Schiller and Goethe- Germany’s most famous bromance pair
Weimar was a surprise trip on many levels for me. My good friend, K, won this trip as the ultimate prize from the Fulbright Conference: lodging for two at the Best Western Inn in the beautiful city of Weimar. The best surprise was K’s invitation in joining her. Who says no to a free trip at a 4-star hotel? (Of course, I was delighted because K’s also a good friend of mine so I’m not entirely greedy, I promise.)
Please take a moment and appreciate the following picture:
By no means am I a great photographer. Shoot, I’m not even a good photographer. However, certain photos trigger vivid memories for me and this one does just that. It not only reminds me of my overall trip with my wonderful friend, H, whom I met during my year in Munich two-and-a-half years ago, but of so many little and big things that we did during this trip. It was one of the best trips I’ve ever taken and I hope to return the favor to H someday. I know where he lives now, so it’s not like he can avoid that promise 🙂 If you haven’t figured it out yet, the above picture is of the Alps in Southern Bavaria, specially close to the beautiful city of Freilassing, H’s hometown.
Nyhavn in Copenhagen
Before I publish a string of posts for you all who have probably by now stopped reading this blog, I’d like to apologize for keeping everyone hanging! Two weeks of Easter Break (last two weeks of April), then a friend visited for a weekend and almost immediately thereafter the big bomb: my surprise visit back to America for my lil’ sis’s graduation. The most surprising thing was not me surviving the fun, yet grueling schedule, but the fact that my Mom and I managed not to ruin the surprise. That surprise had been in-the-making since mid-February. I kid you not. My Mom and I are probably the worst secret keepers in our household and Jamie is by far the most perceptive person in said household. Senior year just really put her off her game of her usual perceptiveness. Ah…the power of stress.
I was right— the traveling days were grueling! But we made it and so did my bags. It’s nice to have a real bed again! Speaking of
which, our accommodations here are really nice. The center was built about a year ago. We stay in these little duplex cabins called Bandas. Each houses three people and has its own bathroom. I’m actually really enjoying the mosquito nets at night— it’s like being in your own cozy little cocoon.
Yesterday was our first day at the center. We stayed in a hotel in Arusha the night before last and arrived here just outside of Karatu yesterday morning. The staff here is very friendly. In Tanzania, having a guest is like receiving a gift, so it was a very warm welcome. They threw us right into the local culture yesterday. On the seventh day of every month there is a huge market nearby. We were only there for about an hour but it was pretty overwhelming. Vendors were following us around trying to sell us stuff. At a few points, SFS staff had to escort a couple of students back to the land cruisers because they were getting swarmed with persistent vendors. It was crazy! But really interesting and fun at the same time. And we’re learning Kiswahili pretty fast!
Today we finished up orientation and will start classes in the afternoon. This morning, the Student Affairs Managers (SAMs) brought us down to the little town right outside the center, Rhotia, to observe some more of the local culture. Sadly, alcohol is a pretty big problem
Ostriches spotted on the way to camp
here. There are several bars in Rhotia, which we have been strictly instructed never to enter, as it can be quite unsafe and reflects poorly on the program. Alcohol and drinking have very different connotations here than they do at home. The problem here is that men (and some women) will drink away their families’ money, which is limited in the first place since they’re not out working to earn any in the first place. Here, alcohol is more of a plague than the social lubricant U.S. college students have come to consider it.
Huge termite mound
Tomorrow we will have a full day of classes and then we’ll head out on our first expedition to Lake Manyara National Park on Friday!
Today’s the day! I’m all packed and ready to face the adventures that await me in the Serengeti. But first I have to make it through three grueling days of traveling…
The first stop on the way to East Africa is Newark. Most of the students in the group booked their flights through the program and Newark is where we’ll all meet for the first time. From there we take an overnight flight to London. Our twelve-hour layover will allow us plenty of time to get acquainted while taking a brief and speedy tour of the city— the first of hopefully many safaris, if you will (yea, I went there haha). Then we’re off again on another overnight flight to Nairobi. This is where the SFS staff will meet us and guide us through obtaining our visas, pupil’s passes, and plane tickets to Tanzania. This part makes me a little nervous but they know what they’re doing. Once we get into Tanzania, we’ll head to a hotel in Arusha for the night. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m hoping for a shower at this point. Then, FINALLY, we’ll get to the field station the next day, June 7th.
I’m actually really looking forward to spending the day in London! I’ve been there a few times with my family on vacation and I can safely say it’s my favorite city. I just won’t eat any fresh vegetables while I’m there… yikes. Plus, it’ll be nice to have a day between our two longest flights.
Well, I think I’m ready. I’ve been learning Kiswahili on YouTube, read through the packing list like eight times, and started my malaria drugs. Speaking of which, I had an interesting/scary incident a few days ago at my last travel medicine appointment! After getting my last three vaccinations, I walked out into the waiting room and promptly passed out. Luckily, I had the foresight to sit down first. I guess it’s actually a pretty common reaction that people can randomly have even if it’s never happened before. It was awful, but at least it didn’t last very long! For those of you who are curious, my vaccination count for this trip comes to six: Polio booster, tetanus booster, Hepatitis A (I already had B), Typhoid, a second Meningitis, and Yellow Fever. I didn’t have time to get the Rabies series but still, that is one impressive immune system if you ask me. I’ll just have to remember to keep my arms and legs inside the Land Cruiser!
The cost of travel is almost always the deciding factor when considering your next vacation. It’s understandable, considering the headache induced from figuring out how much you’ll be paying for flights, hotels, food, and maybe even some souvenirs by the end of your stay. I had been hoping that this would be a little more straightforward when approaching my study abroad experience. There’s the program cost, of course, plus airfare and a little spending money, but after that I thought it would be smooth sailing. Today I learned otherwise. It’s okay though, my REI dividend was put to good use, but then there’s the camera equipment (yikes!), textbooks, and school supplies. I hadn’t even thought of any of that stuff. And I still have a few more items to pick up before I can safely say I’m ready. Needless to say, I’ll be looking for a job on campus next semester…
On a lighter note, I get to spend the next nine days at home before heading off on my first adventure of the summer! Although I haven’t felt really homesick since my first month of college, after a while I start to feel a little achy for my hometown. I can safely say that this past year was one of the most intense, influential years of my life, and it’s good to be able to come home and get a little closure. After my freshman year, I went straight to an internship in Hawaii where my mom lives. Although I was living with family all summer, it wasn’t quite the same as coming back to St. Paul. I didn’t really feel like I had just finished my freshman year of college. It was more like an extended break. This lack of closure came back to haunt me when I got back to school and everything was different. Some of my friends had transferred and the rest were scattered around Tacoma in off-campus houses. To make things even more difficult, I went back as the RA of the same place I had lived as a freshman only now, I was living in my old RA’s room and a bunch of strangers were living in my best friends’ rooms. Don’t get me wrong- I love my residents and wouldn’t trade my experience as an RA for anything. It was just a difficult transition to make given the lack of closure at the end of the previous year. So here I am in my old room in downtown St. Paul, putting my sophomore year to bed and getting amped up for summer! If only I hadn’t spent so much money on extra meal points last semester…
So, I’m not actually abroad yet but I figured that in order to share my summer experience with you all, I have to include one of the most crucial parts— the planning process. My mother is a notorious planner. I can’t remember a family vacation when every minute of every day wasn’t mapped out ahead of time, but she always said that the planning process was the best part. You get to imagine it over and over again, living the experience out a thousand times before the plane even takes off. So here I am, still in Tacoma, living out my summer from the comfort of an off-campus house across the street from the SUB.
Perhaps I should explain what it is exactly that I’ll be doing. From June 4th to July 5th I will be studying abroad with the School for Field Studies (SFS) in northern Tanzania. Then, after a brief trip home to Minnesota, I’ll be heading out to Norway for a 30-day backpacking trip across Scandinavia with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) before coming back to campus to be a Passages leader. Yikes. That’s a lot of flying. As it gets closer to the day I leave for Tanzania, I wonder more and more what I was thinking when I planned this crazy adventure (or I guess set of adventures). Actually, it all started when I was looking at a study abroad program for next spring. There was really only one program that I wanted to give up a semester at UPS for. One of my senior friends last year told me about her semester in the Turks and Caicos with SFS. I’m a Biology major interested in marine biology and conservation research so this program sounded perfect to me. As I was looking at their website, I saw the Tanzania/Kenya program and that they had a summer session for it. That was it. Any plans I had for staying in Tacoma this summer to do research went right out the window. I think the fact that my parents really didn’t want me to go to East Africa probably had some influence as well… sorry, Mom.
About two weeks after I applied to both programs, I was informed that the Kenya portion of the summer Tanzania/Kenya session had been canceled. This meant that I had to find something to fill the remaining month and a half of summer left after the end of the Tanzania portion. I had always wanted to go on a NOLS trip but I kept putting it off for other things. When they cancelled the second half of my Africa trip, I thought I’d see if the timing matched up with any of the 2011 NOLS courses. And that’s what led me to plan a summer spent on three different continents, in three different time zones. It wasn’t until I paid the deposits and booked the airline tickets that it even began to feel real.
(The Sehitlik Moschee in Kreuzberg in Berlin during a Fulbright Conference tour.)
I haven’t blogged as much as I should and for that, I am very very sorry! I know many of you check up on this page once a week and this may sound a bit nerdy, but I do brainstorm what I should blog about every single week. Once I realized that there were at least 3 people who read this thing, I knew I had to take this blogging thing seriously.
This is a post I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. There were other things that I hadn’t blogged about yet for whatever reason: I’ve either forgotten, didn’t have enough time or didn’t find it interesting enough.
As promised per last post, I wanted to share a small list with you all of a few, select reasons why the 5th graders have transformed me from the Grinch into the typical 23-year-old woman that I apparently am.
(Inside the “Pregnant Oyster” during the Fulbright Conference. Photo courtesy of good friend, J.)
1. There are only four boys in the class but two of them always perk up when they see me. “It’s Jill!!!” they’d cry out whenever I entered the room. They’d then look me in the eye, offer me the sweetest smile and say “Guten Morgen, Jill!” My heart melts a little every single time they do this. It never gets old.
2. Some of the other students always slow down in the hallways or look up when they’re at their lockers to offer me a hello when I walk by.
3. Most of the 5th graders are almost as tall as me. That’s what happens when you’re only 5′ 3/4″ tall.
A few months before I came here to Vienna, I sort of fell into a panic… when I read a discussion about how Austria is (possibly) the most racist country in Europe. Is this true? Of course it is debatable. Austria is the furthest east of the German speaking countries on this continent; it is more conservative compared to its neighboring West European countries. Apparently it is not too welcoming to outsiders, especially those who came across the boarders from its eastern neighbors. I even read that the Viennese would opening show their disgust at the presence of whoever it is that they don’t like, an obvious outsider, an Asian tourist, for example – and, may I note, as the IES center is located in the first district, I have spent considerable time in the most touristy area of Vienna and have seen plenty of Asian tourists. That seemed like a devastating news to me when I read it. Since I already confirmed my study abroad, whether this claim is true was for me to find out. I decided it is best to not step into the country with any presumption. If it is true, then I will just have my default reaction – ignore it.
So I stopped thinking about it. I have lived in Vienna for almost three months now. I have had many people – sometimes even random people on the streets, in Belvedere Garden, at Stephansplatz – stopping and asking me, “woher kommen Sie? Where are you from?” Or simply, “japanisch?” Hahaha. In these instances I always ended up having a friendly conversation and never felt hostility (or sometimes I was just irritated). There’s definitely more curiosity, and people do not try to hide the fact that they clearly notice the different appearance, not at all. They won’t take “ich komme aus Amerika” for an answer either! But where are you originally from, where are you really from? They would say. In such a relatively homogeneous society, and a society in which people normally do not move too far away from where they were born, it must be very difficult to understand how an Asian person could come from America. Eventually I became less sure and started changing my answers depending on my mood and depending on what I thought they wanted me to say. It is true that the society influences how you think about yourself and your identity! Sometimes I rather like it this way. Compared to what I experienced at home in the States, this is much more direct. I don’t call it racism or anything like that, it’s just being (strongly) aware of the differences in appearances. I am used to being in the minority, too – I lived in Missoula, Montana for crying out loud, and my sister and I were probably the only Asians at my high school… oh wait, maybe there were two others! Anyway, what I am tying to get to is, where I lived in the States, I could always feel it, and when people treated me differently, even though it could well be for other reasons, I had to wonder to myself: is it “racism”? However, it’s a terrible thing to point it out! You could wonder about my ethnic background, but you must not ask me directly about it! Sometimes the awkwardness becomes way too absurd. Whereas here, it is one of the first questions people ask.
We talked about this in my German class too. My German instructor cannot explain this phenomenon, because she simply is one of the Austrians who think this is the most natural question for people to ask! People are curious, we don’t mean it in an unfriendly way, she would reply. When she saw me, she immediately assumed that I have a completely different culture background than others students, that I must speak an Asian language, Korean or Japanese was what she guessed, and she would frequently single me out in discussions, asking, for example, Joan, you come from a different background, what do you say?
A fellow student, who is Asian, who came from Chicago, seems to have a different take on this matter. We, including some other friends, were all standing at the back of Musikverein große Saal during a concert intermission. A tall, gray-bearded, stern looking was standing close to me. He glanced back at me several times, and finally turned around, shouted and spitted passionately, “I know there are more countries than just Japan and China in the Far East!! I know!!!” He subsequently repeated the statement a few times, uttered something else that we couldn’t make out, turned around, and then, as if remembering something else, turned to face us again and excitedly said something else that we couldn’t understand, although he was speaking English. I didn’t know what to think of it. His demeanor made it sound as though he meant it to be hostile, yet I didn’t catch anything truly offensive. The man moved away and was crazily shaking and swinging around for the second half of the concert. I shrugged. But my fellow Asian student, who has been here since September, apparently took it to be somewhat offensive, as he said to me, “don’t worry, you will get used to it! The first two months I was here I felt so uncomfortable. I could always find someone staring at me. When I go back to Chicago I will be so glad – there will be ten sorts of rice to pick from, gosh – but then I know I will still miss it!” Should I feel uncomfortable? Where I lived in the States, there aren’t that many sorts of rice to pick from… Have I already started ignoring everything since day one – is that why I don’t feel offensive at all? Sometimes I’d rather people admit what they are thinking and be more direct, but sometimes I get irritated for being ask so frequently the same question, for people always singling me out. I still don’t know what to make of this!
