Wednesday, October 25, 2006

how i ended up with Lancelot and Macbeth

You say: Lucky Anna, lucky girl, went to Germany for a year, will have an internship in a German bank...
If you only knew the whole truth about German life, you wouldnt probably keep on saying that. Well, by "the german life" i actually mean my vision of it, nothing else. (Most of my blogs are actually based on my personal experience and MY point of view.)
What is so desperately being discussed, by the name of "culture shock" and "language barrier", which i was sure would never happen to me, actually did! It happened to me in the Frankfurt Airport right at the moment when I had to open my mouth and... speak German.
The next moment when I looked around I realised I was trapped! Everyone around, I'm not exaggerating, everyone was speaking German. More than that, they didnt seem to have a problem with that.
What never touched me while I was in America became my biggest concearn here in Germany.
I thought: ok, give it a few days, happens to everyone, besides, there is a plenty of Erasmus students who dont sound like native speakers either!
In the end I gave it 2 weeks and as a result I actually began to understand almost everything of what professors where saying at the lectures of Competetive Management and Industrial Economics.
But if you want a better picture, take a sleepy mouse at 8 (!!!!) in the morning, (which is a crucial time for me, when I still have some German left-over-words running through my head since last night when I was desperately trying to learn them) and put it before a fluent German-speaker for, say, at least 12 hours a day. And then look in its eyes... which say a lot about its general state of mind, which can be only characterized by the word - dead tired.
After all that, you put the mouse in a box where it has to run through its head everything it had to listen and stare at for the whole day! Isnt it a torture?
Maybe, not such a big deal, as I desscibe, but could be a lot more pleasurable...
Sometimes it is. It actually is almost every night.
A small geography lesson: the area where I live in Kassel, i.e. university campus, is not the right place for the night-walks under the moon, if this thought ever crosses your mind. Its a place which can be characterised as notorios. For its drugdealers, prostitutes, devushek netyazhelogo povedeniya,( which cant be translated into English). Right for theat reason they put the campus there. It has become a relatively safe area since then.
However, once when I was coming back home alone, usually I'm coming back home with friends, and oh God, I met HIM, here he was a man of my nightmare dream, a mix of a short mexican, ugly redneck and a turk, dressed as gay with a very bad taste. Oh GOD! It was only 8, which is a very sensible time for me. I'm still puzzled about what i was about me - it could be my trench coat together with a skirt, but since when it became known as a "professional outfit"? My feelings were so deeply hurt, that since that day I started reading books about Templars and took a course of Shakespeare literature.
However, the best part of my student life lies in Freudenhaus, which could be roughly interpreted as "Mouline Rouge", of modern time. "Freude" auf Deutsch is "Happiness" or something that makes you happy. There's also a place called "Cuba Club" where we go out dancing salsa every Saturday night and a place called "New York", which very detachedly remained me of NYC, mostly by its music.
Germans are very different from Americans however. They also gladly help you, and smile everytime you look at them, but I have noticed something more sincere about the way the smile and talk to you. They are sincerely interested in your personality and can talk to you for hours, and not only about their income. I'm not saying all Americans necessarily talk about money 24 hours a day, but I've seen that a lot.
However, Germans are more concearned about wasting their money, which if not talk about, but cherish and spend according to the plan.
Despite the fact that Germans are usually called hard-working, once you see their students you realise that the fact is no more than a myth. In fact, I become more and more sure about that only Russian students are capable of working on the huge amounts of information and get a well-round education in the end. Pity, most of these bright students have nothing left to do but leave the country to look for a place where their brain-work will be paid for.

I would not want to finish my entry accusing someone or comparing nations. It wasnt my idea. Again, I write about I see, and what I think is necessary to be spoken about, at least here, at least with my friends.

In the end I'll just say: Veritas vos liberabit

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

well, Anna, i undestand you perfectly. i really do. i can imagine how it feels, and i'm with you (at least mentally). try to look at your life from the other side. think, would it be better if you stayed in your city, here in Russia? i see, Kassel is not the best place to live in, but nevetheless, what would you do here?
ps it's damn cold! getting colder and colder with each day. today -13!
you know, i was really depressed in October, upon returning... i didn't want anything. Uni is not a hard work, we're studying just 3 days a week. Compare! i attend all possible and impossible courses, i feel that my brains are dying. Don't laugh! i see how my friends from Moscow or my foreign friends work, and it makes me sad. That's why i read a lot, translate a lot, try to practise a lot. If you don't use your brains you become dumb, so you may be happy - it will never happen to you! lol
You know that my dream is to come to France... and you know what? i'm ready to do whatever needed to realize it! i know it's gonna be hard, and i will "хлопать ушами" during lectures and all that stuff, but how i want it! well, i know exactly to which city i want to go, so i hope i will not get to such a bad place. I'll need your advice about adaptation to foreign culture ;-)
now i just want to wish you Good Luck, i believe in you n everything is gonna be OK :)