Freezing Germany

Spending the last month in a relatively large city has made me aware that I seriously lack urban-navigational skills and it is simply unacceptable to carry a compass and a map with you wherever you go. Whenever I want to go somewhere and people tell me that it will take 30 minutes, I plan for an hour and a half because I can NEVER find ANYTHING the first go around. It's not just the public transportation or the fact that many of the buildings look exactly alike that throws me off, but it is also the fact that many of the street names look and sound alike. For example, I was trying to find the Ultimate Frisbee field (located on Schulstrasse) a few weeks ago and during the course of my excursion, I came across: Schulgassestrasse, Schulgutstrasse, Schulgstrasse-Papritz, Schulweg and Schulze-Delitzsch-Strasse. By the time I reached Schulgutstrassse, I could only remember that the name of the street I was looking for started with "Schul." Needless to say, I didn't find the field and then took the wrong bus home. I believe that my lack of city navigation is due to a genetic condition inherited from my mother… A woman who needs to put her head in between her knees and breath into a paper bag if presented with a city's grid plan. Urbanites, we are not.

So I am a member of the TU-Dresden Ultimate Frisbee Team, a sport that I have never really played until now and I'm not very good. While sweating this sport out, I have come across yet another difference between German and American culture and it is: If you are terrible at a sport in America, Americans will go to great lengths in order to not hurt your feelings and will keep you on the team under circumstances like "she has great team spirit," or "she really hustles out there!" Germans, on the other hand, will treat you like Typhoid Mary and would much rather put you down the first chance they get than watch you plague the field with your ineptitude. I'm not making it easy for them to put me down though, because I refuse to sub out! Ha!

I have two tandem partners here in Germany. A tandem partner is someone who is interested in learning your language in exchange for teaching you his or hers. My tandem partners are Thomas and Lisa. Thomas is kind of boring, but Lisa is a riot because she wants to learn American slang (I made her watch The Big Lebowski last week). Anyways, I was talking to Lisa one day about how I'm not used to the cold here and I referred to October as "Octoburrrrr." She told me that I have started to adopt a German sense of humor, which really means: That was not funny.

I'll conclude this long post with a tidbit of German forestry information. I was on a field trip for my Forest Mensuration (Mensuration=measurements, not to be confused with menstruation) class and my professor pointed to an Oak tree and asked us to guess how much it was worth. I guessed 2000 euros, thinking that was way too much, and everyone started laughing at me. My professor then said that it was worth 7-8000 euros because a cubic meter of veneer oak lumber is fairly rare in Germany. That is over 11,000 dollars! Coming from the South-East, I'm not used to those figures.