Introduction

August 2000
September 2000
October 2000
November 2000
December 2000
January 2001
February 2001
March 2001
April 2001
May 2001
June 2001
July 2001
August 2001

May 2001

3 May 2001

8 May 2001

11 May 2001

18 May 2001

29 May 2001

31 May 2001

3 May 2001
Thursday

It seems that I am gradually getting some sort of routine back into my life, including (but not limited to) updating my journal weekly-ish. I am also feeling very good about myself these days, which must have to do with the sunnier and warmer weather.

This Tuesday, 1 May, was the Tag der Arbeit, which is a holiday in Germany. [1] For me this meant that I had Saturday through Wednesday free, because I don't have class on either Monday or Wednesday. Perhaps I should have used my free time to take a trip or something, but instead I wrote out a list of everything I needed to do and worked all weekend. Of course I didn't do everything on the list (in fact, I'm several days behind in reading Der geteilte Himmel for history class), but since most of my work was trying to get ahead anyway, that's no great cause for worry.

Yesterday I went to the printing workshop in the MdA and printed business cards. I don't really want business cards, and they have my German address on them so they'll be out of date in three months, but I made them because they're simple. Very small, not that much to set, etc. Actually, in retrospect I should've just put my email address and web page on there, because they're the things that will stay constant, at least longer than my geographical address. Even though I'm going to have trouble finding things to do with my cards, it was great fun to set the type and to run the press. Not many people can say that they printed their own business cards, right?

Hmm, that's my week right there, actually. Until next time...

8 May 2001
Tuesday

Last Thursday the weather was so beautiful that I left my window wide open when I left in the morning. While I was at the Smith Center that evening, I heard wind, thunder, and lightning. When it started pouring down rain, I convinced myself that I'd only cracked the window. Unfortunately, when I arrived home I was proved wrong by the soaked condition of my room. It looked really awful (puddles on my floor and in open drawers), but the worst casualties turned out to be my clock [2] and a copy of Kim. [3] Everything else was only partially damp, even papers which were lying in the open drawers. I laid things out on the desk to dry, used my towels to clean up part of the huge puddle on the floor, and hung the soaked end of my rug out the window. Surprisingly, everything but the rug was dry by the next morning. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that only a small corner of my bed was wet; I simply changed the bottom sheet, and it was fixed. Even my pillow, which was right next to the wet spot, was perfectly dry.

I spent the weekend in Amsterdam, at the third (and probably final) Bookstore Meet. That was quite fun, though the pub wasn't as nice as the one we went to in London. I'm not going to write more about it, though, because my story is already in the report I wrote. I replicated that on my meet page (linked just above), because again, I didn't want to rewrite it. I spent enough time writing the first one. (Leo said it was good, so I guess my trouble was worth it.)

Hmm, that seems to be all that's happened. I'm trying to be industrious about my work (especially papers), but it's only partially working. For a while I've been intending to go to the library where Rainer works, to look at a book he recommended to me for the paper I'm going to write for him, but I haven't made it over there yet. (It's on my schedule for Thursday.) I'm also making progress on reading things for my Captivity Tales paper, and I keep intending to talk to the professor about it, but since his office ours are on Monday evening, I keep forgetting. In any case, things are progressing, if slowly.

I'm starting to think about going home at the end of July. That's not too far away any more, and I have a lot to do before I leave. Of course I have a lot of work for the Uni, and I'm also planning at least three trips before I leave. Time is eternally in short supply...

So I'm going to use mine wisely and go do something else now. Tschüß!

11 May 2001
Friday

At least three interesting things have happened since Tuesday; some of them are still happening.

Since the beginning of the year, students of the Smith Program have been regularly renting movies from the English video store next to the Uni. I have been thinking about it for a long time but never got around to it; a couple of weeks ago I signed up for a card because I went with Hillary, who was doing it too. So yesterday I went and rented two movies (because Thursday is 2-for-1 day). I really wasn't sure what I wanted to see, but I headed back towards the drama section, where my eye fell on The Joy Luck Club. I have just started reading Amy Tan's new novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, so I had been thinking about the movie anyway. Then I needed something to lighten the mood, so I wandered over to the comedies even though I didn't expect to see anything that interested me. On the contrary, a row of Monty Python movies accosted me, so I decided to get the Holy Grail, of which I'd only ever seen two short scenes. [4] I watched The Joy Luck Club yesterday night and almost bawled. It wasn't as bad as when I watched Dancer in the Dark last fall [5], but afterwards my eyes were hot and dry from crying.

On Wednesday afternoon I came back from the MdA to check my email and found that a server had been hastily installed in the office, and that now we all had individual login names and profiles (managed from the server, so that they'd be the same wherever we logged in). Good for me, actually, because this means that I can save the programs that only I use (for example, Agent for news) on the server (even though I probably shouldn't - but really there's not that much load, and we're only 12, and there's 20GB on that server anyway), and then I won't be limited to using only the one computer! Yay!

Unfortunately, nothing is ever so simple. I was the first one to log in, and that worked fine; however, we made the mistake of pasting some of my files from "My Documents" in the old profile that everybody had been using before, to my new profile, and then changing my username. See, without asking any of us, Gabi had just assigned our usernames to be the first letter of the first name and then the last name, but I've been typing 'lbmelton' so long that it's hard to teach my fingers not to type the 'b' any more. So the guy changed it, which unfortunately meant for some reason that I couldn't open the files in that folder. Oh, and it had also been cut and pasted rather than just copied, so I couldn't just get the backup copy either. (I wasn't the one who moved it, he was. Silly man for not leaving a backup - though I do have backups myself, it'd be a pain to get them.) So he had to come back the next morning and fix it (I'm not sure how; he didn't tell me, but it involved a lot of clicking around and switching between profiles).

At this point Word doesn't work under personal profiles either... It seems that almost nothing works. :-( I think the simplest thing is for no one but me to use this, because probably no one else has any use for it. Things worked the old way. Sheesh. That's Gabi I guess. It always amazes me that she can so be so completely oblivious of the way her actions affect other people. Not that I didn't support getting a server, but nothing happened for months, and then suddenly it's here! And then of course Gabi is away for the weekend now, so she can't deal with any problems. How typical.

Anyway, the guy's coming back to talk to Gabi on Monday, and I'm going to try to be there so that I'll have some idea of what's going on, and if I can get ICQ to work under my own profile (which it doesn't at the moment, as far as I can tell). Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that this is the absolute end of any possibility of my playing with CVS any time soon; these computers are confused enough without trying to add a UNIX shell to them. (Note to self: Must email Patrick.) I feel bad about that; I volunteered to help maintain the meets pages, and I've barely done anything yet.

Speaking of not doing anything, my group had a Referat in linguistics class today. That was fun; however, I didn't say anything. I had asked for a small part in the beginning, and there were so many people that I ended up not having anything to say. The Referat worked out well, though; it was interesting, I thought, and we managed to convince the professor to let us do one paper rather than splitting up into two groups as had been planned. I'm not sure what I'll end up writing, but I'll have something to do.

As for everything else, I still haven't managed to get to the library to look at a book Rainer recommended to me. Gabi had a little birthday party for Hillary on Wednesday in Sternschanze, where the library is, so I thought that was the perfect time; however, when I got there I found out that it shut several hours early that day. Poot. So I'm going to try to go on Monday, but I'm not sure that'll work out, since I've got another couple of appointments then. It's really too bad that I can't go on the weekend, and that it's enough out of my way that I have to intend to go there; I don't just pass by.

One thing that's coming up at the end of the year, but about which I'm not particularly worried, is the DaF-Test. The Uni likes to test its foreign students about their German-language skills; thus we were tested in the fall, to determine whether we had to have one or two semesters of Deutsch als Fremdsprache; for some reason we also have to be tested before we leave. I guess maybe they want to know how much we've progressed, or something like that. In any case, the test is mandatory, but unlike the last one, it doesn't mean anything, which is nice.

It's about the only thing that's nice, though. There are three parts to the test: dictation/grammar, Textwiedergabe, and oral test. We didn't have to do the oral part in the fall because they let Jutta and Gabi tell them how well we spoke, so I don't know exactly what that's like. What Jutta told us, though, was that they'd give us texts from something out of our majors, let us read it, and then talk to us about it. It can't be that bad. Neither is the dictation, I think; it's easy just to write down what someone else says. [6] However, I never do well on the Textwiedergabe. I'm not sure how to say that in English; it literally means "giving-back-text." The proctor reads aloud a text (usually full of details), and you have to take notes and then reconstruct the text from the notes. Even though it's read twice, I never get enough details, and I try too hard to write things I know are right, so I leave out too much that I'm not sure of. Anyway, the test doesn't matter this time. The thing that brought it into my head was that we found out the dates: June 18 and 19 for the written bits, and about a week earlier for the oral bits (exact date not yet set). Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?), I can't attend the test on the 19th because I'm going to be on a plane at that moment... Oh darn. :-)

18 May 2001
Friday

I've had a fun week. Last weekend I got really fed up with people asking the same questions over and over on mhc.comp.questions, so I wrote a FAQ. I'm quite impressed with myself, actually; on a purely web-design level (as opposed to information) I wrote the basic HTML (and CSS) for the page on Saturday afternoon. Yeah, it needed some tweaks (mostly to make it look decent in Netscape 4), but it was basically written. I posted about it to mhc.aaa, which is sort of the geek group of MHC, and asked for comments. Apparently it made a good impression and may be incorporated into the LITS pages. I'm really happy about it. (You can see the draft if you'd like. Comments welcome, if not always heeded.)

The other thing I'm extremely happy about is that my application to International Affairs was successful! I will be the first administrative fellow in the IA office! Admissions have had AF's for years, but for some reason they're being instated in other departments, too. The job description I got from International Affairs seemed rather general, i.e. I do pretty much whatever they need me to (web design, help with program development, etc.). That makes more sense now that I know I'm the first in that position; even they don't know how they'll use me.

Kelly has an internship in a kindergarten, and she was entertaining us the other day with her experiences. At one point a kid asked her why she was speaking Plattdeutsch [7], and she said "No, that's not the reason you can't understand me..."

The weather this week has been weird again. It's more rainy than it has been for the past few weeks; in fact, it's more rainy than Hamburg usually is. Because it hasn't rained for so long, the rain has been extremely violent. Yesterday, while I was in Sprachlehrforschung, it started thundering, and a couple of minutes later it started pouring down rain. Luckily by the time I got out of class a couple of hours later it had stopped raining, because I don't think my mini umbrella would have been able to do anything against such a flood, and I wasn't even wearing a jacket.

This weekend 26 Hamburg museums are having a Lange Nacht der Museen (long night of the museums) thing; basically the museums stay open all night and have lots of special programs and things. I'm thinking about going, but I'm not sure.

Why do all the things I have to say always disappear when I sit down to write in this thing?

29 May 2001
Tuesday

Last Monday Kevin came to visit, and then on Wednesday we went to Dresden with the rest of the Smith program. It was fun; we had a very fun and interesting tour Wednesday morning of the old city center. Most of the historical sights in Dresden are next to each other, and though there are also things on the north bank of the river, the important things over there can be seen from the south bank. We had a lot of information for not much walking, which was very nice since the weather was very sunny and hot.

We also went to Prague, which I didn't enjoy so much. I think it was partly that the tour we had was in German, which the tour guide didn't speak so well. I don't want to be too hard on her; she expressed herself pretty well, but I found it very hard to listen to her for two hours, especially since it was very hot, she always had us stop in the glaring sun, and we had to walk a lot through narrow, winding, unnavigable streets. Unfortunately that influenced my enjoyment of the few hours I had left after the tour. I think I would have enjoyed the city more if I'd been allowed to explore freely.

One of my great worries was alleviated in Dresden - namely, I bought a wedding present for Ralph and Lori. I won't say what it is (not sure if wedding presents are as secret as birthday and Christmas?), but you can be sure that it is completely worthy of the occasion.

Back in the mundane, I had a referat today in Sprachlehrforschung. I wish it were a little better than it actually happened (specifically, I wish that I had been more active and spoken more), but the prof seemed happy, so I'm not too upset. I'm just slightly disappointed in myself, that I was a little bit too much at a loss. That was, however, my third and last referat, so it's all papers from here on out.

I'm thinking about packing up my junk and sending it home already. There are things (like my riding gear and winter sweaters) that I'm sure I'm not going to need for the rest of the year, so I can go ahead and mail them back to Mount Holyoke. I'm thinking more about going home and realizing that the 2-3 weeks I'll have there are much too short, especially since my friends in Dallas won't have seen me for just under a year. I could also wish for a little more time to get resettled into America. On the other hand, I won't have the leisure to miss Hamburg or Kevin very much. C'est la vie, I suppose.

31 May 2001
Tuesday

It occurs to me that my recent journal entries have been much more reports than letters. I've been letting go of one of my original intentions in writing this journal, which was to give a real and immediate (if not accurate) impression of What Study Abroad Is Really Like. Unfortunately that's quite a philosophical question, and one which I don't usually feel up to dealing with. I can't even answer it; I can only say what it's like for me, though sometimes even that's hard.

Most of the time living abroad is mostly like living in the US. Okay, people speak a funny language and eat strange food, and geography is a bit cramped, but the important things [8] are universal. There are a lot of stereotypes about foreign countries, especially about the people who live there. For example, Germans are supposed to be bureaucratic and organized, and this is true to some extent. [9] However, the Germans and French and Brits are quite normal really.

Btw, today I found out that Sprachlehrforschung in English is Second Language Acquisition. I finally got around to asking the tutor what it was, after wondering about it for half the semester. It was rather silly of me, actually; this might have been one of the strange cases in which I know lots of things (especially terminology) in a foreign language but find it difficult to talk about them in my native language because I have to translate everything in my head. It's a very weird feeling.

On the bus today I saw a garbage truck. Actually, it wasn't a garbage truck; it was a recycling truck for collecting used paper. In any case, the funny thing was that it had stuffed animals all over it! They were attached in a row all along both sides of the truck, and there was also a huge Pooh perched on the roof. I guess, in a way, that's one of the reasons I'm abroad; I get to see things I wouldn't otherwise.

Of course, one of the reasons I'm abroad is so that I can go home again. I love MHC, but I did realize, even when I was there, that my world was significantly restricted. I came to Germany to have a coed, international experience. What I didn't realize was that I would start to appreciate MHC a lot more. While I can survive at a big university, I prefer small-college MHC as well as its meal plan (yay for not having to go to the grocery store every day!). Just imagine having a 3-minute walk to class, rather than a 30-minute bus ride.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to going home. I'm looking forward to being an Upperclass Academic Advisor and to working in International Affairs. I'm anticipating showing Kevin my beautiful campus and spending my last year living down the hall from Maggie. I will be a senior, and at the end of it I will graduate and go off to do Wonderful Things.

June 2001

[1] Ironically, on "Work Day" no one works.
[2] The poor thing was having a nervous breakdown; I unplugged it until it dried out completely, and now it's fine. It's handicapped (missing part of one of the numerals) but still functional.
[3] It was lying under the digital clock, directly under the open window; I picked it up, hoping that only the edges were wet, but it was way too heavy and swelled to twice its normal size. The pages were completely and irremediably soaked. :-(
Ah well, I wouldn't have had time to read it anyway.
[4] During the study of Beowulf in senior English, Mrs. Morini divided up the class into groups and gave each a different topic to prepare and present; ours was "irony." We decided to do a video, in which we read out both definitions of different types of irony and examples from the text. To make it more interesting, we also acted out bits of the epic, made up our own sketches, and used clips from movies, for example The Princess Bride and MP&tHG. In the end it came out extremely well. I still have the tape.
[5] I cried harder than I've ever cried in a movie. I sobbed so hard that Kristina, sitting next to me in the theater, started crying nearly as hard as I. Romney sat on the other side of me and tried to look like she didn't know us...
[6] Jutta eventually told us how we did on the test. She said that I did well enough on the dictation not to have to have any DaF at all; it was only my Textwiedergabe that brought me way down.
[7] Plattdeutsch as opposed to Hochdeutsch - Low German and High German in English, I think. It's considered another language, not a dialect. Hochdeutsch is standard German, what's taught in German language classes, the official language of Germany. There are also lots of other dialects, for example Schwäbisch (the dictionary says "Swabian" in English?) and Bayerisch (Bavarian). Friesisch (Friesian), which is spoken in the North Sea Islands, is also another separate Germanic language.
Have I confused you enough yet? :-)
[8] Please don't ask me what they are.
[9] There's a street in Prague where the Germans lived after they were invited to the city early in its history. That's the only street in the city which is straight and has 90-degree corners. Leave it to the Germans to impose order on their universe. When they say things are all right, it's in Ordnung, "in order." (Okay, we say it too, but not as much as they do.)
Personally, I like order. I get along well with Germany.

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