Week 01: Meat & Greet
Saying hello to Hamburg and full of...energy? Hope? Wurst?
Order Up
After eating a hearty meal, one would say, “Ich bin satt.” Trying to directly translate the English phrase would read as, “Ich bin voll.” The latter does not hold for eating purposes, but as I get settled into the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (to be exact) founded in 1189 AD, so many emotions are tumbling in my body, my mind feels full. So here I share the first week from departure to slowly settling in.
The Bread
Top Slice: Jetting immediately from Seattle to Iowa to a wedding to Michigan was a whirlwind. I spent invaluable time with family at the wedding, enjoyed the hospitality and as always, phenomenal food with my aunt Ruth Ann, and got some quality time with the big ol’ brother Sam who dropped me off at O’Hare in Chicago.
Bottom Slice: Next week, we will start our actual classwork. Intensive German classes early in the morning and practical (aka playing around in the city) work the rest of the afternoons. The days look packed, and rainy, and windy, and promising. Classes will not start until October 15 in alignment with the European semester calendar.
The Filling
Travel: I flew out to Helsinki on the 13th of September via Finnair. I landed early morning to a sleek, Scandinavian designed airport (Eero Saarinen is Finnish and also designed the St. Louis Arch) filled with bald men in suits presumably on business trips. The Moomin cafe was closed, but I was jolted back to the childhood books filled with these bald cow-hippo creatures. I traveled from Helsinki to Schoenfield airport in Berlin and then from the airport to the Hauptbahnhof/Main Station to the Hauptbahnhof in Hamburg via train. A person walked down the aisles of the train with a snack cart—just like in Harry Potter and then took another train to the Office where I will have my classes. Finally, after meeting the program director, we took a taxi to my living place north of the university.
Business: The first agenda item of the week was: bureaucracy. It remains so amusing to me because it is simply true. The group of US students studying via this program, Smith in Hamburg, is small—only four of us. We applied for visas, registered with the university and with the city government (they want to know exactly when you arrive and how long you intend to leave), signed our room leases, signed up for a German SIM card, signed away the rest of our lives, took every bus and train imaginable, and finally, got some good coffee paid by Smith College who runs the program.
Sights: Three places I will and have frequented often while in Hamburg:
1) Rothenbaumchaussee and the Rathaus — Universität Hamburg and the main city center/town hall. There are three universities in Hamburg and mine is one of the most noteworthy in all of Europe.
2) Alsterdorfer Str. — my living space with 160 other students. It is dormitory style but there are three buildings and each floor has about 8-12 students. A thirty-minute commute to the university, but pristine and peaceful paths along the Alster river which I will kayak this week.
3) Speicherstadt — the old warehouse district on the historic harbour. Hundreds of brick-laid buildings creating a maze of canals. There are more canals in Hamburg than Amsterdam and Venice combined!
The Sauce
EH? Was meinst du? Everything since we have been here has been communicated in German. Only around 50% of my flatmates speak English fluently and the four staff of our program, director, associate director, lecturer, and coordinator, only speak German with us. Schade.
Feeling testy. We were administered a German comprehension test three days after I arrived. TBD on how that went. I need a re-fill of energy after the hour-long endeavour.
The weather is foul. Rain one moment, blue sky the next. Pouring and clammy then misty and musty. Reminds me of Seattle.
It’s a small world in the fall. In July on an impromptu trip back to Bowdoin I stayed with a friend and met all of his roommates. As they were all in the Class of 2024 and most were getting ready to go abroad themselves, I knew I would likely never see or have seen them again. One roommate was getting ready to study in Taiwan for a year. Making small-talk, I found out his sister was studying on my program and they are part of triplets. I don’t know where the third one is, but was so shocked that while I was third-wheeling (or like, a ninth-wheel) for a random week in a random apartment in Brunswick, Maine, I had met a direct relative of the person I was soon to be spending 6 months with.
The Mystery Meat
CRAZY stuff! :) Glad it was a relatively smooth trip misster worldwide. The Speicherstadt is almost as old as you! Har har har