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This is my travel journal, narrating my time in Germany. It is a blog I will be updating at least every week.  I hope it will give some insight into what it’s like to experience another country as a student and traveler. 

Arrival in Munich, week one

What is it to arrive in a foreign country?  How is it different? Sure the culture is different, and the people and their views, and what one eats for breakfast and the language and cars.  But these are, in a way, quite trivial.  Your still one planet earth; these are human beings you’re talking to.  They too have a sense of humor, and as it turns out, many of them like the same music you do! So what is different?  It is different on certain levels, but which?  Well I’m not really going to answer that question because it’s all deep and philosophical and even though I made it up, I don’t perfectly understand what I’m saying.  I will, however tell you this:

I started feeling different about the whole affair about halfway across the Atlantic, when, having asked for a drink from one of the very pretty flight attendants on Lufthansa, I received the usual plastic glass of bubbly Sprite, but without ice.  It was as though somewhere in this transatlantic journey we had superficially entered Germany and the flight attendants were acting accordingly.  Of course I didn’t know then that I would be spending the next eight weeks without a single cube of ice in my drink, I just kind of had a feeling, and a vague memory of someone saying that before I left.  And so with no ice and very little sleep I arrived in Munich, to 78 degree weather and the sight of a jumbo tron displaying the World Cup.  I tried not to be too boring on the train ride to the house with my foreign exchange, Lenny (Lennard), but I was truly sleep deprived and my Deutsch was failing me utterly.  When we reached his house, my dwelling for the next eight weeks, I was allowed to go straight to bed.  So I got in my new, German bed and slept.

Do any of you have really interesting dreams when you travel? If you don’t I feel somewhat sad but also happy for you.  For these dreams present a curse/blessing situation.  Those who do get these dreams will know what I’m talking about.  For me the first one was extremely animated.  I know this because I awakened sweating and quite flustered, however, not five minutes later I could not for the life of me remember a single detail of it.  All I could recall is that it had something to do with traveling and a lot of frustration and loneliness and going from place to place in a sort of a circular motion.  And I haven’t yet stopped having these dreams.

For a person that normally has very few dreams I can truly identify, my dream life over the past week has been incredibly active.  Every night these similar episodes occur; last night I dreamt that U2 was going to give a surprise concert at our school back in the states. Not only this, but I was the only one who knew! Don’t ask me how.  It was a lot of fun hoarding my secret from the rest of the class.  Unfortunately my dream was cut short at the gloating stage and U2 never arrived, instead a came back to the real world, in which, I have few secrets of any worth.  And that is why these travel dreams are a curse.  You don’t actually get to see U2.  Dammit.

The funny thing is, my dreams don’t seem to be affected by my surroundings.  I’m in freaking Germany!  Is it too much to ask for a dream in German? I do realize that this sort of dream requires a broader knowledge of the language, but my request remains.  OK, failing a dream in German, how about a dream that takes place in Germany? No? I wasn’t even affected when I joined my new German class for a five day field trip. There I was in the pastoral Bavarian countryside, among woods and flowers and charming old dairy farms.  It rained softly the entire time and I was surrounded by lively conversation, almost all of which I could not understand.  This seemed to me like a real feast for my brain, with a host of stimuli made available for manifest in my dreams, but no, instead I dreamt of things I had left in my other life back in San Francisco.

Now a psychiatrist would likely blame this on a case of homesickness.  But what is it really?  Yeah, pretty much, a case of homesickness.  I miss everyone and everything so much.  But I’d also blame it on the German penchant for partying.  That fact is I really haven’t been getting much sleep, let alone dreams.  The other night the excited activity throughout all the rooms in the hostel where we were staying died down at two in the morning, only to start back up again after someone screamed in a purposefully thick German accent, “I’m so horny” and dove headlong into someone else’s bed; it continued like this for another hour, only ending when everyone passed out on the floor.  I will give no further details.

So you can imagine I was more than happy to make it back to Munich last Friday.  I was at the end of my rope by the time our train pulled into Central Station.  But to my chagrin it was World Cup time and Lenny whisked me off to public viewing to watch Deutschland gegen Serbian.  When we arrived, they were, of course, all out of the “small” size beer mugs and I was overjoyed to down a large flagon sized mug of Munich light.  Thank god it was light and not something else or I might have fallen asleep right there in the Beer Garten.  No, instead I made it home to drink another day.  I fell asleep and did not dream.