going through half of it by car i can only say that it's really, really pretty. there is almost nothing there, besides cows and grassy hills, but the grass has sort of a reddish shade to it, they call them the enflamed hills. pretty, really pretty.
my grandma has not noticed my eyebrow piercing so far. yay. or maybe she is only pretending not to have noticed it, that's quite possible, too - one way or the other: no discussions on that part. so far.

i miss the fellow lexingtonians. if any of you read this: i had a great time with all of you and i hope to meet you all again at some point. i mean, in the end these days it's only a couple of hours away,
right...

i have to go now. have a good day everybody, dear fulbrighters, let me know if you arrived well!

one more thing

2009-09-17T16:30:00.000+02:00

autumn has arrived
it's starting to colour the tips of the leaves in all colours and the air feels differently - i always smell autumn before i can see it. i love autumn. it's my favourite time of the year.

even though for now it still is hot, i believe that as i move on further north i will see a beautiful fall this year.
love it.

when there's nothing left to say

2009-09-17T16:29:00.001+02:00

now time is running by extremely fast - there's only about one week left in kentucky and of course this is the time when I get to know the greatest people and figure out which places are worthy going to and which not, and isn't it ironic.... a little too ironic...?

after pimping myself with loads of aspirin complex and alka seltzer (doesn't work half as good) because the airconditioning had finally got me and had brought me a nice cold with headache and sleeping fourteen hours a day and such on sunday, on tuesday we went to al's bar to listen to rock music. that was cool, and there was beer, that was just equally cool.

yesterday we had a ridiculous number of events coming up on our schedule, one of them being the "oktoberfest" in the german house - i must admit: i was wrong. some of the german house folks are fun and fun to hang out with, which i did afterwards after trivia.

today was my second last real class here, and now it seems very odd and just simply not right to leave next week - i mean, where did the other four weeks go? i guess it is the moment you realize that you can name all of the upcoming events until you leave - i have to sleep less to spend as much awake time here as i can - that you also realize wow, this is it, the time has gone, just gone.

actually it's amazing that people even bother to spend so much time with us, as if we were staying, as if we were to be around forever.
i wonder if something like that would ever happen in germany.
probably not.

the last week that is now to come offers a broad variety of eventy -some of which i dig, but some of which i could easily do without: football match louisville - uk this coming saturday. i tried to talk myself out of the thing, wouldn't work. *******

tomorrow we're going on a river cruise. the last experience i had with cruises was in tenth grade, we had drunk way too much the day before and hence were extremely dehydrated, and the cruise in the burning sun at 35°C was certainly not a pleasant experience. i guess i'm still traumatized.

our esl teacher demands perfection on (or in?) prepositions from bliss and me. i do not feel exactly motivated to sit down and study wordbound preps all day long. in fact, i hate learning them because the process of that is so stupid and monotonous.

but i guess, all of that are just the small things left over to write about in here - there's nothing really new going on once you get settled somewhere, so i guess, this might even be my last entry from ky - although, no, wait, it has just come back to my mind that i had promised you to upload pics of the stadium. well, i'll try to at least bring my camera to the game... and cards and a book, cause that's our big plan. my big plan, at least. cards and a book.

thank you!

2009-09-15T00:45:00.000+02:00

hello everybody -
wow, i'm amazed. i got so much awesome feedback on that prose-poem, that's overwhelming, really, i would never have guessed you people would like my stuff that much - thank you all, really, thanks!

this reaction encouraged me to upload some more of my stuff, only not here as not to overkill anyone with poetry-spam who is not interested in that kind of thing at all: please visit my new (second) blog anna schreibt and read into my stuff. i'm afraid most of it is in german, but at least there is a second prose poem in english and it's pretty long, too, so it might be worth taking a little glance at it ;)

of course this blog will be kept up in the same way as previously.

what it all comes down to

2009-09-14T15:59:00.001+02:00

after three weeks of school
and campus and fast food
after three weeks of getting to
know new
people new
culture new lifestyles new all
after three weeks of time difference of not
being home and not
seeing those who love und who know you
after three weeks of having the same conversations all over
hello where’re you from Germany that’s awesome where in Germany never heard of it gotta go have a good one
after three weeks of knowing that we’d leave soon enough too soon much too
soon
after three weeks of making friends but not making coffee
of being taken care of no matter what comes up
of not having to go grocery shopping
of learning to order at starbucks and to
customize
everything
cause everyone customizes
everything here
after three weeks of eating burritos and drinking soda and
three weeks of free refills and all you can eat
of blue shirts are everywhere and identification
with school
country state
sports
of trying to figure out the shortest ways to faraway buildings on campus
of trying to figure out the shortest ways to faraway buildings off campus
of trying to figure out the shortest ways to making real friends
and let us
be honest: who would we want to build up friendships with
if we knew they were leaving soon enough much too
soon
after three weeks of being in a group of twenty that feels like you’d known them forever for years but surely not
for three weeks
after three weeks of wifi-problems and sharing a room and language emersion and big cars and enormously huge paper cups of sweet tea of baseball and history of African Americans and all that and much more

what it all comes down to
after three weeks
is
it’s getting too complicated to summarize
it’s changed from a state of being somewhere to a
state of being someone
a state of having arrived and now dealing with it
and not wondering anymore about
customizing everything and even
enjoying it
and not wondering anymore about
the doors which have locks that open the other way around –
you turn the key right –
and knowing where to go and where your place is
and where not
it’s changed from a state of asking your way around
to explaining the way to other people
to a state where you know what shoe size you are
how to dial a cell phone
what it all comes down to
after three weeks
is
that nothing is black or white
and that there are always people you’ll be surfing on the same wave with
and that there is room to grow and things to find out
that what appears as naivety is optimism
and what appears as optimism is naivety all the same
that taking pride in oneself can lead to
george bush
but also to ella fitzgerald
that optimism and self-confidence make people sing and dance and become
the greatest musicians
the greatest sportsmen
the greatest thinkers
writers
researchers
but that optimism and self-confidence can be
arrogance and ignorance just as well
what it all comes down to
after three weeks
is
that people are different
everywhere
that you have to find your crowd
no matter where you are
and I have to find my crowd
no matter where I am
what it all comes down to
after three weeks
is
that it’s hard to leave a place that you’ve just gotten used to
that it’s hard to leave people that you’ve just gotten attached to
that when I asked what people think my experiences were they said
draconic liqueur laws, overbearing religious culture, - *censored* – music scene
that I’ve found my crowd

what it all comes down to after three weeks, as short a time as that might seem:
it doesn’t come down to anything
anymore
it’s become too much
it’s become part of
me

too many useless possessions will kill your karma. and: fuck sexism!

2009-09-12T01:37:00.009+02:00

i love my credit card. finally i can spend money i do not own on things i do not need, and with the sucky dollar it is even cheaper than in europe. yaaaay.

that's why i don't count the beer i buy (by credit card of course, they won't take plus account for alcohol. i can't see why.) and that also is the reason i actually got a hardrock cafe shirt from louisville. i especially like that it does not have anything fancy printed on it, nothing like chicago or new york or madrid or such, but a place noone in europe has ever heard of. it's pinkish-purple, by the way, and after nelli explained to me that from what she has heard this colour has an interesting submeaning i'm a little worried about myself.

the last week was full of weird and interesting and well.... other things. find out for yourself:

sunday

i was wanting to work on my paper. i really was. only, other things came up. like updating this here, having breakfast, writing a 20-page letter, hanging out at starbucks, hanging out at coffea, hanging out here and there and doing some other fun though academically worthless things.

monday

i finally started reading that biography of burroughs. man, that guy was a freak. for sure he was.
the rest of labour day i actually used to work on my paper - which was: to read. our folks had returned from chicago and it was huongs birthday the next day so we of course hung out together and i was not quite as efficient as i had hoped. one week to go for the paper, right.

tuesday

i had my class. before that i must have been doing something cause my class only starts at two. i suppose i read something. after class i went to zumba and in the evening we probably did something, too, i can't remember. that's strange, cause i actually had beer, and not too little of it, the two days after, but i believe i can remember everything from those evenings... ha. that's curious. six days to go. my butt was kind of burning.

wednesday

we had a class on us civil rights which was great, after that we had our weekly meeting, which was good as well. in the morning, much too early if you ask me we had had our english as a second language class (esl) for which we had to write an essay on an article or an essay written by a guy named lawrence shanes who analyzes the usa's striving for more, bigger, higher, faster and draws a line from the history of overcoming frontiers in order to expand the countries' greatness to an economical expansion in the 20th century. his idea is (or was, the article was pretty old) that the pursuit for expansion has to do with a historically grown ideal of always getting more in order to become a happy person. my answer to this was that there's a logical error in this setting of ideals because you literally become the donkey chasing the carrot that is held in front of your nose too far for you to ever reach it. of course! that was what we had been doing tuesday night! we had to write the essay!

anyway: after our weekly meeting, which had ended at like 4:30 or so, we went over to coffea for doing homework and working on my paper (five days til buffallo....)

i ended up being frustrated because nothing would work out the way i wanted it to so i decided to ask my prof for help. i wrote an email to him, it took my about ten minutes for four sentences. well. i told him that i cannot come up with a good writing plan because of these and those reasons and what my ideas were but that i needed his help because i couldn't decide which way to go.

after that i played rommée with trevor, who is the owner or manager of coffea and whose job it is to be there and make coffee and such but when there's not that much to do he's got time to hang out with us and play cards.
i thought, i might actually get back to work after that, but i wouldn't be able to concentrate - or maybe, subconsciously, my mind wanted to hinder me from work because it is nasty and mean and it wanted so sabotage my good will.
instead i ended up going to the mellow mushroom - references to anything you might think of are not coincidental - drinking american ("import" - i swear it was not real german!) beer and playing trivia. trivia is a game where one guy asks random questions on pretty much random knowledge - who played xy in zz, who was the president who added the 14th amendment to the constitution, in which year did the beatles record norwegian wood for the first time, whatever - and every team can hand in answers to the questions. you can win fun things like 50$ credit or a free pizza. we, that was trevor and me and two german-philosophy-phd students did not win anything. i'm afraid i was completely worthless there anyway. it's a myth that we as germans know everything about american pop culture. trust me, we don't. we don't know anything.

this was a really great evening. i ended up not doing anything for anything but instead i had a great time hanging out with the guys and letting beer float through my veins, which i had missed a lot around here :)

thursday

the first half of the day i hung out at coffea trying to read the book for my class, which i managed in about three times the time i usually would have needed. the beer from the day before might have had a tiny little impact on that....

i got an answer from my prof who wrote to me that if i was a damsel in distress i should come by his office next week and he would see how he could help me.
i wrote back, well i kind of can't.
later on i would google the term and find out the following:
"damsel in distress"is a term from the british english literature theory that describes a motive that often appears in the 19th century brit lit: dumb women hanging around naively and stupidly waiting for some heroic guy to pass by and save their asses. this motive is one of the most criticized by feminist literature theory and the feminist movement in general.

now, lets think about this: a professor in a german university in the 21st century dares to write this as a reply to a female student who asked him for help based on questions with regard to the contents of a paper that is yet to be written in a major that is to an extent of 90% studied by women. amazing, isn't it?

it doesn't even matter if anything about this comparison was true, even if there was truth in it, it still simply isn't his right to say something like that. for, if i was dumb, which by the way i certainly do not believe i am, it would still be my personal cognitive disadvantage but hadn't have anything to do with my gender or sex, right? and do you think he would have likened a guy to some motive like that? i don't think so. fuck sexism!

i wrote him one more mail telling him i seriously doubted that he would have replied in the same way to a male student asking him for his help on a paper and that i'd like to put my paper off til november. i fear he won't let me so that my worst case scenario is having to redo the module, but maybe things will turn out okay. i was thinking: there's so many people walking around who are always lucky about not worrying too much about how things will turn out, why shouldn't i be just as carefree and lucky as them, right?

in the evening we went to the german house speaking to the people who live there - german majors, exchange students from g, people who just randomly speak g... and after that we went to their german stammtisch and though there were a few nice and interesting people all in all i must say, they're just not my crowd. ("hey, you know, my friend once said to me we were drinking over a thousand liters of beer a year, and i said, no, but then i started counting: well, one football game: 6 wheat beers, that's 3 liters, and this three times a week. any random party, i drink at least 30 small bottles, that's 10 liters... hahaha..... so in the end i thought he must be right... hahaha.... blablabla..")

friday

we had to get up eeeeeeearly as to go to louisville (uk's archenemy in sports, by the way) to the mohammad ali museum, which was interesting because i had not known anything much about him and now found out that he's (or was, haven't been able to figure that one out so far) an inspiring person. still i am of the opinion that many us-americans strongly overemphasize the individual influence a person has - "just work hard enough and everything will be great, you'll see. be faithful and hardworking and you'll be living a happy life" - and i still don't believe in it. also i was once more proven in my observation that in the us people tend to put a lot of pathos into presentations and that they want everything shown in movies. that's interesting. i'll tell you more about that later on maybe. and as usual, this of course does not apply to all us-americans. but i get the feeling that a vast majority of those people surrounding us here on campus are part of that.

we had lunch at the hard rock cafe, hence the shirt.
huge steak, at least 2 cms thick, and awesome! :)

after lunch we went to a baseball bat museum where we saw plenty of movies and real people (wow) showing us how baseball bats are manifactured and in fact that was interesting. we got cute little bats as a souvenir and they said we could even take them home in our checked luggage, so watch out folks, i'll be coming back armed!

the evening we spent rehearsing for our big performance at the international night tomorrow - well, that's kind of a different story, but what it comes down to: we, that would be olga, huong and me, will be singing keinen zentimeter by clueso, probably a disney song medley with german lyrics, and hit the road jack there, accompanied by guitar, of course.
we'll see how that works out...

then we were hanging out in front of coffea with erdem playing us his freshly composed... erm.. songs in helge schneider style and drinking tea, both of which were equally fun.

as of now

time is starting to fly by - only two weeks left in ky, and of course, that's always the moment when you feel like you finally got used to a place. i'm looking forward to moving on and seeing other places, but of course i start getting attached to people round here - not only our german folks, for by now, i cannot even believe that we have only been hanging out as a group for three weeks, feels more like we had been going to school together for ten years or so. but also the other cool people around here. who knows, maybe i'll end up visiting friends over here sometime sooner or later after this thing...

it's late around here, i'll be going to bed now - tomorrow is a big day: rehearsal, performance, teaching people how to play "durak"....
have a good one, people, and let me know what's going on in your lives, i'm always interested in that!

finally, reality

2009-09-06T11:02:00.001+02:00

i was often not in a very good mood over the last week. this had to do with what I call the disco ball effect: when things are shiny and glittery and whatever kind of interesting from outside but have no substance to them, if you take a closer look at them you realize they are completely empty (“außen glänzend, innen hohl”). now, i hate that. or maybe: I just cannot deal with that. my mind, but even more so my soul, were desperately longing for substance, for something meaningful, for something real. cause always trying to spend as much plus account money as possible (they give us 40 bucks a day on our student id card which we can only spend in the restaurants on and close to campus or in the campus convenience stores that also sell t-shirts. i’m so not into campus sports merchandise, but at starbucks they do have good cds…. well, anyway: instead of just handing us some money in cash they more or less force us to spend the plus account money on useless crap.), going to classes that are – well, lets just say, a little bit… suggestive and/or weird, and spending the rest of the time reading or going to the gym just could not provide my thirsty soul with anything.

hanging out on campus all the time gave me the feeling of living in a pink bubble and i do not like living in anything burstable. i like being earthbound and staying in connection to the ground i’m walking on.
so, now starting on friday, things changed. while i was almost falling into depression on thursday, our friday excursion to the underground railroad museum really gave my soul some food. the underground railroad was a network of people who helped people escape from slavery. the exhibition gave detailed information about the history of slavery in the americas and elsewhere, the abolitionist movement, the situation of african american people ever since and many other things and all of it really touched me. looks like fate or whatever wants me to deal with those things at this time - you see, the thing is, i have also been taking a class on major black writers here, which starts with the times of frederick douglass and harriet jacobs and as such makes me deal with the history of slavery all the time. the class is one of the best classes i’ve ever had in all my college time. the professor is a young guy who fulfils all of my american stereotypes with regard to his outward appearance and is currently working on his dissertation. he seems to know everything about what is to be taught in class, i mean, literally, everything, and he teaches in a way that really makes you reflect on the conditions of those people. i’m constantly on the edge of crying when i read about slavery. not so much, because it is so sad, which it is, too. but more than anything it is a desperate outcry over the injustice in this world and of course the profitability that went along with slavery and that made it happen – the fact that people lose all their sense for solidarity and all interest in other human beings if there is power and profit to acquire. the fact, that until this very day people use the means of division to rule and conquer the world.

the museum is located in cincinnati. we only had very little chance to actually see the city, but here’s some pics for you anyway:

in the evening bliss and i went to coffea which is a coffee bar we’ve been hanging out at a lot (because they are open til midnight, they accept plus account and they make the only real tea anywhere on campus at first, but now we’ve got to know all the people who work there, too, so our reason hierarchy was slightly shifted.) there we met lujza, a writing and esl teacher who was born and raised in budapest and moved to the us eight years ago. we talked for hours and then decided to walk downtown together the next day, which we then did yesterday. lujza first took us to the art museum on campus, where they have a temporary exhibition on local folk arts and also a permanent exhibition with some very nice pieces in it. we moved on to a couple of nice little stores with in germany so called alternative clothing and a lot of great and very cheap used books as well as all kind of other things, then we went to the movie theater to see adam, which is a very sweet, very gentle and very, very good movie. the theater is kind of old-schooly, i think lujza said it used to be a stage theater but then they made a movies out of it. it is really beautiful and reminded me of russian theaters.

afterwards we checked out yet another coffee bar and went to a restaurant with good (and real!) food and live jazz. the sax player was real good and for the first time for more than a year awakened a desire in me to take out henry and blow the horn again. jazz definitely does have a different sound here compared to europe, at least compared to bremen. it flows more naturally, it seems to have some way to it that it does not have on the theaterschiff, i even liked the guitar in it.

so, after this genuine american experience we went back to coffea, found out all of us were extremely tired so we went to bed soon after that. that was a long day.

yesterday for the first time i think we got an idea of what the locals really do and how they live and where they go. this is so much more real then any campus life going on here, and this is so much more interesting and even convinced me, that living and studying here – of which they try to convince us in this fulbright program – is a cool thing worthy to be considered. thanks again for showing us reality, lujza!

baseball. horses. water ballons. natural bridge. sunday - what did we do on sunday again?!? basic leadership skills.

2009-09-01T13:35:00.000+02:00

that's pretty much what we've been doing the last days. you must know, i'm too lazy to take pics because melisa does so all the time and i only realize i don't have any the moment i want to post them here. we've been planning to exchange them for days but, well, you know how the song goes. water ballon fight on youtube. basic leadership: see true colors.

so, baseball and horse pics to be uploaded some other time, but the natural bridge part i'll give you right away, cause that was my personal highlight in ky so far.

natural bridge is a resort park in south eastern kentucky as far as i understand (i'm not the brightest kid in the bunch when it comes to geography unless i travelled somewhere by train or car, we went by bus and i did not have to read a map...) and it's incredibly beautiful out there. they've got hiking trails which include climbing up and down a mountain (or maybe it's just a hill, but everything measures in comparison and i'm used bremen standards you know) and i guess some hotel facilities as well, at least we were at a traditional kentuckian buffet restaurant, and there's square dancing and clogging on hoedown island which we tried but failed to master.

i'll let the pics do the rest of the talking and say goodbye and good day or night or whatever time you wish with a smile and a big hug to all of you.

i see your true colors and that's why i love you

2009-08-31T19:26:00.000+02:00

initially i intended to write a whole long blog entry about this wonderful book, quoting the funniest parts and stuff, but after realising that my heart starts beating like a jungle drum (and not in a good way) whenever someone gets me started on it i decided that it might be better just to let it go and not think any further of the pseudoscientific approach and the many heart-touching but no sense-making stories about middle and upper class white american people who realised that their job was not what they wanted to do but what they were asked to do by their parents and after changing their profession (because everyone can easily afford to go to college for a second or third time) finally became fun and cool people who are now dedicated to their work and shiny happy successful money-making members of the capitalist society, yaaaay!

by the way, my ideal job is somewhere in the field of actors, career counselors, gynecologists, researchers, airline receptionists or greeting card writers, just for your information. be the change you want to see in the world! here is the link for all of you who want to find their true colors and follow them to the work they love, i can assist you in finding your ideal career if you are interested, i'm an expert now.

two things i've found out about myself while being here

2009-08-29T15:18:00.002+02:00

a) i find watching sports boring. we went to a baseball game and though i enjoyed the popcorn and kind of got an idea about what the rules of the game are (kind of like brennballish with a bit of schlagball in it), i found it seriously boring.

b) i hate, hate, hate big cheering crowds. hate! hate! hate!
i don't want to be part of something big like a waterballoon fight world record (118.000 balloons this year) if it means i have to be in a big cheering crowd. i'm okay with staying far aside and doing something else that does not include getting wet from head to toes. really okay.
but then again, maybe i just don't fit in. maybe something's wrong with me and i'm asocial or unsocial or something. i guess everyone else but me had loads of fun. maybe i'm just not fun enough, dunno. i feel so uncomfortable around many crazying around people, it's unbelievable. hate, hate, hate. hate!

i like the positive attitude people have around here, they smile all the time and are so friendly and so on, and i love that people always motivate you to keep on trying instead of criticizing as they do in germany, but there are things that convinced me i'd never become an appropriate american. they've got to do with watching sports, big cheering crowds and fast food.

about what i'm not going to do

2009-08-27T12:23:00.004+02:00

here's a list of things i'm not going to write about:
1. i'm not going to write about the k-week-activities. k-week is the "welcome to university of kentucky (in the following referred to as uk or uok) everybody - freshmen (erstis), look, what we've got here, all kinds of things and groups and activities and free food and masses of free t-shirts"-week. i'm not going to write about this because it really is too much to write about while not too interesting in the end anyway.
2. i'm not going to write about the big blue u, which is getting acquainted with the football stadium, the school colors (blue and white) and the mascot (wildcat), the fighting song and similar stuff. a detailed report about all of those things will be given with the big game against louisville (pronounce "louville") on september 17th including nice blue pictures and stuff. i hate watching sports but i am kind of excited to get to feel the atmosphere in this case. i do not feel exatcly comfortable in big cheering crowds except demos but we'll see.
3. i'm not going to give you a detailed schedule of the past events because there's too many of those anyway and it's kind of boring for you, too.

so, what am i going to write about, then?

first, i'd like to get you acquainted with my living conditions:
room

(community) bathroom with prison charm

view out of the window

hallway

i don't have a view-from-outside-pic yet, but it's a nice brick building, you know, a dorm is a dorm is a dorm, right....

that's the library

and my study tree, i sit under it for reading as long as the ants don't realise my being there.

the shelves in the library are put very close to each other, too close to get in between them. you have to type in the number of the book you want and then they move aside to give you access. really like in harry potter only without wands.
all the furniture is wooden, you know, that dark, naturally classy looking expensive wood, and looks so dignified (if you can actually say this about interior design of which i'm not sure - native speakers, please comment), there's a ridiculous number of study and reading rooms, computer access everywhere and they have a video editing mac room in the basement. oh, and yeah, of course the library is open 24/5 (and a half actually) from sunday 12 p.m. til friday night and then some more 12 hours on saturday. sometimes i wonder why exactly i actually chose the uni of bremen for my studies back then. no need to mention that this library has an amount of 3000 books on the topic i'm writing my paper about and not 30 like ours does...

kentucky is very green and very hot, too. i don't mean hot as in "oh, the weather is so nice to day, 24°c, let's go out and hang around in the park!". I mean hot as in "man, i really don't want to walk this ten minute way, it's 38°c or so in the sun! let's take the air conditioned bus." oh, yeah, that leads me to my next topic: every room is air-conditioned. except our dorm, obviously, which has more of a sauna atmosphere to it. but every other room is air-conditioned, which basically means: cold. you go out and sweat like a pig in shorts (more like hot pants) and a sleeveless shirt, you go in and freeze in jeans. well, possibly not in jeans. but never forget to carry your fleece around, it might save your life at some point.

let's see, what else.... the area is still beautiful. classes have started. i've got my class on major black writers in about an hour. yesterday we talked about "the american way of life" as referred to in germany and "the american dream" once again. i still don't believe it works, our teacher however has kind of a well.... let's say... erm... more optimistic view on those things, to avoid nasty words like naive or ignorant.
our group is cool, though i get the feeling that we start splitting up into several subgangs which is okay since there are several people i can connect to in a better way than others but still makes me think of how things will develop within the next four weeks - cause that's really it, only four weeks left in ky, isn't it weird how fast time runs by?

i'm learning tons of new things here, i think that's the best about it. not only languagewise (which is not one of my weak areas anyway, but i still learn a lot, especially my vocabulary grows in very necessary areas: on sunday i learned to say "license plate") but mostly in practical things: salsa dancing and juggling have been named, yesterday we went to the gym and i ran on a treadmill for the first time, later on we're going to check out yoga and then our schedule sends us to watch a baseball game. also i've found out about how much better the meyer-briggs personality test is compared to a four cholor scheme personality sorting system (what a very german way to build a phrase, but i like it so i'll keep it in here) - but i'll keep you in suspense and write a whole blog entry about that some other time. only so much for now: i'm sort of 35:33:17:15 blue-green-orange-gold. you're supposed to be one of those colors.

okay, my class will be starting soon, i'm gonna grab some more coffee - oh yeah, that's one more thing i've learned here: ordering at starbucks. to keep things easy enough for beginners like myself i always get a grande latte.

gotta run - have a great day or night everybody, love you, bye!

days 2-4

2009-08-24T21:54:00.005+02:00

helloooo everybody and welcome to a new round of "what's the difference?"! we are so happy to announce that our showmaster today has just had recent experience in finding out about cultural differences between the us and germany - and here she is, our lovely anna!

alright folks! here come ten randomly sorted things i have learned in the last three days:

1. doors never open the way you expect them: those you want to push you have to pull. those you want to pull you have to push. those that say "automatic door, caution" you have to open manually. those that ask you to use your id for opening stay open all day. to open the door you have to turn the key right. to close it, left. doors are really interesting around here.

2. everything is awesome!. sometimes it's aaaaw-some!!!!. but mostly it's just awesome!.

3.everything is sugary. but to keep your conscience clear, they mostly put high intensity sweetener in there to make it sweet but free of calories. i wonder how that actually keeps people running - my body is aching for vegetables and real meat instead of sticky food already. and also, it is already willing to accept vegetarian food - who would have thought!

4. coffee: very thin. i leave out the cream or milk because it just wouldn't make any difference. but then again, they've got fancy variaties of it like a cinnamon-flavoured one. it tasted like very thin coffee with cinnamon flavour.

5. tea: only black. deal with it. we found a place that sells green tea, too, though.

6. people are very easy to approach and really like germans. everyone has a german relative or friend or a friend with a german relative or a relative with a german friend. they really like us here. the general reaction is: awesome!

7. my cell phone doesn't work.

8. w-lan = wifi. there is some for free everywhere - on campus and off campus and even in the airports.

9. people share rooms in their dorms, usually they've got one roommate. noone in germany would ever be willing to share their room for a whole year - people around here feel great about that the first couple of months, it seems. those who do not get a roommate are even kind of sad about it. leo, i love you and you know that - but i really appreciate that door between our rooms.
my roommate nelli is very nice though. she's one of our group, one of the university students, and we live a happy life next to each other, when we are in our room. that's mostly for sleeping.

10. campus university means you have to walk up to 45 minutes to get from one side of the campus to the other. anyone ever had any complaints about having a class in gw1? don't even try to whine on me! the definite pro of this is the beauty of the area, the amazing library and the fact that all of your friends are somewhere around at all times. the definite con is that you live at school and there's no getting away from it whatsoever. the whole thing leads to a strong identification with the school and thus to a great school spirit but at the same time to a big pressure on everyone to adjust to the group. i'm not sure yet whether i find this latently aggressive and authoritarian or pretty cool and a good opportunity to connect people regardless of their differences in situations and whatever else.

what else happened in the last two and a half days?

we were informed about our schedule, some nice events are coming up. we had breakfast at mc d, i'd prefer not to repeat that experience but i'm afraid i will for the us-americans don't feel any urge to get up as early as germans which i can highly identify with but which hinders them from offering real breakfast on weekdays.
yesterday i learned to juggle with three balls. it works for a couple of seconds already, i'm so proud of myself. also i learned to dance salsa yesterday.
we went volunteering for the lexington community today. the name of the program was "fusion", which makes me happy because i'm easily amused and because now i can really say i have been to fusion. yay. i was weeding and collecting rubbish at a homeless shelter for men. for the most part we were collecting cigarettes while the men were smoking and thus providing more work for us. i came to understand once again how important it is to involve people into improving their life and how not only senseless is is to collect rubbish for them if they are perfectly capable of doing so themselves but also how it must lower their self esteem significantly.
i went on a see-four-churches-tour with a few dozens of other freshmen, no one of our german group was there so i had a real chance to get to know people. that was interesting. churches look more like malls around here, they're very modern with huge plasma tvs and they use power point to present their church work and such. that was very. erm. christian. they provided good food and nice giveaways, though, and i really got the chance to meet some really nice people.

so far i like the states, only my head is exploding from all this information already.

i'm to lazy to upload pics today. sorry about that. have fun reading!

and remember: anyone who wants cards: read the instrunction under "you've got mail"!

have a good day or night, folks!

P.S.: sorry leo, i cannot do that. that would interfere with my principles and since i am in the us now, i cannot let that happen. you'll get used to it, i promise! ;)

angekommen - here we are

2009-08-22T23:43:00.009+02:00

p.s.: ihr lieben - ich hatte ehrlich vor, eine zweisprachige version dieses beitrags zu verfassen, aber hier passiert dauernd so viel, dass ich so schon nicht hinterherkomme - ihr werdet merken, auch hier fehlen bereits zwei tage. ich hoffe, alle verstehen genug englisch um folgen zu können. wenn nicht, schreibt bitte beschwerdekommentare.
und schreibt doch auch kurze "ich bin dabei"-kommentare, ich weiß gern, für wen ich schreibe :)

i intended to give you a bilingual version of this posting. i fear there's just too much going on here to realise that. i hope everyone understands enough english to follow. if not, please post in commentaries. also, please post your attendence in commentaries, i like to know my audience :)

and here comes the story:

does anyone know the feeling of not knowing where to start from because you're afraid to start from the wrong end of things and then you miss out important information and so on and so on?

i'm gonna try to sort things in chronological order, but there's slight chance that this will work out the way i intend, so nevermind if i keep jumping back and forth.

okay, so things started at five a.m. on friday. five a.m. is real early. i stuffed some things in and out of my backpack, i tried not to forget anything important and so far it looks like i have succeeded with that intention. i took the tram to the airport and it was pretty crowded which strengthened my opinion with regard to capitalism. people did not seem exactly happy about having to get to work at six a.m. and i can see why.
i checked in. i was surprised how easily everything worked out with my backpack and my guitar (flying in a soft case - i would never have dared to send an espensive instrument this way, but things worked out fine). i went for coffee. at the bakery i saw another girl from my group and her family who had already checked in and were enjoying their breakfast now. as some of you may know i'm not exactly an early bird and so i was having trouble following their vivid conversation or even getting involved in it. i drank my coffee and smiled empty-eyed. they're great people, no questions about that, but guys, six a.m. is just really not the time to get to know a lively anna....

we bought souvenirs for the people who organize our stay in ky (werder cup, werder rubber duck). i bought a resealeable plastic bag to put my tooth paste in. we hung around for a while doing - ... ... ... - well, something i cannot remember.

we got on the plane. it was a small plane that was mostly occupied by business men aged 50+. i read die känguru chroniken which i can only recommend to all of you, but specifically to those of you who are involved in left politics, because it's an incredibly funny book about a communist kangaroo moving in with an unsucceeding writer (thanks again to leo for that!). i kept rolling over the plane floor from laughing which might have disturbed the cute steward who was sitting next to me. too bad.

we landed. we met another girl from our group. we hung around. we looked for and found our gate. we were checked for extremely dangerous things like lotions, pencils, water bottles, that kind of stuff. while the guys in bremen had found out about the evil plan i had with my craft scissors (bastelschere) and at least asked me about it, those in frankfurt did not seem so worried about me hijacking the airplane.

"passport, please"
(me, showing my passport.)
"you have to go over there with that passport."
(me, going over there with that passport, holding it out to the american passport checking guy.)
"show me your passport please."
(...)
"thanks. that's a russian passport."
(...)
(in russian): "where are you going?"
"lexington, ky"
"why?"
"to attend a summer school program at the uk"
"aha. and where do you live?"
"in bremen."
"you live in bremen?"
"yes"
"how many suitcases do you have?"
"one backpack, one guitar."
"and who packed those?"
"me."
"and where did you pack them?"
"at home."
"in bremen?"
"yes, in bremen."
"so you live in bremen?"
"yes."
"and who packed your suitcases?"
"I packed them."
"and where have they been between the packing and the check-in?"
"only with me."
"do you have any electronic devices with you?"
"yes."
"and who has used them the last time?"
"me."
"and where have they been ever since?"
"only with me."
"and where do you live?"
"in bremen."
"do you have any liquids with you?"
"yes. in a plastic bag."
"so, they are in a plastic bag?"
"yes, in a plastic bag."
(me, showing him the plastic bag with the liquids)
(him, pointing on a box with cream in it): "that box is too large, they will not let you in with that. throw that away."
"alright, i'll throw it away."
"yes, throw it away please."
"okay, i'll throw it away."
"have you come here directly from bremen?"
"yes."
"and where do you live?"
...........

i still have my cream, for that matter. and the scissors; i still have those too.
and the us passport guy in charlotte by the way asked me about which school i was attending three times. they do seem to be very interested in geography around here.

we got on the plane. nine and a half hours, the rest of the kangaroo chronicles, a strange movie with julia roberts and clive owen (duplicity) and various once-an-hour-beverages later we got off the plane. the movie taught me about why it isn't wise to make movies too complex for people to understand and that confusion isn't always a good thing.

in charlotte, nc, they checked one of our fellow travellers who is orignially from turkey for terroristic intentions for about 45 minutes. i don't think he had any.

we got to know rege, who is probably taller than two of us together, and who drives around passengers who are unable or unwilling to walk to their gates in cute little cars. we wanted to hijack one but since rege was so tall we decided we needed a better plan than just overwhelming him. we tried to talk him to unconciousness but that did not work out quite so great. so we ended up just re-checking-in and getting on our plane to lexington.

by that time it was about 12 a.m. in german time and we were all pretty much done with the day.

we arrived in lexington at 19:30 (always count plus six for germany) and were met by karen, andrea and david, the guys who give their very best to make us feel like kings and queens here.

we got on the bus, off the bus, checked in, got some pizza and went to sleep.
finally. it must have been about 11.30 p.m., 24.5 hours after getting up.
it never stops to amaze me that these days you can cover a distance of 7000 km within a few hours. really.

pictures and more impressions to follow.

you've got mail

2009-08-20T23:41:00.008+02:00

oh, was mir noch einfällt: alle, die karten wollen, müssen

a) mir ihre adresse in irgendeiner weise zukommen lassen. rauchzeichen zählen nicht.
b) mich mit hilfe eines fotos, eines gedichts oder liedes, eines ausführlichen briefes, einer politischen rede, eines großzügigen selbstgebastelten geschenks oder auf andere weise davon überzeugen, dass karten suchen, finden, schreiben und abschicken wirklich das ist, was ich tun will. ich bin gespannt - und meine es ernst: keine hände, keine kekse.

ja, und sonst noch, zum abschied:
hier kucken

---------------------
if you want to recieve a card from me you will have to
a) provide me with your address somehow.
b) write a poem, a song or a storyboard, invent a nice game, make a movie or a selfmade present for me or do whatever else to convince me that searching, finding, wrting and actually sending cards is the thing i wish to do while being here. i mean it - no hands, no cookies as i keep saying a lot to annoy everyone

I'm singing in the rain.....

2009-08-20T21:43:00.006+02:00

ja, das war doch mal ein gebührender abschied aus bremen:

nachdem ich nicht nur meine hausarbeit und diverse anträge zu allem möglichen kram abgegeben habe, sondern nun auch dank flashspiel (guckst du hier) alle länder asiens benennen kann und die südamerikanischen hauptstädte auswendig gelernt habe, rückt der abschied nun tatsächlich bedrohlich nah.
eben gerade waren wir (kathi, seidi, leo, tobi, ich und diverse russischsprechende jungs, die es irgendwie cool fanden, dass wir klampfig an der weser saßen) im regen singen, denn was anderes bleibt einem bei dem wetter ja nicht übrig, als es anzunehmen wie es ist und sich darüber zu freuen. das war super, besonders, weil 38 grad wirklich abkühlungswert sind und weil ich finde, dass abschiedsrituale das leben qualitativ verbessern. aber auch, weil platzregen, sturmböen und blitz zur verabschiedung genau richtig sind, da fühlt man sich wertgeschätzt.
nun habe ich fast fertig gepackt, fast fertig organisiert und mich fast fertig verabschiedet und werde für die vollendung all dieser dinge die nacht nutzen, denn ekeligerweise muss ich morgen um sechs uhr dreißig am flughafen sein - noch nie habe ich mich so sehr darüber gefreut, direkt an der linie sechs zu wohnen, und wer mich kennt, weiß warum XD
auf dem bild da: das bin ich, nass und glücklich. ich weiß es sieht so aus, aber außer bier sind keine drogen im spiel.

alrighty - i'm off to KC, have a great autumn everybody - ich beneide euch alle sehr, denn der herbst ist wirklich meine aller-allerliebste zeit in bremen!

ich meld mich, wenn ich gelegenheit dazu habe, jetzt freu ich mich erstmal auf weg von hier!

dies ist ein test: noch eine woche bis buffallo....

2009-08-14T16:20:00.003+02:00

und bei mir brennt die hütte. was ist das eigentlich für ein abgefahrener mechanismus, der einen immer dazu bringt, möglichst solange nichts oder fast nichts zu tun, bis es nur noch in stress ausartet.....?
diesen kleinen testeintrag wollte ich aber trotzdem schonmal posten, nicht nur, um micht von meiner hausarbeit abzulenken, neinnein.

jetzt geh ich erstmal überall rumerzählen respektive -schreiben, dass ich nun doch einen blog habe, yay, das wird super - noch weniger sinnvoll verbrachte zeit!

schönen tag an alle leser!