Week 19: Das Kapi-wahl

I didn’t choose this life, the non-fiction reading history obsessed adult life chose me.

Order Up

In German the word for picky is wählerisch which stems from the noun, Wahl or choice. The Hamburg-ish version is krüsch.

Today I am en route to Dessau which is the home of the Stiftung Bauhaus. I left at 6am and which was really not an ideal choice as Andrea and I had very late evenings. After a two-year delay, I will finally get to meet Dr. Florian Strob, a curator at the foundation and the person who would have facilitated my internship in 2021.

There is snow on the ground! I am going to visit the cemetery!

They are not correlated but remind me of the wonderful show, “Over the Garden Wall.” A lovely recommendation for the crusty January winter.

The Bread

• Top Slice: Several highlights this week: a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration at the international center at the university, a nice breezy run all around the Außeralster again and a visit from my friend Andrea. We had our final test in German class (thank goodness) but was really tested all week trying to figure out my mobile phone data plan in I was charged but my data tracker said I had a balance of zero. I went to three different Vodafone shops all through the city and kept hitting a wall and couldn’t add credit to my phone. There was no choice either—you could only reload in $15, $30, or $50. I’m going back to a flip phone.

• Bottom Slice: I am starting to get architecture memes on my Instagram and having flashbacks to when I had lined up an architecture internship in Hamburg in 2020. So I compensated this weekend by trying to explain Brutalist and Expressionist styles to Andrea and now am walking around Dessau thinking every single thing is Bauhaus. There are limited choices: rectangles or a squares but squares are just rectangles so that MArch counts for nothing. Choose the Mrs. degree every time. More Bauhaus content next week.

The Filling

In our German speaking class we spent the week interpreting a poem which our two groups had vastly different opinions on. We were grouped in pairs and Isa and I found it uncertain and about isolation whereas the other group considered it to be hopeful and about fleeting connections with random people. However, the poem was about the milieu of the city and written in 1930s as everything in Germany was moving faster and faster and cities were more industrialised. I kept attempting to bring in sociological concepts about cities and the malaise / worry of writers about an industrialised world, but kept failing at pronouncing “sociology” in German and could not remember the names of the theorists at all.

After class I googled, “German sociologists” and an endless list popped up: Simmel, Habermas, Adorno, Weber, Oppenheimer, and I guess, Marx? Not totally sure on this classification but also am not as knowledgable as omniscient Wikipedia.

The singular German book I have read this entire semester is the one I keep talking about for my urban studies class. The first book I put on my shelf, however, was “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx which is incredibly fat and has many more Kapitel (or chapters) than “Stadt-Land-Frust.” I keep bread-crumbing my tutor who is helping me correct my essay for the latter in the sense that it has been three weeks that I have promised her some form of written product and each time I have showed up with nothing. Like a good liberal arts college unemployed humanities students, I am applying Karl Marx’s position against productivity as an excuse for my lack thereof. I am exercising my ‘free will’ and though it does not directly translate in German, I see it as freiwilig.

But my eyes start to glaze when reading about electoral patterns and all the graphs Haffert uses. And the appearance of the world populismus. And reading US headlines that are constantly about who the next presidential candidate will be for each party. And the fact that we even have a bi-partisan system whose illogic makes my head pound harder than hard techno. And the heavy weight and sadness of this year’s Chinese Lunar New Year being marked with insensible violence and tragedy. The number of festivities turned tragic by gun violence in the US is unbelievable and senseless. Growing up with this as a reality and being so sensitised to the occurrence has made my generation, I think, lose a bit of faith in voting systems and the ceiling for change in the US system. It also brings into the question of what ‘choice’ even means when people start to disagree with each other not just conceptually, but destructively, about what the meaning of ‘choice’ or ‘freedom’ is. The university’s celebration was so joyful on Wednesday, with more than 40 other students packed into a room eating dumplings and Chinese snacks, a very funny powerpoint presentation, and a qixian-qin performance. To see a celebration on such a bigger scale in a community such as Monterey Park be defined by a shooting is just…I don’t even know what to say.

In regards to Andrea’s visit, we cooked quite a bit of good food at home and walked around the city all day looking at different neighbourhoods. We stumbled upon some cool art and near the posh downtown (surprisingly!) and some funky old German names names in the Ohlsdorf graveyard and although she didn’t say it, I know me stopping to read all the plaques on the wall and statues and spouting fun history facts constantly was probably not her first-choice. I made the joke that I don’t even recognise myself at all as anymore because my childhood self thought nonfiction was for boring non-creative people, lawyers were snakes and that was the singular career off the table, and that history buffs were anti-social and bad with people. Judgemental, I know. And I know that techno deserves judgement, but I decided to drag myself and Andrea to Uebel & Gefährlich for the novelty of it. I was also enticed by the DJs playing including one called KRL MX, but getting there we realised he wasn’t playing until 3.30am and were exhausted from the night before. Thank you Andrea for being willing to rally and making the trek to watch everyone dressed in all black dance around like they were in the Sims.

The Sauce

I keep running into people at the climbing wall I know at random times. Hamburg is supposed to be really really large but it’s like a collision of worlds at times. As I was putting on my shoes on Monday night, I ran into Marla Schuchter from the exchange in 2017 who I haven’t seen for 6 years or something. We made eye contact and , laughed at the absurdity of the situation especially as I only go in the evenings 1% of the time because it gets so busy. I keep running into the boyfriend of a girl who lives in the Überseekolleg with me and on Sunday, I spotted my math PhD friend standing right next to my British climbing friend and neither of them knew of each other’s existence, but I knew both. Especially awkward since I went on some dates with them before but decided friend-direction was the best direction. What can I say. I am a little bit picky…

Today I am going to stop in Berlin to see my friend Zelda from the 2016 exchange and stay with her until Tuesday afternoon. I am super excited and we will finish the TV series, “High Fidelity” with Zoë Kravitz that I got hooked on back in September and now Zelda is. Honestly, maybe that is the ground for her letting me stay over…but every time Kravitz breaks the third wall in an episode, I must keep binge watching.

Andrea and I talked about the idea of ‘quirks’ and how her professor in Copenhagen asked all the students what their quirks were the first day. I suppose I have many as you have already deduced (a fear of protein insufficiency) but the one that came to the top of my head as she and I had brunch was the inability to order from the menu, especially when it comes to eggs. Normally I panic order when I am overwhelmed by the choices and panic when someone asks me even in English about “How do you want your eggs done?” I am mortified. A menu that not only has the million types of ways eggs can be cooked, but is in German? My worst nightmare. I could easily deduce some types: gekochtes Ei = boiled egg, pochiertes Ei = poached, but why in the world are fried eggs called Spiegelei when they look nothing like a mirror???Confused with a capital C.

Mystery Meat

• In Tanger, Morocco there was a French poem right outside the lighthouse. Eleanor elegantly summed up the content: The birds are flying into danger and the lighthouse keeper likes the birds. And now the birds are gone and the lighthouse keeper is distraught. So he turns the lighthouse fire off and then ships crash. All for the birds. I wonder if he thought about it though as he ate some turkey or chicken sandwiches and as the French do, some foie gras.