Die Reisen des Spidermans

During one of my trips to Berlin (the one in January, I think), Bine and I stopped at the Flea Markt at Mauerpark.  It is (one of) the largest established flea markets in Europe.  It's full of amazing furniture, worthless junk, hand-crafted jewelry, DDR relics and it's my favorite place to shop.  While there, we picked up a pair of finger puppets. 

Mine is the very small Spiderman on the left, hers the miscolored Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on the right.  He's wearing both blue and orange so we named him Donatello.  We decided that these could be our own sort of personal Flat Stanley project, and we could take pictures with them wherever we went.  So Spidey has been accompanying me all around Germany.

He enjoys trips on the Deutsche Bahn.  This is actually the cute little Regional train that zips between Kiel and Lübeck and I take to school every morning, though I only go a couple of stops.

This past weekend, we went to Husum, which is an idyllic little seaside town over on the North Sea.  It doesn't look it from this picture, I know, but I had walked about as far along this little wharf as I could before it turned into industrial docks, so I turned around for the shot of the town.

While attempting to find the beach, I got a little lost.  Somehow, my little brightly colored seaside town had turned into rural farms full of horses and sheep and the occasional car.

But the first trip he accompanied me on was the one to Heidelberg, before I had quite figured out the settings on the camera to allow me to focus on two things.  This is Spiderman posing with a unicorn riding a giraffe in a shop window.

In possibly one of the least focused pictures I have ever taken, Spiderman poses with a rather famous monkey statue, still in Heidelberg.  In my defense, it's very hard to hold a dSLR with one hand while taking a picture of a finger puppet on your other hand.  It's not really what it was designed for.

And, of course, back in his hometown of Berlin at the Reichstag, the seat of German government.  Someday, he'll get out of Germany.  Most likely when I do.

Ansegeln?

All things considered, my German’s not that bad.  But every now and then, words still slip past me.  A couple of weeks ago at the Yacht Club meeting, someone mentioned something about “ansegeln” at this upcoming regatta.  I figured this just meant sailing alongside.  Obviously not on the Arndt, which was going to be the committee boat, so I signed up for the other of the larger boats.  What I didn’t realize was that all the other boats were, in fact, racing.

I signed up with my friends Svitlana and Anke on the Aegir, nearly identical to the Arndt, both about 40 feet long and your basic modern sloop.  I arrived at the harbor on Sunday morning and called Svitlana to find out what boat I had signed up for.  That cleared up, I climbed aboard and started sail prep.

Now, the first time I went out with the Yacht Club (on the Arndt), it was night time, below freezing and super windy and we had just rigged the boat, so we didn’t put up any sails.  The second time, we had just launched and fully rigged Taffi and were all excited to sail, but there was no wind.  The third we actually went sailing.  So this was really only the second time I’d done proper sail prep and everything.

I put on my foulie pants, belted on my new knife and did as many things as I could remember needed to be done.  We got a jib out of the forepeak, found and bent on the sheets, prepped all of the other lines (mostly comprised of pulling them out of a bag and throwing them down the companionway), uncovered and untied the main and generally got things ready.

As we cast off, I ended up on the bow lines with a dude whose name I never actually learned.  We cast off the lee side bow line and held the windward side so that it would slip and we could ease it as we backed out of our berth.

 

 It looked something like that.

I hadn’t intended to do anything super complicated, but as we set the mainsail, I was the closest to the sheet, so I grabbed it.  Someone had to.  The Yacht Clubbers worried that I wasn’t wearing gloves, so the helmsman/skipper Dieter loaned me his.  Thank God he did.  Having not been sailing on a tall ship since August, my hands are no longer the impervious calloused sailor hands of awesome that we would show off to children.  (“Hey kids!  Wanna see what the life of a sailor was like?  Look at our 

bosun’s hands!”)

So, let’s set the scene.  Here I am, sitting in the cockpit, borrowed gloves on my hands, working the main sheet and waiting more experienced to take it from me.  The wind is between 20 and 25 knots and we’re going 8 without even trying.  Announcements start coming through the radio and people start discussing the racecourse and I slowly realize that we’re actually racing in this thing and everyone else has a line and I’m pretty much stuck on the main.

We run through a couple of tacks and I learn the vocab I need to know.  “Klar zu wenden!” “Ist klar!” “Groß aufmachen.“ “Groß dichter.“ “Gut so, fest machen.“  “Ready about!“ “Ready!“ “Ease the main.“ “Trim the main.“ “That’s good, make it fast.“  I learn how to move in the very small cockpit, how to position myself to haul and ease and all manner of useful things.

The race itself was pretty typical, I imagine.  It was full of yelling, other boats in extremely close proximity, near misses and some awesome sailing.  We tacked across the start line, nearly hit another boat on our way to the first mark, and took a comfortable beam reach down into the Kiel Foerde to the second mark.  The second mark was at Reventloubruecke, where there was a large festival and rubber ducky race, so there were a lot of people on shore.

Once we rounded it and headed back up the foerde, my real work began.  Into the foerde had been comfortable, so of course heading back out was not.  We sailed up at a tight close reach and at every gust, I had to quickly and correctly ease the main so that we didn’t capsize and then sheet it back in afterwards to keep us on course.  On Tuesday, I had been on the steering end of this maneuver, throwing all of my strength into the tiller as the wind shoved us around.  Being on the sheet was difficult and it took me a bit to develop a technique to knock the sheet out of the clamp with my foot while holding it fast with my hands and then easing it, but I eventually got the feel of it.  The Germans even stopped having to tell me to ease.  I do love sailing schooners, but working this mainsail was an amazing way to see the application of sail theory and to really understand how it works.

My hands were cramping by the time we hit the third mark, but we rounded it and headed into a dead run before the wind to the finish.  Running before the wind is tense, because if you get a little bit off, you can accidentally jibe, and your main sail will come slamming across the boat.  So, I had to keep hold of the line and keep my head out of the way just in case I needed to sheet in as fast as I possibly could.  We didn’t accidentally jibe, pulled an intentional tack and crossed the finish line.

We sailed back to our berth comfortably, sharing cookies and snacks and with no more yelling.  Throughout the race we had passed several tall ships, including my very favorite tiny little brigantine and the three-masted topsail schooner Thor Heyerdahl.  I’d hoped to see more of them on the way back, but they were all already out sailing.

Sail dropping was nicely undramatic and then we had to circle around three times and wait in line to get back into the harbor.  My part of the docking was smooth, but on starboard, they broke a fender line and may have scuffed the paint on the neighboring boat.  We put everything away then shared some cake that had inexplicably gotten salt water in it while I taught/showed off knots.

Then I got a ride home with Svitlana in her Citroen Ente and didn’t realize until I got to my room that my hair looked insane.  Thanks, wind, for turning me into Albert Einstein.  All the more reason for a haircut.

Es stimmt, ich lebe noch

            As my life settles more and more into a routine, I am less and less inspired to write blog posts.  Which makes sense, I think.  It makes less sense when I realize that since I last posted, I’ve been to Lübeck three times (and I’m going again on Monday), I’ve been to Berlin twice, Heidelberg and Münster once each.  I met a whole bunch of fun British language assistants and said good-bye to half of them at the end of February.  I’ve discovered the German discotheque in full force, keeping hours that I won’t post because I know my parents and grandparents read this.  I took along the Kiel harbor and saw the cutest brigantine I have ever seen.  I made it back to the Yacht Club, getting to sail and work on boats and make new friends and connections.

            In school news, our semesters switched over at the end of February and all of my classes have changed.  Instead of working almost exclusively with the younger kids, I am now working exclusively with the older kids, taking them out in pairs or small groups and talking about various subjects in preparation for their English oral exams.  While I miss the little kids and their overwhelming enthusiasm, I do enjoy having students who can hold a conversation.  And I think we can all appreciate my ability to relate to surly teenagers. 

            Rainer, my mentor teacher, criticized me the other day for being too soft with students.  Which, yes, that can be true.  But, in context:  I was working with two tenth grade girls on a speaking exercise.  They’re not the best, but they’re not that bad.  Rainer comes in and observes for a few minutes and then says that maybe next time he’ll give me one good student and one bad student, so they balance each other out.  He goes on about bad students and how bad they are, so in a lull, I turn to the girls and say something encouraging, like, “But, don’t worry, you’re good!”

            After class, Rainer says that I shouldn’t tell them they’re good because then they won’t understand why they’ve failed their orals.  These girls were not that bad; they had a few minor grammar issues and needed some prompting to talk, but there is no reason to expect that they will fail.  Though, he also told me to give stricter grammatical and vocabulary feedback, which I have since implemented and has worked quite well.

            But the idea of not encouraging them still sticks with me.  I’m trying to give them the confidence to simply be able to speak during their test.  I think that if they are worried to much about this or that little grammatical point, it will be in a much more noticeable way than if they simply confidently talk past, through or around it.  I know that my German is better when I just speak and don’t think too hard about it.  Then again, I’ve never had to pass an oral exam in German (beyond every day life, that is).  So who knows.  Maybe my whole pedagogical theory is bunk.  It’s not like I have any sort of training to be a teacher.

            Also wrapped up in this critique was “I know you don’t want to be a teacher, but” being strict is a basic concept of teaching.  I feel like he’s kind of disappointed that he got an assistant who’s not going in to be a teacher, but I also feel like that’s exactly why I’m useful.  I don’t worry about pedagogical concepts, I just want the kids to talk to me.  At the same time, I’ve realized why doing experiential education on boats was so great for me.  I’ve long since realized that it’s good for the kids and I love watching them grasp an idea.  On a personal note though, I’ve realized why I was good at it:  teaching on a boat, I had a million different things capturing my attention at once.  It’s not that classroom education is necessarily boring, just that I function and engage better when I’m doing several things at once.  That probably says a lot about me right there.

            In other news, my next year is still a bit nebulous.  I have deferred the MA program in English literature at SUNY Buffalo for a year and hope to move to Berlin for the year.  What I’ll do there is a bit uncertain.  Either I’ll work or, if I’m really lucky, do a Master’s program.  Education is much cheaper over here.  Anyway, I’m on Spring Break for the next two weeks, so I hope to get a little caught up on blog posts.  No promises though.

Unterrichten

Today, I took a few kids out of one of my classes to another room and we worked on saying the date.  Things like reading "12th January" as "the twelfth of January" are particularly difficult.  I think it's because we're using the British system.  "January 12th" equals "January twelfth".  Much easier.  But anyway.

I had one kid making up dates, and the other two up at the board, trying to correctly write it before each other.  The board folds in two places, making it very convenient for this sort of game, because the ones writing can't see what the other one is doing.

There was, as usual, some creative spelling and some German spelling and some misbehavior, but it went over pretty well.  Then one of the boys, Bjarne, started humming the Imperial March and drawing Darth Vader on the board.

Now, I wasn't too bothered that he was disrupting the lesson, because that's kind of just what he does, and I'm used to it.  No, what bugged me was that his Darth Vader drawing was terrible.  This kid was probably born in 2000, so I guess I can't expect him to really understand.  Not that I can even really understand, but I at least managed to see the trilogy in theaters.

Anyway, as a responsible teacher, I couldn't take time from the lesson to educate him and Jascha, who also tried to draw the Sith Lord, about the fact that yes, Vader's helmet does have a nose; no, that's not actually how perspective works; no, Darth Vader does not have three pink lightning bolts in the middle of his forehead, though I appreciate that as an interpretation of the transformative power of force lightning. 

Teaching about Star Wars is just as important as learning to say the date.  It's hard to earn my respect unless you can have a conversation about Star Wars, so I think this is an important cultural ambassador moment.  There's a lot of background vocab to learn though.

Longest post ever.

After two weeks waking up to an Alpine landscape, waking up to dirty, slush-covered Kiel this morning was a bit of a disappointment.  I spent the last two weeks in the Swiss resort town of Lenzerheide, up in the Alps and a couple hours from Zurich.  I was there with the Ebner family, old family friends from Palo Alto that I’ve not seen for years.  Susi and Manuel, their daughters Kati (my best friend when we were both three years old and running around graduate student family housing in Stanford), Kira (the same age as my brother) and Kristin (named after me by a distraught Kati after the family moved to Switzerland), as well as Roswitha, Manuel’s mother.

            I took the night train down from Kiel after a very short and snowy day at school and had to stand around the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof for an extra hour because the heavy snowfall delayed my train.  Eventually, it showed up and everyone on the train was simply glad that it was finally there because it was quite cold outside.  At Hannover, the train stopped again and filled up with travelers heading south for Christmas.  I woke up just in time to see that we were in Basel, where I needed to transfer, so I jumped up, gathered my backpack, camera bag and presents and then no one ahead of me got off the train.  And then the train left again.  Apparently there are two Basel train stations and I needed to get off at the second one.  From Basel, I went to Chur, through Zurich and caught my first glimpses of mountains, towering over serene lakes, everything much less snow-covered than Kiel.  Oddly enough. 

            Susi picked me up in Chur, and we drove up to Lenzerheide.  Apparently, Chur is the oldest city in Europe, though the parts I was in weren’t the old part of town.  Up in Lenzerheide, we ate some lunch and then, almost first thing, started scavenging the snowboarding bits and pieces left around the house by various boyfriends, guests and family members to find a suitable amount of gear for me.  I ended up with a pair of snowboard boots and a board with the bindings set backwards for me.  We walked across the backyard to the mountain and Susi went to actually ski while I attempted to go down a very small hill without falling down too much, despite the backwards bindings. 

            The rest of the family started to trickle in, Kati and Manuel that night, Kristin the next morning, and then Manuel’s brother, Stefan, and his fiancée, his son and her daughter.  We had dinner, fondue chinois, with a number of people that pushed the table to its limits and then went and opened presents.  Stefan’s son, Manuel(ito), as the youngest, got to sit under the tree and pass out presents.  With two “Christine/Kristin”s and two “Manuel”s, he got a little confused, but it all worked out. 

            The next was actually Christmas, but we’d already opened all the presents, so there was no real reason for me to wake up.  But Kristin gave me a bit of a snowboard lesson, showing me how the kiddie lift works and the basics of braking and boarding.  She took a couple runs on her own on the real mountain and left me to wrangle the bunny slope.  In true personal fashion, I landed rather hard on my head once or twice and definitely knocked the wind out of myself once. 

            At this point, I sort of lost track of the days.  But Stefan and family came back at some point and we went to a fondue dinner up on a mountain.  This meant, of course, that we had to hike up the mountain slope to get to the restaurant.  Having lived very literally at sea level for a very long time, all of a sudden hiking the Alps was not an easy transition for me, but we got up there and had a very delicious fondue dinner.  After I had then accidentally ordered a much too large ice cream dessert and eaten the entire thing, we rented sleds outside of the restaurant and tobogganed back down the slope. 

            Growing up in a combination of California, Kansas and Missouri, my sledding experience was approximately nothing.  Kristin told me the basics of steering (dragging your feet in the snow) and Susi gave me a push off, telling me to follow Manuel down the slope.  Unfortunately, at one point, Manuel went right into a snowdrift, and I followed him, but neither of us wiped out.  At the point of the mountain, someone was shooting off fireworks.

            The next day, Kati gave me a quick snowboard lesson, helping me to graduate from the bunny slope to the big kid slope.  It was very helpful to have someone telling me what I was doing wrong and how to do things better.  We got back to the house, and Susi decided I was ready for an early birthday present:  a private snowboard lesson the next day.  That evening, Kati, Roswitha and I went to a classical music concert in a neighboring town.  I had no idea what to expect, except maybe a violin or two.  It was in a small little Protestant church built in the 1600s.  The chamber orchestra shared the very small performance space with a very large Christmas tree to their left and a nativity scene to their right.  The director was a funny old man so old he could barely sit at his electronic keyboard.  He was wearing a very formal and old-fashioned coat which went to his knees, dark grey tights and black shoes with buckles.  My favorite moment of the concert was very possibly when he announced that he was going to take a short break and simply walked out of the church while the cellists played a duet.  Or simply watching the very expressive faces of the first violinist and first cellists, letting everyone know what they were thinking.

            We came back and managed to get my worst injury of the season:  I slipped and fell down the stone steps inside the house.  A terrible bruise, a bit of blood and a tear in my jeans later, I just decided to go to sleep.  I woke up the next morning, sore all over as usual, and we went to secure a snowboard lesson.  Despite some confusion and a lot of Swiss German, I ended up with a lesson with a girl named Vivi.  She was short but enthusiastic, with dreadlocks and sunglasses that matched a fresh scar on her cheek.  She taught me to use the Bugellift, and heel-edge and toe-edge and turning and all of it in German.  So much in German, that while I was practicing after the lesson, I was continually muttering to myself in German about snowboarding.

            I continued to practice on the big kid slope for the rest of my time there, getting fairly confident at descending it without falling down.  Of course, Susi had found me a helmet after I tumbled onto my head a few times and then I didn’t fall on my head anymore.  I had great fun muttering to myself in German or cursing the small children who were much better than me and cutting in line at the lift.

            Eventually, Kira came up for a day to celebrate Christmas with the family, and then she and Kristin headed back to Zuirch for New Year’s.  So Kati and I got to accompany her parents and grandmother to a relatively fancy dinner at a friends’ place.  Friends with whom the Ebners are going to build a hotel. We were served yet another traditional Swiss dish.  Very focused on cheese, potatoes and meat, Swiss cuisine.

            For New Year’s Eve, Kati and I took the bus to Davos, another neighboring city, apparently with the highest elevation in Europe.  We were picked up by a couple of her friends and then I stopped being able to understand most of what was going on, because they were speaking Swiss German.  When they switched to High German or English, I was fine, but not Swiss.  But they were all nice and we played an entertaining game of musical chairs in the car, dropping off and picking up new people all the way to the mountain.  At the mountain, we once again climbed the slope (this one steeper and icier than the last) to the restaurant, though this time trailing our own sleds.  I thought this was a rarity but It is apparently a thing.  Halfway up the slope, we were given free Gluehwein and optional torches.  Climbing with a cup of Gluehwein in one hand and the sled reigns in the other, I couldn’t also carry a torch, which made me very sad. 

            As we walked up, Kati said something about how she imagined I was going to explain my experience.  “All the Swiss do is climb mountains to eat cheese and sled down!”  Well, yes.  It’s a winter thing, I guess.  Those Swiss.  Crazy.  Even better, we were far enough away from town that I could see nearly as many stars as on transit.  Amazing.

            At the top, we had expected fondue, but it turns out we were getting a four course meal.  It was delicious, and Kati’s friends kept ordering rounds of drinks, so we were all quite happy.  Just before midnight, everyone in the restaurant went outside, picked up a glass of champagne and watched the fireworks start to go off in the alpine valley below us, the flashing lights reflecting off the snow and the explosions richocheting up to us.  Someone set off a set off five roman candle like fireworks about fifteen feet in front of us, down a slight hill.  Roy and Ollie decided to jump into the New Year and ended up jumping off the ledge, rolling down the hell and Ollie put out a firework with his face.  Somehow they emerged unharmed, though I’m not sure how.  We went back inside to avoid the rush of sledders “rutsch”ing into the New Year.  Germans wish a happy New Year by wishing a good “rutsch” or slide into the New Year.  So, naturally, we were all going to literally slide into the New Year and sled down the mountain. 

            Kati was a little terrified at sledding down the slope, it was very icy and steep and very intimidating.  We only had the one sled, so we were going together, and her negative attitude was making me a little nervous.  Luckily, my awesome new pink hat and our celebratory drinks bolstered my confidence and we made it down the piste with minimal screaming and only falling off once.  There were no lights, except for someone stopping every few hundred feet and waving a flashlight while shouting “Checkpoint!” 

            We headed back to Roy’s grandmother’s apartment where we were staying and Kati and I decided to go to bed.  She was kind of sick and I thought I was getting sick.  We stayed up talking for a bit, and then as soon as we laid down on our respective couches, people started coming home loudly.  The next morning, we all started to rally around noon, watched a couple episodes of Scrubs and then bought some food and walked over to Roy’s parents’ apartment, where we breakfasted until 4, complete with champagne and a magnificent view over Davos. 

            Later, we raced back to the grandparents’ to pack our sled so that I could catch a bus back to Lenzerheide.  Kati and her friends were going skiing/snowboarding the next day, and I was not quite up to that challenge yet.  We packed the sleeping bags and mats back into the sled and I rode it part of the way to the bus, and I headed back to Lenzerheide.  I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a night time bus ride through the Alps on thin winding roads, but it’s quite the experience.  The next day dawned extremely foggy on the slopes and I was glad that I hadn’t attempted to snowboard.  Instead, I bought and wrote postcards.

            My birthday a couple days later was marked by the return of Kristin to the house with a friend as well as two German friends of Susi, Nicola and Frank.  I went snowboarding for several hours and then celebrated with champagne and a traditional Swiss dinner for my birthday.  It was pretty low-key and there was no R2-D2 cake, but it was still a great birthday. 

            On the fifth, Susi, Nicola, Frank, Kristin and I went to this special sledding slope.  You have to take a train up the mountain.  The train actually goes up inside the mountain in several parts and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.  Then, the sledding slope is a good fifteen minutes.  This being the third time I’d ever been on a sled, I was a little clumsy the first time, falling off on the first couple of icy curves.  Luckily, Susi was babysitting my camera so that I could do silly things like try to go fast and then crash.  Then, an ambulance came up the slope, seriously slowing us down.  So, we decided to go up again.  This is the sort of sled slope that has a speed radar to tell you how fast you’re going.  I topped out at 30 km/h but Frank won with 46.  The second run, I made it all the way without falling.  Kristin passed me, but then her sled inexplicably spun around so she was going backwards and then spun around again, which slowed her down a bit so that I could catch up. 

            I left the next day, after being provided the means to make myself multiple sandwiches for my long train ride, taking several hours for my last snowboarding runs, and discovering that Kristin was going to travel with me as far as Zurich.  We parted ways and I passed out on the train from Zurich to Hamburg as soon as possible.  I bought some breakfast in Hamburg and made it back to Kiel to discover Christmas and birthday cards and packages in my mail, from cousins, friends, grandparents and secret santas.  It was a marvelous second celebration, especially since I got wonderful pictures of upstate New York, a jar of peanut butter and a print of a polar bear in addition to lovely cards. 

            Of course, I actually had to go grocery shopping and do other responsible things as well, but I’ve settled back into my weird little Kiel routine.  I’ve gotten both New Year’s and birthday wishes from my roommates and I think my New Year’s resolution is going to be to quit being so anxious about running into people and just be less awkward.  That should make things better all around, if I can manage it.  

             I'll try to get some pictures up soon, but I think we all know how good I am at that sort of thing.  No promises.