The DDR, Thüringen, and Jena

While all the photos I've taken over the last month upload (it's going to take a while) I have some time to write about the region in which I am and have been. One thing that I'm perhaps counterintuitively glad about is spending my year in the east, the former DDR (or GDR in English). It was not so long ago that Germany was in two separate parts, and most of the adults here remember what it was like with the wall up. This gives me an opportunity to learn about how it was to live under Soviet rule without having to go to one of the real eastern bloc countries. I hear Georgia sucks this time of year.

The physical reality of Communist rule is really brought home by the apartment blocks that dot many of the cities in east Germany. Stendal is a perfect example of this; I don't have any pictures unfortunately, but I figure most of you know what I'm talking about when I say 'Communist apartments'. They're big, brown, concrete, square, and oppressively unattractive. This style of architecture exists in the US as well, but only in the east was it elevated to what you might call an anti-art form. The buildings are all over and tell you exactly what they think of you and any concept of individuality that you might have - they actively mock creativity and beauty. A decade after the wall came down, a building called Der Grune Zitadelle (The Green Citadel) was built in Magdeburg (a large urban center composed mostly of communist style buildings) for the purpose of mocking the architecture right back - it is painted entirely in pink and looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. You will see the pictures I took of it when I feel like showing them to you.

DDR paraphernalia of all sorts are a fairly common sight around here, the most common being the Trabie, a natty looking car which one would have had to wait about 17 years on a registry to recieve. You can't miss them; they look like remnants from the 1940s and from what I hear they drive like it too. The other thing that a visitor will almost certainly run into is Vita-Cola, a communist soda that was so popular that it has survived to this day in a capitalist Germany. It's sort of like someone poured a noticable amount of Sprite into a bottle of Coke... it's not bad, although the other American students I met didn't like it.

Thüringen is most well-known for its bratwurst, which is widely held to be the best in the world. It is also a land of mountains and valleys, much of a welcome change from the fairly flat Sachsen-Anhalt. It reminds me of the Black Hills in South Dakota, although lakes are sparser here. There are tons of trees - where I live is more or less surrounded by forest - and of course castles. There's also a wine city not far from here called Freyburg. I haven't tried the wine but I have heard it is good.

Jena itself is an industrial town, renowned for its universities and for the Zeiss optical plant. These two form the backbone of the city, a fairly large one which has a modern center surrounded by old villages. Jena proper was more or less destroyed in WWII, so the city center is mostly new while the surrounding area was mostly left intact, including the area in which I live, a small village called Ammerbach. Like any European city, Jena is compact - I live on the outskirts but I can walk into the middle of the city in under 45 minutes and fairly inexpensive buses are constantly running people in and out. It also happens to be built into the surrounding hillsides, making it a totally beautiful city to bike and walk around. It is pretty much the best and I pity people who have not been here. However, if you happen to be one of those people you can check out the photos I will be uploading at http://www.flickr.com/photos/30050210@N06/ or you can choose not to do so and break my little heart. It doesn't matter. Really.

Brötchen/Kaliberg

Just in case my last post seemed a bit down on the Germans about the A/C thing, I figure I should list a couple things that are unbelievably awesome here. First off, the bread. Dear lord, the bread. We have bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and it's some amazing stuff, but to me the holy grail is Brötchen (common nouns in German are capitalized - how cool is that). Mostly a breakfast food, Brötchen is what Americans would call a dinner roll except that it's generally much better than our rolls, you buy it at an actual bakery (they have bakeries here!) instead of in a plastic bag at Sam's Club, and when it is served for breakfast it is socially acceptable to smear semisolid chocolate and copious amounts of butter on it and then eat it. The Germans are my kind of people.

The other amaing thing here is what locals seem to call the Kaliberg (spelling may be ridiculously wrong), what looks like a mountain on the horizon of our small town. This part of Germany is called Sachsen-Anhalt and it is known to be flatter than Minnesota - I had a feeling something was awry with the mountains in the background. I turned out to be right. The Kaliberg is actually an enormous pile of salt. I don't mean a fairly large 20 foot high by 20 foot long pile of salt. This thing looks to be the hight of Devil's Tower and about a quarter mile long. I didn't know this much salt existed all together anywhere in the world. Every time I see it my jaw hangs open a little bit.

Óh yèäh, and yöu cán dö stüff like thís with the keyböärds here.

Getting there is half the battle

There was no shortage of stories about the exchange from the counselors, and one which stands out to me in particular was one about waiting in a German airport for six hours right after a seven hour flight. I particularly hoped that this story would not parallel my own, but no dice. After a flight during which the most eventful happening was me finishing an audiobook I'd been working on for a while and then a layover and then another uneventful flight from Frankfurt to Berlin, the six of us CBYXers who were to stay in and around Stendal were quite ready to have the german experience. Unfortunately, the two kids we had to wait for at the airport missed their flight so our initial german experience was sitting in a Starbucks for five straight hours speaking mostly English.

The main difference between our Starbucks and the Starbucks in Germany is that Starbucks here in Deutschland are not air conditioned. In fact, nothing except for cars come standard with air conditioning. Airports, train stations, Subways (yes, the restaurant), nothing here has A/C. That is not a problem 10 months out of 12. We were unfortunate enough to arrive in late July.

In any case, after our wait at the Berlin airport we hopped a train towards Stendal. In fact, we hopped a train towards a train to Stendal, because we had to make a connection. Each ride lasted around an hour - keep in mind none of us had slept in nearly a full day because our seven hour flight took up an entire night's worth of time. We were pretty beat up. When we finally got to Stendal, we fell into the arms of our host families more out of exhaustion than out of emotional overflow. Nonetheless, it was nice to be here finally. I myself slept from eight that night to noon the next day.

DC trip

It seems a bit anticlimactic to leave everything that you're used to and go to Europe only to find yourself bumming around Washington DC for the better part of a week. However, I ended up finding the four days in DC were actually quite helpful in setting the stage for the year and also in getting to know the other exchangees. We stayed at the 4H center, a hotel-like enclosure with air conditioning, a cafeteria, spotty Wifi and an arcade. Most of our days were spent either in meetings (which were generally helpful but sometimes dragged on a bit - you could feel the wind come out of the room when we were told at the beginning of a meeting at 9 AM that we would pause for lunch at noon) and in the dorm rooms, where we would spend much of our nights not sleeping and hanging out with the alumni chaperones. Although the alums had been on an exchange 2 years ago, none of them were much older than us. We spent the better part of one day on the Hill where we were supposed to meet with senators and representatives - the Minnesota kids managed to get glad-handed by a Coleman staffer but that was about it. At one point another CBYXer and I rode the elevators in a House of Representatives office building for a solid half hour. We had a tour of DC and Arlington, then we went back to the center.

After a very full four days, most of us were quite ready to be in Germany - for some of us, that would take longer than expected...