Part III:
On Monday, I caught a train from Nürnberg to Heidelberg to visit Sarah Korn, another friend from Linfield who’s spending her junior year abroad. I tell you, this having-friends-scattered-throughout-Europe thing has really worked out well! Sarah met me at the train station and we walked through the Altstadt to her room…which is in a frat house. Her study abroad program must have a sense of humor.
I loved being able to see someone else’s study abroad experience from the inside. The program I chose in Ecuador turned out not to be a good fit for me (see the email-blogs I’ve archived below), but, on the whole, it was a wonderful year full of learning and growth. Spending a day as a part of Sarah’s year abroad was a great way for me to see the “traditional” European study abroad experience.
While Sarah was in class on Tuesday, I went up to the castle, which is now preserved in a state of about-to-fall-down splendor. In the afternoon, Sarah and I explored around some more, and climbed a church tower to get an amazing view of the Altstadt.
And that was it. Heidelberg was beautiful, but as we were leaning over the railing of the church tower, looking at the red roofs below, I couldn’t think of anything else that was calling my name in Heidelberg. Sarah and I had spent a long while talking the night before, and it was really nice to get to know her better. Throughout these five months of travel, I’ve gotten to see Linfield people out of their dorm-and-class-life bubbles, and I love it! I could have stayed in Heidelberg for a lot longer just to hang out with Sarah, which I know would have been great, but I needed to get back to Mainz sometime on that afternoon so I could catch an early bus to the airport on Wednesday morning, and there was one world-famous museum in Mainz that I hadn’t made time for earlier—the Gutenberg Museum.
DON’T WORRY—I FORSWORE IN MY LAST POST LADLING ON DESCRIPTIONS OF ANY MORE MUSEUMS—but here’s a quick overview :) Gutenberg: amazing. The guy invented movable type, revolutionized the printing press, printed a famous Bible. The Gutenberg Museum: full of awesome old books, facts about Gutenberg’s life & legacy, and live demonstrations of printing techniques—ok, ok, my random-fact-o-meter has just hit its limit. Anyways, I decided to say goodbye early to Sarah so I could book it to the Heidelberg train station and get to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz before it closed.
Ashley picked me up at the museum at closing time, and we spent a good last evening in Mainz together. Around 11, she went out with her roommates to watch a friend DJ at a club. I went to bed, and when I woke up at 3am to get ready to catch the 4am bus to the airport, Ashley and her roommates were still up! She cooked me up an espresso and I said goodbye as they headed for bed.
That was my trip to Germany! I learned a lot, I practiced a little German, I spent good time with good friends, I saw new sights, and I expanded my horizons just a little bit. A good trip, in my book.
A few last thoughts to leave you with:
Sometimes you learn the most from the random encounters—the ones that God, or fate, or what-have-you, plans—not from the encounters you expect. Two stories:
When I caught the train from Heidelberg to Mainz, I was walking down the aisle with my mini-suitcase and I saw a set of 4 seats facing each other that looked empty, but as I veered in to dump my stuff, I realized that one seat was occupied by a slouching, beat-up figure with a bottle. I didn’t want to be incredibly rude, because the guy had already seen me aiming for the empty seats next to him, so I sat down, instead of veering off in the other direction at the sight of him. I hated myself at that moment for wanting to sit somewhere else, but I was determined not to be graceless. I read from my book for a while and he sipped away at what looked like a bottle of rosé, until about ten minutes later, when the guy addressed the empty space next to me, with vigorous shakes of his bottle: “I don’t like this stuff. I really don’t. I wish I didn’t have to drink it, but my body demands it.” He then looked straight at me, and I made a sort of sympathetic-hmm noise. He stared for a second, then asked me my name, and what I was doing in Germany. I answered, and after a moment, he said, “Tell me honestly, how do I look?” Well, he had a terrible black eye, a gash across his forehead with stitches that looked oozy, a huge fat lip, and a pretty beat-up hand. “Pretty bad,” I said. The guy took another swig from his bottle, sat back in his seat, and said, “Well, thanks for your honesty.” “In English, we say, ‘You should see the other guy,’” I offered, but I said it in German, and I’m not sure I translated it well, or if the guy was angry, or if he was simply in so much pain that he didn’t really care what I was saying. The train pulled into Mannheim, where I had to switch trains, so I said goodbye and wished him luck. He saluted me with the bottle.
I flew from Frankfurt-Hahn to Girona, and then from Girona to Palma. When I was waiting in the Frankfurt-Hahn airport, the girl next to me leaned over and asked, “Do you speak Catalan? Do you think our flight is delayed?” “Sorry, my Catalan is pretty terrible,” I said in Spanish. “But no, I think the flight’s on time…we’ve still got an hour before it’s scheduled to leave,” “Oh! I was looking at the wrong time. Good! I don’t want to be delayed—my family is meeting me in Girona…” and she proceeded to tell me a little about her life. She was wearing a headscarf so I couldn’t really see how old she was—at first glance, I would have said she was younger than me, but then she said that she has a daughter who is working, meaning she would have to be in her 30s. I asked her a few questions, and she commented on my funny accent. I told her I was from the US, and she started asking me all sorts of questions: what is the US like? are the people nice? is it worth going to see? are there any Moroccans that live there? what do they do? is it better to live in the US or Europe? I told her some of the differences I saw between living on Mallorca and living in the Rockies, and then I started to telling her about Yellowstone. “You know, like Yogi Bear,” I said, using the reference that everybody here seems to know. She hadn’t heard of Yogi. I said that Yellowstone is a huge park full of nature, where people can go see the animals—“You mean like a zoo?” she asked—so I was trying to describe how there aren’t any fences, and the animals are all wild, and I asked if she’d ever seen pictures of an elk, which is like a big deer—“What’s a deer?” she asked—so I said it was kind-of like a horse. The conversation wasn’t going much farther in that direction, so I just concluded by saying there were lots of differences between where I lived in the US and where I live on Mallorca. We somehow got into talking about healthcare, and taxes, and different forms of government, and it was one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time. Not once did she compliment me on my Spanish, and she even laughed a couple times at a couple of words I use—which was wonderfully refreshing. I know I speak Spanish well, but it is obvious even to me that I don’t speak like a native speaker, and I’m getting a little tired of native speakers always telling me how good my Spanish is. I can’t wait to get to the point where my Spanish is good enough that people will quit telling me so. I don’t patronize people who speak English excellently by telling them their English is good; I do, however, encourage people who are learning English by telling them that their English is good.
My encounters with these two strangers are another reminder of why I travel, why it’s important not to assume that in a global world, you can reach everyone and everything through the impersonal internet. The human connection is important; stepping outside your comfort zone, i.e. sitting next to an obviously once-violent drunk, is important; exchanging ideas with people whose worlds don’t even touch yours is important; experiencing others' beloved cultural festivals is important, even if it ends with two hours of wandering around a foreign city when it's 3am and freezing outside; reminding ourselves of our own history, by going to museums and learning the events that brought about the future that we live in today, is important; keeping an open mind about the other 6 billion people who share this space with us is important.
It was a very good trip.
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