Tag: acculturation

I am only an egg.

On By StevenIn Life At Home, Life In Germany, The U.S.21 Comments

This post is tangentially related to the December 27th WordPress Daily Prompt.

“Your personal sculptor is carving a person, thing or event from the last year of your life. What’s the statue of and what makes it so significant?”

I was already thinking about the words that follow, even before I saw the prompt.  While I didn’t write this post specifically to answer the personal sculptor question, I am going to talk a great deal about something that has shaped my world the most for the past year.

Back in 1993, there was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Second Chances.”  The basic plot is as follows-  The Enterprise goes to retrieve some scientific data from a planet which has an impenetrable distortion field around it.  Once every eight years, the field is weak enough to beam through it.  Eight years previously, a younger Lieutenant Riker was the last man to beam out when his team was forced to abandon the post.  When the modern-day Enterprise arrives, Commander Riker leads the away team, and meets- himself.

ST-TNG_Second_ChancesAlthough Riker made it up to the Potemkin and continued his career, a transporter phenomenon caused an identical Riker to rematerialize on the planet.  This Riker believed that he’d been left behind, and he spent the next eight years living alone.

The reason I’m talking about Star Trek on a blog about life in Germany is because it’s kind of the same thing.  Obviously I don’t mean that I was duplicated in a transporter accident, but there is some similarity between that ludicrous scenario and how I feel.  What the other Riker went through was, at certain points, textbook culture shock and acculturation.

While I was in the United States a few weeks ago, I was struck by the notion that while I’ve been living my life in Germany, life in the US has been going on without me.  This is the truest and deepest cost of being an expatriate. Friends and family kept going on-  my youngest niece started walking and talking.  Another friend is nearly done with law school.  People have gotten engaged.  Couples have split up.  Some of my friends have had massive shifts in their health, some for the better and some for the worse.  There are new pets, new jobs, and new hardships.  And while I was in Germany and away from all of this, there was a tiny part of me that went on living in the US, along with my friends and family.  There are two Stevens now.  They are entirely alien to each other.

I spent most of my first year in Germany feeling like I was on an extended vacation, but one where I just happened to be going to the office a lot.  It felt like my life in the US had just been paused- waiting for me to return to it.  My apartment has never quite felt like my apartment, and I’ve always been just a little bit of a stranger in a strange land.

It’s been more than a year now, and in the intervening time, I’ve felt less like that US life is mine.  The drift has begun-  I don’t speak to people in the States as much as I did in the first year. There are some people who I once considered my closest friends and confidants who I speak to now only via electronic means, and only regarding superficial topics.  If not for the horrible abomination that is Facebook, I would have lost touch with almost everyone except my closest ring of family members and a few dearly cherished friends.

There is even a physical component to this drift-  while I was in the US, I moved my few belongings to a much smaller storage unit.  In order to do that, I had to let go of a lot of possessions.  Most of my kitchen goods from the US are now gone.  Everything I own in this world is either in a 5×5 storage unit in Florida or a 45 square meter apartment here in Regensburg.  Considering I used to have an entire condominium full of crap, this is kind of a sobering realization.

I don’t feel like this Bavarian life is mine either.  I’ve made friends here, but making friends as an expatriate can be a little tricky-  most of us are transient.  You never know if someone you’ve met will still be there to talk to or hang out with in six months or a year.  I’m even hesitant with the locals, the people who aren’t going anywhere, because I don’t know if I’ll be here in a year or two.  My contract is written through the fall of 2014, but there’s nothing in it which says that Mr. Company can’t recall me to the United States sooner.  (They probably won’t, but it’s something that I think about.) There’s also the chance that they’ll want to renew my presence here at the end of the contract on a yearly basis.  I’m not sure how I feel about that, to be honest.  I get asked a lot if I want to stay here at the end of my contract, and my answer is always a little timid:  “Ask me again in another year and a half.  A lot can happen in a year and a half.”

For night now, I’m stuck in the middle.  Beholden to two countries, but not truly feeling at home in either one.  I am the two identical Rikers, both fighting to claim the right to be the real one.

Ein Jahr

On By StevenIn International Travel - Europe, Life In Germany10 Comments

As of today, I’ve been in Germany for one year of a three year commitment.   It’s been a hell of a year.  When I posted about being here for four months back in March, I had a few items that I listed as to-do items.  Let’s see how I did:

Have basic conversations in German:  On a very basic level, I can do this.  I can introduce myself, ask where someone is from, and inquire about basic information.  I have the vocabulary of a two year old native, but I’ve learned a lot.

File my German taxes from 2011: I did this in late March.  In July, the Finance Authority sent me a letter asking for more documentation, and I returned the requested document right away.  In October, they finally sent me a followup, and a small refund a few days later.  I am now the proud owner of a German Steuernummer (tax ID number.)  It only took seven months!

More blogging: I’ve settled into a pattern of posting every Monday.  Coming up with ideas for new posts is difficult sometimes, but for the most part I’ve always got something new to say.  Sometimes I have a rush of ideas and I post a little bit more frequently, but I post at least one new entry every week, always on Monday mornings.   WordPress.com’s scheduled post feature is a tremendous boon for the frequent traveler.

More travel:  Holy hell, success!  Of the thirteen cities I mentioned back in March, I’ve been to seven of them.  This year has been an amazing year for travel.   Every new city is logged as a ‘Category’ on this blog.  There’s a dropdown on the right-hand column to view entries about them.  In 2012, I’ve gone to seven new countries and countless German cities.

  • Edinburgh, Scotland
  • London, England (Seeing London has been a goal of mine for more years than I can recall.)
  • Barcelona, Spain
  • Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Prague, Czech Republic
  • Vienna, Austria
  • …and so much of Germany already:  Berlin, Bochum, Bruhl, Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Kempten, Mannheim, Munich, Nuremberg, and of course, Regensburg.

Eat Less McDonald’s:  Mild failure.  It’s still far too easy to slip into McD’s when I’ve been out late or have to eat something after German class.  I try my best to keep it to a minimum, but I still eat far too much of this because of the convenience.

Acquire a traditional Bavarian outfit complete with Lederhosen: Yup, I did this.

I originally wanted to list a whole lot of the things that I’ve accomplished this year, but I did that on the Four Months post and again on the Six Months post, so I won’t do that.   Here’s a few other highlights that I wanted to mention though:

I Went To WEBMU: WEBMU is the “Whiny Expatriate Blogger MeetUp.”  The rules for membership are that you have to live in Germany and blog in English.  The people in the group are a heap of fun, and we had a great weekend in Berlin.

I Met Other Bloggers: Expatriate blogging is a very social thing. Between WEBMU and my naturally social nature, I met many other bloggers (and their non-blogging spouses) in person this year. Here’s an incomplete list of them:
Riayn in Hamburg, Heather in Nürnberg, Mandy in Berlin, Sarah in Hamburg, Snooker In Berlin, Ian in Hamburg, CN in Heidelberg, and last but not least, Cliff and Sarah here in Regensburg.  (Alex, you’re totally on my “Want to meet this person” list for 2013.)

I Tried A German Theme Park: I went to Phantasialand, a pretty well known German theme park.  Living in Florida spoiled me for theme parks, but this was still a lot of fun.

I Listened To  A Percussion Show In A Cave: The header on this one is pretty self explanatory.  The cave, the Tropfsteinhöhle Schulerloch, is near Kelheim.

I Drank Beer Brewed By Monks:  The Weltenburg Abbey is not far away.  The dark beer is delicious,  the grounds are beautiful, and the boat ride up the Donau river from Kelheim is picturesque.  Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

I Watched More TV and Movies In German:  I have been trying to learn German, and one of the things that helps this is to use German television, radio, and movies.   I’m quite fond of watching How I Met Your Mother and Futurama in German.  I also watched The Lion King, The Muppets, Men In Black 3, and Ice Age 4 all auf Deutsch.  I was even able to clearly follow the plots of all of them, even though I missed quite a few of the verbal jokes.

It’s pretty hard to sum up an entire year in a single post- that’s what the entire Blog has done.  It’s mind-bending to think that I’ve been here for a year already, and that I’m a third of the way done with my time here.

I wonder what my next year has waiting for me!

Buying Things Is Hard

On By StevenIn Life In Germany5 Comments

The process of acculturation in Germany, for me, has been particularly challenging.   Every time I start to feel like I’m making progress, I encounter things which are enormously difficult for me, despite being rudimentary and simple for a native.

Purchasing concert tickets, for example.

For most of the concerts I’ve gone to this year, I’ve used eventim.de for my purchases.  Eventim is a great deal like Ticketmaster, except easier to use.  It also allows you to select English for the Website, so I’ve been able to get by.  However, sometimes the concert I want isn’t available through Eventim and I have to go a different method.

This is where I start to have trouble.  My command of the language isn’t very strong yet, so I use Google Chrome, which translates German to English on the fly.  The only problem is that the translations aren’t always precise, so I really have to employ some educated guesswork.

The word Karte can be a problem.  Karte can refer to a map, a card (such as a credit card,) or a ticket. You can imagine the confusion when you’re being asked to put enter payment information.

Dates are reversed here.  Using the first day of summer as an example, when I arrived, I thought the first day of summer was written as June 21st, 2012.  Here in Germany, it’s written 21 June 2012.  This is also true on Internet forms.  This leads to still more confusion: Is my card’s expiration 11/2 or 2/11?

Many of the line items on order forms don’t translate very well to English.   The idea for this post popped up while I was fighting with an order form for a concert ticket in Mannheim.  It took me three tries to successfully navigate the form to completion.   I was ultimately successful, but I would not have been able to place that order without help a year ago.

Sehnsucht, I Has It.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany4 Comments

Over the last several months, I’ve read some fascinating information and theories on homesickness and culture shock/cultural adjustment. I didn’t know before I moved to Germany that there was even a cycle. It goes something like this:

  • Honeymoon Phase – This is what I like to call the “ooh, shiny!” phase. To borrow from Berkeley, “This phase is best described by feelings of excitement, optimism and wonder often experienced when you enter into a new environment or culture.” Anyone who knows me well understands that I actually spend roughly 70% of my life in this state.
  • Crisis Phase – This is where the acute homesickness comes in. Changes in eating and sleeping habits, irritability or sadness, calling home much more frequently, and a host of other depression-like symptoms can be attributed to this stage. This is the time when the different stuff feels a little too different, and you just wish you could be back in more familiar surroundings.
  • Recovery and Adjustment Phases – These are exactly what they sound like. You get used to things and you even out. Everything that seemed bad during the Crisis Phase doesn’t seem so bad any more. You start to integrate with your new locale a bit more. Some people adjust so well that they never leave. Some don’t really integrate at all, and become anti-social and reclusive.

Some variations on the so-called “cultural adjustment curve” use slightly different labels – Honeymoon/Negotiation/Adjustment/Mastery – but the basic cycle is the same.

According to the Great and Powerful Google, most people hit their Crisis Phase at around three months. Now that I think about it, I recall that I was definitely calling home a lot more frequently at three months than I do now, but I don’t remember feeling especially homesick at the time. Perhaps my cultural adjustment curve is just slower than most. The reason I bring this up now is because I saw the new Spider-Man movie tonight.

There is no time that I feel more lonely than when I’m in a movie theater filled with other geeks who I can’t talk to. In the US, I usually see this type of movie with some friends- people who speak my language.

I’m not just talking about English here, although that’s a big part of it. Whenever I hear someone speaking English in town, I always want to be part of the conversation, even if they’re going the opposite direction and I have no idea what they’re really talking about. I hear the language, and there’s a tiny part of me jumping up and down and screaming in a tiny voice, “me! me! talk to me! I want to speak English to you!” Yes, sitting in a crowded movie theatre with four German conversations around me that I can’t follow is kind of disheartening. That’s not precisely what I mean, though.

What I mean by “people who speak my language” in this instance is people who can dissect the movie with me afterward. When I see a geek oriented film like this, I want to nitpick in a geeky way. I want to have conversations with people who know the source material, the back story, the universe that film is set in. I want to talk about whether the mechanical web shooters are better than the organic ones, or whether we’ll see Original Recipe Spock in the Star Trek sequel or whether Smaug will look as cool in the upcoming Hobbit films as the Balrog looked in LotR. I want to talk about whether the sequel to this movie will cover a specific story arc, I want to discuss incidental characters and tiny for-the-fans details that not everyone will catch, and I want to gush about the things the movie got right.

I realized while I was walking home in the lovely cooling rain tonight that I have been profoundly missing this type of interaction. I’ve felt it to varying degrees every time I’ve gone to a genre movie here- superheroes, science fiction, Muppets, Sherlock Holmes- when I see these movies, I’m surrounded by a crowd of people who share my interests, and yet I am very much alone. I don’t know any geeky types here in Regensburg to join me for this level of obsession. Not in town around Regensburg, anyway. I have friends here in Regensburg, but nobody that seems to be as deeply into geeky pop culture as I am.

I wasn’t sure how to wrap this up, so I’ll close the post with an explanation of the title.

Sehnsucht isn’t only a well-known Rammstein song. It is a German word which roughly translates to longing, yearning, deeply missing something, or nostalgia. It’s a word which seems to be difficult to pin down or translate clearly because it describes an emotional state rather than something concrete. Sometimes it’s used to refer to a longing for a homeland. CS Lewis described Sehnsucht as an insatiable or inconsolable longing in the human heart for “we know not what.”

I do know what I long for, though- a specific type of friendship and interaction that has been missing for me here.

In its absence, I suppose I could be consoled by some tater tots. And a nice tasty Cola-Weizen.