Thursday, November 26, 2015

Giving Thanks for Life Lessons

Today is Thanksgiving and, coincidentally, the last day of my German language course. For the past four weeks I’ve been learning German three hours a day, four days a week at the DeutschAkademie. Well, learning and rediscovering. Rediscovering things I knew but had forgotten, and learning new rules, new tricks, and new vocabulary.

The most educational part of the class, however, was learning with my fellow students. Four of us come from the U.S., one from France, one from Italy, one from Brazil, and one from Armenia. With each theme in our textbook our teacher surveyed us to find out how food or holidays or media or free time compared to that in Germany. It was great to hear firsthand about these different cultures and see, as we all struggled to make ourselves understood in German, how much we were progressing each week.

The Monday after the attacks in Paris the hallways of the academy were buzzing during the class break with stories about acquaintances in France and uncertainty over making weekend jaunts abroad. Inside our classroom the atmosphere was unusually somber as one of my fellow Americans asked our French compatriot about her family. 

They were safely away from the violence, and her friends in Paris were safe, but she had multiple worries, because the other half of her family was in Lebanon. With attacks in France and air strikes in nearby Syria it was as if her entire world was under siege.

She conveyed all of this to us in English, the emotion and politics being too difficult for any of us to express yet in German. But as our teacher joined us and talked about her conversations with friends over the weekend, I realized that all of our anecdotes over the past few weeks weren’t just about noting the differences in our cultures, they were about sharing and bringing an understanding to each of us.

In our American viewpoint events like Paris are truly foreign unless they impact someone we know. Until 9/11 we didn’t worry much about non-domestic violence; we were invulnerable. Even now this type of violence is mostly background buzz—something that happens primarily elsewhere.

Now that I’m living in Europe, I realize how much these acts impact the world community. Because these attacks were seemingly random, they are particularly terrifying. And France is not someplace “over there” now for me, it’s right next door.

So today, as I prepare food to bring to class to share a part of our Thanksgiving tradition, I am giving thanks for my life and every aspect of it—my family, my friends, my health, my education, my experiences, my freedom and, with that, my ability to write and share my smallest thoughts or my biggest fears with anyone willing to read them.

Be safe, and give thanks for today.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Let It Snow!

I am not a cold weather person. I get cold easily and stay cold for a long time. The only exception to my aversion to winter weather is snow. So I was happy to learn that winters in Hamburg don't get much colder than Bay Area winters, especially since it reportedly rarely snows here and what snow does fall is wet and quickly gone.

None of which bears out this week.

It's been chilly here; that wet, bone-drilling cold San Franciscans know all too well. Then the temperature started dropping, and I feared the start to a pointless, unpleasant season of rainy, freezing miserable weather.

And then it snowed this morning.

At first it was a light snow that didn't stick and stopped after an hour. Then it started again in earnest, snowing an inch within the first half hour and continuing for another hour and a half till it tapered to a light dusting.

The everyday landscape outside my window is transformed, and even the church bells I hear every Sunday at noon seemed a bit more magical today.

My biggest hope is that "they" continue to be wrong, and that the snow is a regular visitor this winter. (Or at a minimum, sticks around for the opening of the Christmas markets tomorrow...)

Monday, November 2, 2015

Meet Betty

Most cities have a strong bike contingent, and Hamburg is no exception. Up until now I've been a dedicated pedestrian, trying to negotiate the balance between bikers and walkers depending on where I live. 

Here in Hamburg that means staying heads-up to ensure I’m not walking in the bike lane on the sidewalk or in danger of being run down in spots where there’s no designated sidewalk lane and no safe street-riding opportunity for the cyclists. Now I’ll have to look at things from the other side. 

I realized that expanding my scope of exploration and even running some regular errands requires wheels. That means relying on the schedules of buses or enjoying the relative freedom of a bike. 

Except that I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ridden a bike as an adult. So Larry—an unequivocal bike enthusiast—and I went shopping a few weeks ago at a couple of bike stores to figure out what appealed to me, what would work for me, and what it might cost. 

With so many folks commenting on bike theft it seemed unwise to jump right into that kind of investment. So we went to the Flohmarkt to see if we could find something that might be salvageable with a bit of elbow grease and spare parts. 

There were sad specimens aplenty and a couple of contenders, but then we found Betty—my fantastic new used bike, complete with rear basket, shocks, working front light and no rust. 

photo of two young girls sitting on the concrete slab of a statue
No childhood photos of me on a bike, but here's a gem
from 40 years ago here in Germany.
That's me on the left, thinking whatever 
deep thoughts four-year-olds have...
We got her home, pumped up the tires and I took her on a few wobbly spins on the road around our building. I’m sure Larry is secretly harboring fantasies about us taking long rides through the city, but I’m not there yet. In fact, I’m barely anywhere, so it will be one short trip at a time for me for a while. 

But what better place to get back in the saddle than the country where I learned to ride a bike in the first place?