Where to start? We're five months into our grand adventure. The days are full. Some days I come home just exhausted at having listened intently to German being spoken for hours on end. We pack so much into every day, every week, that still it seems like last week was a month ago. California seems like a different world, from a long time ago. A very nice paradise that we passed through once long ago, and will one day return to. So the density of new experiences is still real high.
Where we've been
Through our wonderful, international visiting organization, Servas (www.servas.org), we've made two very nice visits here in Bavaria. We picked our visits partially to visit with families who had sons Luke's age. We visited a family up in Regensburg, a lawyer (he) and a social worker (she). They had two sons. Both were very much into this Herr der Ring (Lord of the Rings) War Hammer stuff, which Luke is big into now. His face lit up when we went in to visit them. Had a very enjoyable visit there. Regensburg is a very old city, even by European standards. It is on the Danube, our first look at that important artery. Because of its importance to trade, it developed early, even back in the Roman times. You can see traces of that and a lot of traces of medaeival Europe there. In the summer they have all sorts of medaeival reenactments. So I'm sure we'll be back there when the weather gets warm. Then we visited a family in little, out-of-the-way Bad Wurzach. It was a cold weekend with snow. We spent all of Saturday outside in it, looking at the landscape. As usual, when the hosts are from out-of-the-way places, they go out of their way to accommodate you and show you around. Wendy also went off to Switzerland for the weekend a few weeks ago. She/We have a very good family friend there that we've known for a very long time. We've also been the beneficiaries of some directed attention from a colleague, Egon Sommer, who took me soaring back in October (see last newsletter). He and his life's partner, Claudia, have been wonderful hosts to us. They've made a big difference to us, making us feel at home in their home. It only takes a little attention like that to make the difference between feeling lonely and homesick and feeling accepted and comfortable there. We visited them in Memmingen, about an hour and a half west of here. They took us down to the mountains on a wonderful, warm November day.
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| Luke in Snow in Bad Wurzach | On the Steinbrüke in Regensberg |
We have very good friends from Austin in Cambridge, England. Actually Wendy and Luke went to Amsterdam on the train for a long weekend to see them. They are in England for two years at least, so we may see them again. While there we went down to London, where we rendezvoused with my old friend from Columbus, Mississippi, Jane Crowe, who seems to keep showing up wherever we go. My impression of England is not that great. It is very expensive there. Also things just don't work as efficiently as they do here in Germany. One of my favorite authors, Neville Shute, an Australian, wrote lots of novels wherein England portrayed as a socialist breakdown. There's some truth to that. The people there do not seem happy, proud, hopeful. They seem, in fact, the opposite. Shute drew this same picture, providing Australia as a contrast, the land of unlimited possibilities. England was the land of unlimited limitations. Much of what he wrote has a large element of truth in it. And we could see it on our visit there.
Us, Austin Friends, and, yes, Jane Crowe (2nd from Left) at Tower Bridge in London
Most of our traveling has been confined to local (within 3-hour trips) travel. But we did go to Malta over the Christmas break. Why Malta? Being an educator does not pay in money. But it does pay in the souls that you mold during impressionable times of their lives. And after 15 years in that business, there's lots of souls out there. One lives in Malta. He's actually only a couple of years younger than me, was a student of mine during my first year in the business (1987-88). He had a Maltese wife then and still does. She won the where-do-we-live battle after only a short time in England, where they'd gone after his yacht design study at Maine Maritime Academy. He has a very successful business in the small-boat, marine engineering area. Malta is a waypoint and also a big base for pleasure boating (sail and power). And Ian's business has flourished there in this long time since we last saw them. His wife Vanessa, a native Maltese, is vivacious and gregarious. She seems to know everybody on Malta. So again, this personal connection there made our trip very enjoyable. Malta is a place like no other. It's in the middle of nowhere but on the way to everywhere. We enjoyed a two-week sojourn there. We went sailing on Ian's 48-foot Nonesuch sailing yacht. And we hope to go back in the summer and sail it up and around Sicily.
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| Entering Valletta Harbor on "Journeyman" | Wendy and Vanessa MacDonald on Malta Beach |
A close friend from South Carolina is showing up in March. We have planned a trip to Berlin, then Prague, then Vienna.
Deja vu
So now it's cold and there's been snow on the ground for a couple of months. Good snow too, stuff that never melted and refroze. I liked X-country skiing in Maine. But I'd forgotten how much I did like it. It's right up there with surfing and flying. So I got skis in mid-December, and I'm wondering whether or not I'm going to wear them out before the end of the season. I go almost every day. It's a short walk down to the fields and woods nearby. There's just something it this activity that is very exciting to me. So the wonderful hiking/biking net over the meadows and through the woods has turned into a skiway. For us Maine was so long ago, that the subdued beauty of everything white and the crystalline beauty of bright sunlight on white, sun low, casting long shadows, is a wonder to us.
I even like shoveling snow, though that probably makes me a candidate for the lunatic asylum in places like Maine and Massachusetts. One day I was going to the pool here in Starnberg. But who wants to be inside when there is all that lovely white stuff outside? So instead I went and bought a snow shovel, following the logic that shoveling snow is at least as good exercise as swimming is and you can perform a public service gleichzeitig. So I was outside the Landratsamt, sort of the courthouse, where they do a terrible job shoveling snow. Several people asked me if I was with the county government. I think they wanted to cuss me out for not being on the ball in snow removal. But I just explained that I was Otto Normalburger (their version of John Doe) and that I was doing it for exercise. Well, that was surprising to them. But a nun blessed me and another guy tried very hard to give me a tip for my work.
Surprisingly, just free-lance X-country skiing is a little rare. Everyone wants to go to these prepared tracks, Loipe, they're called. That's still okay, but it becomes monotonous after awhile. I prefer to blaze my own trail. So I just take off into the woods and fields, usually on virgin snow. The feeling is hard to describe. For you surfers, it's like a really good wave. It's pretty cool to see your track following you across that moving mountain of water. Likewise, it's pretty cool to see your tracks on these clean surfaces, as if you left your signature there. There's a great hill near Luke's school, right next to the freeway to Munich. I go there regularly to feel that fresh snow. I don't know why the Germans haven't discovered the pleasures of free-lance X-country skiing. They've discovered everything else.
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| Telemark Tracks Above Starnbergersee | Frank X-Country Alps |
Then there are the Ski Weekends. Three hundred-odd of us parents, teachers, and kids from Luke's school, the Munich International School, take six busses up to the mountains every Saturday. Grown-ups in two busses, snowboard punks in a bus, little kids in a bus, middle kids in a bus, big kids in a bus...something like that. All the ski slopes are nearby, just over the border into Austria, at most an hour and a half away. Everyone is merry going up and particularly merry on the return trip. So far we've been on three. The weather and the snow have been magnificent. This is a snowy winter here, and we're taking full advantage of it. We've also met all sorts of interesting people on these busses. I've always been enamoured by the ex-pat lifestyle, having experienced it first when I worked in Dubai some 25 years ago. Here on these busses you really see it up close. People from all over who move hither and thither, talking about their experiences last week in Singapore or wherever. Exciting to see, though, in reality, not having any roots is probably not so good. But to see and experience it up close is a lot of fun.
Learning German
We have dumped tons of time into learning this crazy language. For what? Not a good question. Still it captivates us. We will continue our study into the next semester. Lots of pride in climbing this ladder. Many people tell me that at first they think I'm Scandinavian. That's some sort of victory, I guess, not to speak so that I'm immediately identified as an American. But part of that is that Americans are so terrible with foreign languages, that Germans very rarely come across Americans that have any facility with their language.
Progress comes slow. I liken not knowing a language to having a long-term disease. It just takes time to get over. You can be aggressive and shorten the time somewhat. But it still takes a long time to get over the sickness. There are four permutations, facets of learning a language. There's written and spoken, input and output. For almost everyone, understanding something written is much easier than writing something or understanding something spoken. Writing is active. Reading is passive. Written removes the time element. So speaking is hardest because you are active and the clock is ticking. We're getting so that we can read and write pretty well. We're also much better at listening and understanding than we used to be. We still stutter when we speak. So we are doing well into three-quarters of the facility with the language. It's the exposure over time that makes it happen. So we are doing well after only 4½ months. Still it is frustrating not to go faster.
As I reported before, all of our language-learning peers are 20-something Opermädchens who are good friends of ours now. In language-learning you share your weaknesses and a lot of embarrassment with everyone else. So this brings everyone together. I hate to think of the time when our course will end and everyone will go his/her separate way. We have all leaned on each other so much, I think we all want to stay friends. It's funny how this common experience can cross all sorts of social differences--age, where we are in our lives, where we're from, etc. This part of it has been at least as satisfying and rewarding as the language-learning part of it.
Us with Opermädchens in Nüremburg
We have also been fortunate to have been taken in by our German teacher. She's a 50-something woman who lives in a local village through the woods from here. She's invited us to several outside events. We went to a wonderful pre-Christmas party at her house. We met several of her friends. I was amazed at the intellect there. That's a common theme here. The average person is very intelligent and thoughtful. Even if you do not share the same views that someone else does, you're not likely to be condemned for your views like you seem to be in the U.S. I read an interesting quote recently, I think from Einstein. He described intelligence as the ability to consider views that are not your own without having to believe in them. I.e. intelligence is the ability to weigh and try out/on all sorts of views without having to be a believer in any of them. This culture here seems to not make snap judgments on people. That type of reactionary thought actually does seem to be prevalent in America. It's like the lawyers have won and that we all are in an adversarial society. There's only black and white, no shades of grey. That, I'm afraid, does not bode well for our society. We are not free to consider things, to stay in a state of suspended judgment long enough to move around freely and consider possibilities. Okay, enough soapbox for now.
Teaching
This has been a much different experience than teaching in the States. We do a lot more hand holding in the U.S. than they do here. Here the students have to sink or swim. At Cal Poly, our norm is to teach 3 x 1 hour classes per week. We give out homework, take it up, and actually grade it (usually a grader does this). We have lab reports every week or two. During a 10-hour quarter we usually have two hours or testing. At the end we have a three-hour exam. So we keep good track of how our students are doing and actually prod them into keeping up.
Here, on the other hand, there will be 1 x 3 hour class every week. There's no assigned homework and no tests. There are labs, but no lab reports. At the end there is a 1½ test that determines everything. In a couple of courses I've seen, there are actually 2 x 14-week semesters before the one, single 1½ test for the entire year of studying. It is every student's responsibility to get himself or herself prepared for the test at the end of everything. I.e. all the pressure, blame, and guilt are on the student.
So what's the best? As usual, there are good and bad in both systems. I think the best is somewhere in between. With our system, it's almost as if we don't let the students grow up and become adults. We treat them too much like high school students. We often spoon feed them. We are sensitive to them. When they blame us because they didn't do well in a class or when they come to us grovelling for more points, some of the guilt and blame are transferred to us. We soften the harsh edge of reality that they will eventually have to face. Is that good? Sometimes, sometimes not.
I have been truly amazed at what some of the students here come up with. I don't see them for a long time. Yet they go out on their own and cook up some great stuff. This is something they are more apt to do here than there at Cal Poly.
But I've also seen some really fundamental things that they don't seem to know about because no one's held their hand to go through it. For example, they are very sloppy with units (meters, seconds, degrees, etc.) here. Sometimes they just leave them off. In the U.S. we whack the backs of fingers hard and often to get the units right. No one bothers much about that here. That's just one example. These students would get run over and mashed flat if they had to work with English units (feet, inches, gallons, etc.), which are much more unforgiving than metric units are.
Because we hold the hands more, I expect that the dropout rate at Cal Poly is much less than it is here. I've only taught juniors and seniors here, those that have learned to swim in a sink-or-swim environment. I know that at Cal Poly and Maine Maritime Academy we would wring our hands and wonder about our dropout rate...and do everything in our power to reduce it. I'm not sure how much they bother about it here.
If you compare the workload of a professor here to one at Cal Poly, you might conclude that a professor here teaches much less, with no homework, lab reports, and few tests to correct. But the professors here actually teach a good deal more courses than we do. All in all, it probably is about the same.
Interestingly, though the systems are different, they are a lot the same too. I see the same problems over and over. The units problem I mentioned above, we still see that a lot at Cal Poly, though we do a lot to try to eradicate it. Unit problems are like cockroaches in the South. Do what you want to, they're going to come back.
Future Plans
The opportunity to stay another year came up. Before we left the States I told Wendy we would come over here, get pretty good in German, and then leave. What a bummer that would be, I told her. She wants to return to California after a year. Luke was sitting on the fence. I wanted to stay another year if we could. My feeling was also that a two-year stay in a place makes a much stronger impact on someone than a one-year stay. In a one-year stay, you're always a visitor, with the end in sight. With a two-year stay, we will always in the future consider this to be a part of our past that we have a connection to. When we visit here in the future, we will remember the old haunts, Luke will remember the school he went to, and we will still have friends here. It'll be a lot like Maine is to us. At Christmas the Malta trip made a big impression on us. I was just amazed at the ease with which Luke picked up all the history that had flowed through Malta over the years. When I was his age, I knew something about Civil War history and had read books about other historical periods. But that was nothing like seeing it in the flesh and understanding it first-hand. When I saw this, I was proud of him and envied his opportunities here. I wish I had had those opportunities when I was young. Still, one other thing entered the picture that made the decision very hard. It was Luke's friendships stateside, particularly his friendship with his pal Graham Gordon-Johnson. I've always told Luke that friendship is more important than almost everything else. In the long run, however, Luke will return to California, the seventh grade. And everything will crank back up for him after this great adventure. So in the end, we decided to stay. We want to see many more places, included more of Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Luke and Wendy will also probably go to Spain this summer to get a refresher in Spanish. All of this is so accessible to us here. Why not take advantage of it?
I hope also that this extra time here means that others will come visit us. We have visits upcoming with a friend from South Carolina, Wendy's sister Donna, another of Luke's great friends in SLO, and hopefully others. Oktoberfest is in late September, usually the last two weeks before the first weekend in October.