German really wears a girl out

This week, I'm in Düsseldorf with a good friend, Esther, who spent a year as a foreign exchange student in Pelican Rapids during my senior year. I took the train all by myself, set up my own ticket and got off at the right stop and even understood that we were a little delayed due to an accident, of which they didn't know exact details.

(Yes, I know, congratulations on being 13 years old... but it is really harder than you can imagine in a foreign language, and even the smallest accomplishments feel huge!!)

The train ride was a mere 3 hours, during which I studied some German, read a little out of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" (a fantastic book, but a little disturbing... I recommend it), and ate bacon and cheese sammiches that I had made in the morning before I left. P.S. I am going to very much miss the bacon, amazing white cheeses and the BROTCHEN here when I leave... holy goodness, the food here is amazing! My one gripe is that everything is a little bland... but that can easily be fixed with the purchase of a couple of spices. (It's amusing... the favored spice of Deutschland seems to be paprika... everything contains paprika! Weird.) And Esther asked me today if I miss American food yet... I have to admit, not really. Amanda and I often make dinner together, good American meals like mac and cheese (no, not out of a damn box) or hamburgers that are more fantastic than American (can you say caramelized onions, gouda, and brotchen, anyone?), and for an international potluck, I made my favorite Minnesotan rice-burger-carrot-potato hotdish, so I am thus far surviving. I do, however, have to say, that I really miss pizza. I understand my friend Sean now, a fellow student of mine at Hamline who spent the last semester at Uni Trier. He constantly complained that Germany has no pizza, which I originally, upon coming here, found to be ridiculous and untrue. I now understand, though, as I miss just good old, greasy, cheesy, going to give you a stomachache pizza for delivery. I miss Mesa Pizza!!! All the pizza here IS amazing... but in a gourmet, fancy, European way.


Aaaaaanyway...

Upon arriving in Düsseldorf, Esther picked me up from the train station, and we came back to her house, caught up a little, ate cake and coffee with her mom, Barbara, and then wandered around the city a little. We did some window shopping; saw the Königsallee, which is much like Chicago's Magnificent Mile, full of haute couture; and sat on the Rhein River and ate ice cream (my god, the ice cream in Europe is SO GOOD!). We also saw the only tower left standing in Düsseldorf after WWII... sort of. It was covered in reconstruction and advertisement stuff, so we actually didn't see any of it. Ha.

For dinner, we headed to a great little Kneipe (bar) in Esther's neighborhood and met Esther's boyfriend, a friend, and her brother and some friends. Good time. Today, Esther is a bit sick (cough), so we're just lying low to save up for tomorrow's shopping whirlwind and tour of the secret servant passages of a castle. So excited!

Being here in Düsseldorf has really made it sink in just how completely and utterly exhausting it is to constantly not only listen and talk in another language, but to be forced to THINK it. All night, Esther's friends talked politics (the American election, their recently dead mayor, etc.), and it was fun and challenging, but SO difficult to keep up. I am constantly listening closely to fast German speech, trying to just instantaneously understand what I already know while simultaneously attempting to pick up context clues and translate what I don't while ALSO formulating my responses in an understandable German form. It is still much easier for me to understand German than to correctly and efficiently speak it. So tiring. It has really sunk in here, I think, because I simply do NOT have crutches like those who know me in Trier, in which I can speak a trashy Denglisch (Deutsch-English) when I don't fully know how to express myself. Here, I surprised Esther with the amount of German I can now understand, so she told her friends I can understand everything, and I am simply expected to keep up.

However, this is good for me. Even when we came back to Esther's, and I was ready to just crash, Tim, Esther's boyfriend, began casually conversing with me... again, auf Deutsch (in German). Oof.

Anyway, I am learning, and having these reminders that I still can't function in German at even half the capacity I can in English only makes me want to learn more and study harder. All morning while Esther was sleeping in, I spent reading the Düsseldorf newspaper, one article over and over, learning harder and harder words, and also drilling verbs and learning words that I've come to realize I use a lot but don't know auf Deutsch.

Thus, alles gut.

Bis später, dann! Viele Grüße zu euch alle!