Twenty-five days. Three plus weeks.
Had someone asked me at the beginning of this project of mine if I'd have been able to take a twenty-five day hiatus from writing I would have looked at them utterly insulted. How dare they assume I would even take a one day hiatus! But I did, and it was lovely because I was starting to feel a bunch of convolution in my ideas. So please forgive me for my negligence and let me continue to tell my story...!
I got a message from a future PPPler via Facebook recently and it helped me get my mind back on track more than anything else could have. The questions were the innocuous concerns of a young person preparing to up and relocate at the drop of a hat. I was more than happy to oblige but it got me thinking about the re-relocating.
There are less days for me here in Europe (24) than my hiatus, and if I manage to not blog in that time period, just know that you would have missed my exodus from Germany. Perhaps, however, it would be better if I didn't write anything else for the next month and a day and just let it all fester until that fateful July 17th when I say goodbye to my Schatz Deutschland for yet another time. You'd think a thing like separation would be like aged wines: if you mean it becomes sour, painful to swallow and unappealing vinegar, it does; if you mean it gets more appealing and exciting with age, it don't. Ten bucks to anyone who can identify the improved movie reference without the internet. But I'm not here to talk about separation, I'm here to talk about reunion, about expectations and about being a stranger in my own land.
We were in Berlin for our ending seminar just a week ago. Along with a number of other amazing opportunities, our entire program stormed the US Embassy, I'm talking 350 young people (the other couple high school branches decided to tag along with us, all the while ruining my perception of their age range) taking over the US Embassy. It was a harmless little gesture but something that made me realize just how German I have become. I'd just finished drinking a can of Canada Dry and, in the midst of chatting it up with friends on the green American soil of the Embassy, I wanted to toss it out. I casually walked inside certain I'd be able to find some sort of place to toss out my can and to no avail I finally asked the kind American woman working there. Surely she would be able to get me out of my dilemma, after all she was an employed woman, she probably got this question all the time. She would answer it quickly and I'd be on my way. Easy as pie.
"Oh, there's a trash can right around the corner."
Just like that, everything clicked in my head. I was in America. A trash can? A universal disposal device. It doesn't matter what you want to throw away, you just toss it in a trash can and your worries are over. I mean the thing even managed to produce R2-D2, of course it could solve the problems of an empty Canada Dry container. The real issue is, I couldn't believe myself. What kind of answer was that...how "un-German" of this woman was it to offer up a trash can to throw away my precious aluminum. I swallowed my German pride and threw the damned thing in the container and with all the hypocricy of Judas I smiled a bit. This was a conflict of self that I'd never experienced before, something amazing I couldn't foresee a year ago.
For any of us who speak both German and English, we know that there's a nice little combination of the two called Denglish. It's a fun thing to do, spit out a German word in an English sentence or spit out an English word in a German sentence. Sometimes there just aren't the passende Wörter for what we're trying to express. This is, of course a gift and a curse. The ability to spit out a word in either language and have everyone understand it is not only fun, it sometimes is the only way to get a point across. I think I've Denglished myself pretty well too. That meaning there are plenty of parts of myself that have become more "German" than "American" and it's something I am increasingly interested to see translate back in the US of A.
I can imagine being irritated by some of the things Americans love to do. The funny thing is, I can't for the life of me tell you exactly what things they'll be. Will it be something as small as watching someone throw a can away or as big as thinking the way that certain Americans act, dress, or carry out their lives is seriously odd. I catch myself saying things to people I wouldn't have said before this year. German forces you to be direct, it forces you to get out your feelings in a way that isn't so sugary and nice as I'm used to as an American. Instead of "you could have done that better" it's "you did that wrong." This is, of course, ok with me, else I wouldn't have picked a country like Germany as a prime candidate to split my being into two.
Perhaps this is something that happens everywhere someone goes. I'm sure when I moved from Chapel Hill to Atlanta there were plenty of things/habits/opinions I picked up along the way but maybe since the two cities are vaguely similar it wasn't something that hit me as hard or perhaps since I could travel between the two cities whenever I wanted to I never really had a moment of clarity like the R2-D2 incident at the US Embassy. I am, however, very fascinated to see what things from Germany stick with me once I hit the ol' dusty trail back to the West.
I've already got the recycling thing down packed.
