Deleted scenes

When I arrived in October in Freiburg to my bare and empty bedroom, I got depressed. I mused glumly the way I muse glumly almost every time I move house: that my living standards have plummeted, and that my personal comfort has reached its all-time low. So my floormate Achim (who felt a bond with me because he'd visited New Zealand) took me to IKEA. We bought me a carpet and drawers and duvet and hangers. And curtains. Because I hated my curtainless blind-less windows and felt as if everyone was staring in at me. More precisely, we bought material and curtain-rings and a curtain-rod, and I sewed it in to curtains.

A month later, someone mentioned casually that the shutters on their window were stiff. I asked myself what shutters these were, and later examined my window more carefully. It turned out that I had window shutters too -- it was just that they were the clever German sort that roll down the outside when you twist a little stick on the inside, and I'd never even noticed them. They were wonderful. But I didn't want to look oafish. So I went sour-grapes, and let on that I'd spent the six hours sewing curtains not because I didn't know about the wonderful window shutters, but because I didn't like them.

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Over lunch one day in the university cafeteria, some of my classmates started laughing in a not-too-malevolent way about our differential geometry lecturer, who was Australian, and sometimes while lecturing twisted up his German words in little ways like pronouncing the German word "Mannigfaltigkeit" [English "manifold"] as "Mannifoldikeit". After they pointed it out to me, I started noticing it too. Then I started noticing the little half-giggle that went around the class each time it happened. (Deep down, Germans are proud of how difficult their language is.) Then, for camouflage, I started joining in occasionally too.

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I found myself in Rome one January Sunday morning, prying open a heavy door in a tall windowless wall of a big blocky building on a sidestreet, and discovering inside a Baroque church, just as a random website had promised me the night before. Moreover, it was a romantic decaying Baroque church, with sixth-century foundations and an interior by a famous seventeenth-century architect called Francesco Borromini and peeling gold-leaf curlicues all over the walls. And, moreover, it was a tiny romantic decaying Baroque church, just big enough for the twenty nuns who were seated hymn-singing at the front and the nine parishioners who eventually gathered for morning Mass and for us.

I found it fascinating, and beautiful, and also a little sad. The nuns were subdued, and their singing wavering; their faces were hard to read. Altogether I couldn't help thinking that nowadays being a nun -- or, at least, being a nun, and maintaining your belief in the importance of what you do, without the constant external reassurance you would have had from the calling five hundred years earlier (back when admiration for nuns was widespread and passionate, and convents were very prosperous) -- must be sometimes a difficult business.

After the service, one of the nuns stayed behind to show the old church to two little boys who'd been brought by their father.

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Late the last night of term, I was out in town with friends, and we were cold and decided to go hang out at one of their apartments. So we separated to go pick up our bicycles from where we'd parked them, and met up again in town centre. Then we all cycled out to Sarah's through the dark empty streets: fast and smooth and quiet and swerving round each other. Like geese in a flock. Or witches on broomsticks.

Rosenmontag

"What's the German word for 'parade'?" I asked my floormate Max.


"Parade," he replied.

Monday morning, maths department

I've been keeping quiet about it here lately -- but German's hard, and keyword-spotting has its limits. Survival doesn't necessarily entail competence. And of course this blog thrives on total honesty. So, to destroy any illusions that have formed . . . well, I suspect that when speaking German I still typically sound like a cross between a caveman and a person with ADD.

Like, with a classmate yesterday,

Clemens: Hey, have you seen David?

me: Heya. Who? What?

clem: David, you know, he's in the differential geometry course too. I was just looking for him there.

me: Diffgeo? Oh, yes, I know I saw you in there a second ago, but that was just to hand in my assignment. I'm actually skipping the lecture there today to go finish my model theory assignment for later this afternoon.

clem: Ah. No, I'm looking for David. He's IN the differential geometry course. He's in representation theory with us too. You know David, you speak to him sometimes, don't you?

me: Ohhh -- yes, I know I sometimes speak up in class in representation theory. I know it's a pain for everyone else, since my German's so bad. But it's a hard course, and I need to ask questions sometimes, even if it takes the tutor ages to work out what I'm trying to say . . . . I hope it doesn't get too much on your nerves . . . .

clem: No, don't worry about it. But it's David I'm after just now. You know each other, don't you? He told me your last name, it's very funny!

me : Aha! Yes, my last name . . . yes, I've been getting teased about it for years.

clem: Haha. I'm not surprised. But, er, anyway, I should go find David. You haven't seen him, I guess? See you later.

me: Oh -- David, you say? No, I haven't seen him. Ciao then.

But I promise, my comprehension has been getting better. For example, it's good enough now to occasionally overhear things in the supermarket. Like, last night,

woman whose purchase included several kilograms of birdseed: Aagh, these seeds are spilling everywhere!

check-out lady: Here, wrap up those packets in this bag. You don't want to walk through town looking like Hansel and Gretel, do you?

Getting colder

Today -- very briefly -- it snowed! It was midafternoon; I was sitting in the maths library reading about cotangent bundles; the rain suddenly seemed rather loud, and I looked out the window and saw it was hail. A couple of minutes later the hail turned white and slow and silent, and (abandoning all pretence of work) I watched it drift down. But before it had lasted long enough to stop melting on the ground, it had stopped snowing altogether, and we were back to our long rainy week.

When it started snowing, I'd pointed it out excitedly to the girl sitting next to me in the library, and a conversation of my usual random-chat-with-strangers style ensued: she said things, I listened carefully for key words, and then tried to make replies that would follow sensibly from as many of the things she might have meant as possible. (There's no point asking someone you'll never see again to repeat casual pleasantries.) I'm getting better at the technique; this exchange lasted a good ninety seconds.

I have these sorts of chats fairly frequently. Contrary to popular belief, people seem to strike up conversations with strangers more often in Germany than in nice little friendly New Zealand. Of course it's possible that I'm just more conscious of it here, because of the need to snap to mental attention to understand well enough to reply. But I think the difference is in the reality as well as in my noticing it. I can't remember the last time that a man on an Auckland bus exclaimed to everyone in earshot how crowded it was, or that a woman passing me in a Christchurch supermarket made a comment on the available pasta varieties.

The snow may not be quite here, but winter habits are settling in. My classmate Leander turned up to model theory today with a thermos of tea and the most wonderful sleet-protection hat (the photo's not mine, unfortunately, but it looked almost the same). I find myself reluctant to venture outside, and perhaps everyone else is too. My 9 am lecture today was suspiciously empty. Emily, my Canadian exchange-student buddy, appeared later, just in time for our second class. I reassured her that she wasn't the only truant: "I was the first person to arrive in class this morning," I began, and -- knowing my unpunctual tendencies -- she needed hear no more.

In which our Heroine discovers that her bicycle is rotten to the core

I went to the bicycle collective again yesterday, hoping to fix a stiffness in my bike's joints that made the handlebars very difficult to turn. The problem had developed quite suddenly this week, and I imagined it should be easy enough to fix -- perhaps a bit of grease in the steering mechanism, and then voila! As I wheeled my bike over, I was daydreaming peacefully about how I'd spend the rest of my afternoon.

Alas, crippling rust was discovered in hidden places; fixing the joint turned out to require the total replacement of a small but crucial metal cylinder deep inside my bike's front bar and of two ball-bearing mechanisms, and took three painstaking hours. The bicycle mechanic supervising was the same patient, rather taciturn little man as last time. I'm quite proud of the mess my bike must have been in for the repair to cause him such apparent enjoyment. At any rate, on at least three occasions he made the cheerful discovery that the problem wasn't what he'd thought, but actually something considerably subtler.

His instructions were half in German, half in broken English. I was pleased to find that the mathematical German vocabulary I've been acquiring lately is helpful for bicycle mechanics: such phrases as "straight" and "separating" and "hold fixed" carry over directly. The optimistic meaning of "relatively easily" is also a common feature.

Let them eat cake

No class on Tuesdays. I slept very late, did a little work and then set out in pouring rain to meet a couple of exchange-student friends in town for afternoon tea. Being my kind of girls, they were also happy to have an excuse to eat sweet. We went to a confectionery shop promising "Freiburger Spezialitäten".

Inside it was warm and cramped. There were lace curtains at the windows, wood on the floor, and two stories of small tables well full of (mostly middle-aged and older) patrons. At the counter were shelves and shelves of elegant, and hugely varied, and very complicated, cakes and chocolates. Altogether it felt rather fussy. It was as if everyone involved were trying to rationalise their bestial lust for gluctose, by colluding to make the enjoyment of chocolate a very complex business. Maybe if you construct an elaborate ritual around the eating of sugar you strengthen the psychological barrier against overindulging.

Anyway, we picked out our eats, and found a table upstairs, and passed a happy half-hour or so. Fulfilling a months-old promise to myself, I had a slice of Black Forest cake: layered cream and chocolate, rather fluffier in texture than I expected, and yummy and rich. Mmmmm. It was with difficulty that I brought myself to go back out into the rain.

My dinner later consisted almost entirely of vegetables.

I was mildly disconcerted to hear the pair of elderly women next to us in the café addressing each other as "du". I've gotten used to using the informal German second-person with people my own age, but the formal -- at uni and in offices and shops -- whenever I speak to adults. I suppose it's surprising to remember that grown-ups can have friends, too.

Conversations II

With Anna, a classmate: It's nice that I'm managing to understand the differential geometry lecturer's German. Everyone else in the class is having trouble with it -- he's from somewhere anglophone and has a difficult accent. Of course, my German accent is also often incomprehensible. Maybe the two cancel out.

With Helene, another classmate: I'm from New Zealand? That's interesting. Her flatmate last semester was from New Zealand too -- or at least he claimed to be; there was a rumour that he was actually British. He never spoke to her, so she wouldn't know.

With Max, my floormate, a law student: How many people live in New Zealand? . . . . Oh, that's very sweet. So, er, what are the job opportunities like for [stifled laughter] New Zealand law students?

Today after class I went shopping for a warm winter jacket, having discovered that cycling in a long coat is rather less picturesque than expected. My success was rapid; I wasn't in a mood for deliberation. This weekend I'm going to visit Bad Liebenzell, a small town in the Black Forest about an hour from here.

I shall conclude this post by confirming that yes, everything's better in Germany, even the safe-sex campaigns. (Click to see properly.)

Just procrastination . . . .

No, life's not perfect, even in Germany. Like,

• I split my time between feeling frustrated, because I'm talking in German; feeling guilty, because I'm talking in English; and feeling lonely, because I'm not talking to anyone. It isn't enough to seriously dampen my spirits, but it is enough to make me grateful for the internet and the friendly people who talk to me through the internet.
  
• Work's already plentiful and hard -- though this is of course also a good thing, because it's stimulating. (For you mathematicians, here's a nice problem from my half-finished model theory assignment, due tomorrow: prove that there exist uncountably many linear orderings of a countable set of elements.)

I went out hiking in the Black Forest yesterday with my Canadian exchange-student friend Emily, round Schauinsland, the highest peak. We climbed halfway up, got tired, and wandered back down, feeling decidedly superior to the tourists who were taking the six-minute cable car to the top.

First day of school

At breakfast, I joked to Achim that today would be "der Moment der Wahrheit". The literal English translation is "the moment of truth", and Achim's English is perfect enough for him to know exactly what I meant. But he didn't even laugh. It seems the phrase is used in German too, and so I'd stumbled into idiomatic Deutsch in spite of myself.

So I went happily off to my first day of lectures in Germany, and found that the truth isn't actually that bad. Depending on the clarity of the lecturer's voice, my comprehension can be anywhere from almost everything he (always he, so far) says to almost nothing. And I haven't yet managed to get hold of textbooks. But the blackboard is my saviour. Like in New Zealand mathematics courses, the exposition proceeds in neat "Definition"-"Lemma"-"Corollary"-"Example" format, and everything gets written on the board; once it's there, I can squint and re-read it and mentally translate it at leisure. My other great help is that the German vocabulary used is very limited, and often the same as in English anyway.

So I may spend less time than expected struggling with the language, and be able to devote myself mostly to struggling with the mathematics. The greatest struggling will be with my paper on representations of compact Lie groups. I'm taking it here because nothing much similar's offered in Auckland. Consequently, however, my background in the area is somewhat skimpy.

Lectures are two hours long, with a break of ten or fifteen minutes in the middle. I had three lectures today, and was at uni from nine til six. Class sizes are huge, by New Zealand standards: thirty to sixty students in courses whose Auckland equivalents might have five. In anticipation of German winters, there's a coat rack at the back of every classroom.

There's an lecturer (originally European) in Auckland who's beloved for his habit of washing the blackboard with a bucket of water after every lecture he gives. Here, however, it's the norm. And every lecture room comes equipped with two little thingamabobs: one like a mop, for washing the board, and one like a razor, to scrape off the excess water afterwards. Drips form, and run down the side of the blade-thing as it's pulled across the board, collecting in a long skinny puddle on the floor underneath.

At the end of each lecture there's a round of desk-thumping, to signal applause.

Conversations

With Hans, who lives on my floor in the hostel: The English word "load" is only used in the context of putting stuff onto something portable. You can't load a house, for instance. The corresponding German word is "einladen", but it has no such restrictions. How would you translate into English a German sentence about einladen-ing some furniture into your new home? You'd have to resort to some generic word like "move".

With Ece, an exchange-student friend from Turkey: Her German got as good as it is from attending at a German-language high school. No, they're not at all unusual in Turkey. Weak Turkish high-school students go to trade schools; good ones go to grammar schools, where they get prepared for university. The language of instruction in a grammar school is always something other than Turkish. There's an exam at the end of primary school that determines which type you'll be sent to.

But the exam decides not only what type of high school, but also exactly which -- the best students go to the English-language schools, the next best to the German ones, the next best to French and the very worst good students to (that natural language for slackers,) Spanish.

With Achim, another floor-mate: Yes, Germany has a lot more smokers than New Zealand. (Achim lived in New Zealand last year for six months.) Maybe it's because the New Zealand government (and the Australian and American and British ones too) is a lot more agressively anti-smoking than European ones. The frequency of corner cigarette-machines (like chocolate or Coke machines in New Zealand) might also have something to do with it. Constant temptation's hard to resist.

I also played Mafia in German yesterday night. (This is a cult math-student game of psychological manipulation. At an IMO, you will usually play your first Mafia round within five hours of arrival. It should come as no suprise to hear that my Mafia games here arose during Math Orientation.) I learned a few useful German words ("dead", "detective", "murderer"), but otherwise understood almost nothing.

I was by necessity one of the silent players I always despised in English-language Mafia, who vote when needed but never say a word. On the other hand, it was a great chance for me to test the folk theorem, often cited by those about to make improbable accusations, about it being "not people's words that matter, just their faces and voices . . . ." (Result: It's balderdash.)

End of the good times

The dull fortnight spent navigating German educational bureaucracy has had some use, it seems: International Orientation began today, and I could understand the speakers close to half of the time. I'm now freshly stocked with data on the population of the university (25,000), the major sources of international students (China, Bulgaria, the US), the locations of free campus internet (library, departmental labs) and the price of the university cinema (1.50 €). They had free pretzels at orientation, too!

At the moment, my other metric for the quality of my German is how often I understand when a stranger makes some quick casual comment. I still usually don't, but I picked up one today ("that cash machine is out of order") and even managed to reply.

I caught an early train back to Freiburg this morning from Paris, where I'd stayed over the weekend for what will be my last Touristic Adventure for a while. I saw all sorts of marvellous things --

• a neighbourhood full of streets named after mathematicians
• the France-England RWC semi-final, projected onto a huge screen behind the Eiffel Tower, in a thousands-strong French mob first attentive, then impatient, then sullen
• Van Goghs and Cézannes, in real life
• a high-end department store being ransacked by autumn-season-sale Paris crowds.

I feel tired and frivolous from all the sightseeing, though, and am rather looking forward to lectures and security and structure.

Bonus! insider travel tip: To avoid paying necessary surcharges, feign sleep when the train's ticket inspector passes your row.

Freiburg (Scene-setting)

Church bells and a celebratory (virtual) cigarette: I'm in France for the first time! I crossed into Strasbourg for the weekend, motivated by two free weeks before lectures start and by the France-NZ rugby quarter-final yesterday evening. For the obligatory remark on the quality of net cafe, let me note that the rates are similar to Germany and much lower than in Austria, but that the keyboards are like nothing I've seen.

The two free weeks may in fact be not quite as free as I'd been hoping, thanks to the sort of German bureaucracy that requires foreign students to visit (and queue at, and present a respectable facade in broken German at) some seven different government offices before obtaining a university enrolment. Clever me, I've raced through five in the four days I've spent so far in Freiburg. But everything shuts on the weekends, so I feel justified in taking off for now.

The rugby I saw last night in a smoky bar somewhere by the river, packed with French twenty-something guys watching the rugby and French twenty-something girls watching their boyfriends. The guy on my left was reading a comic book. The girls on my right were drinking beer from shapely things that looked like oversized cocktail glasses. The cheers at the second French try and at the end were matched only by the gales of laughter at the haka. For the sake of my mourning friends back home, I'll say no more.

So I'll spend some time talking about my week in dear little Freiburg, where I'll be studying for the next five months but which (due to lack of net access) I've so far had no chance to introduce.

It's a town of 200,000 people in the bottom-left corner of Germany on the map, close to Switzerland and closer to France.

It's very flat, with lots of trees and grass and a river running through the middle.

It's in a valley, and if you walk for twenty minutes* in any direction the town suddenly stops and steep hills covered in forest suddenly start.

(*I speak from experience. I managed to arrive in town on a public holiday I'd never heard of. Absolutely everything was closed, including the office at my residence which would let me move in, so I had a lot of free time to wander round.)

It's very sunny.

It's surprisingly dense, with lots of people and lots of cars and even more bicycles.

It has a university which is celebrating its 550th anniversary, and is a thorough enough student town to have cheap beer gardens and Italian restaurants and ice-cream parlours.

I have a large and very empty room to myself, and share a kitchen and bathrooms with a dozen other mostly German students, most of whom haven't yet moved in. It's one floor of one building of a giant three-thousand-resident student village set in a park with nice woods and pond twenty minutes from city centre.

I've spent most time so far with the other exchange students (mostly European -- the Americans can be heard, sometimes, but they don't turn up to outings) and with my housemates. People are friendly and intelligent, so far as my limited German can judge. My limited German's rapidly improving, from necessity.

I got complimented on it on Friday night, in fact -- "much better than most English people's, you can actually be understood".

Anyway, time to go see some Strasbourg sights.

Off the track

I went yesterday to Baden, a small town just south of Vienna, for a day of what turned out to be mostly sight-non-seeing.

Enterprising second-century Romans had turned the place into a thermal resort (hence the name, "baden" being German for "bathe"), but (Misadventure the First) the famous hot pools proved elusive. The closest I got was a swimming pool called "römertherme".

In Misadventure the Second, I took the bus out towards the mammoth Cistercian abbey Heiligenkreuz (discovered on Wikipedia). Misled by a highway sign, I panicked and got off too early, finding myself ten kilometres from anywhere in a stretch of healthy but exceptionally boring Austrian forest, with an hour and a half to wait for the next bus back.
Serves me right for going somewhere not in Lonely Planet.

It was a nice enough town, though, with an averagely-pretty (my standards are rising) church and some parks and a large oldish central area full of old shops. My German went down better there than in Vienna, too, and I had several quite coherent conversations. From twelve til two there was what seemeed to be an Austrian version of a siesta -- all the little one-man shops shut, and the streets emptied, and mushrooms of people appeared in cafes.

I went back to Bratislava yesterday evening to say goodbye to Eyal and Lauren and pick up the luggage I'd left with them. I'm taking an overnight train tonight to Munich, and from there to the university town in south-west Germany where I'll be studying for the next few months.

Vienna, in Ernst

The third-worst part of speaking a foreign language are the moments, several sentences into a so-far successful conversation, when you discover you've no idea what's just been said, and are forced to break the other person's illusion that you comprehend.

The second-worst part are the occasional realisations, midway through a sentence you started confidently, that you don't know the translation for the most important word.

The absolutely worst part is the dismay of finding after what you thought was quite a fluent sentence that the other person hasn't understood a thing.

Today, being in Vienna alone, I started trying seriously to speak German. I had a couple of great, formulaic conversations that could have been lifted straight from a German 101 textbook, and not-so-great ones of the types listed above beyond number. It was rather discouraging . . . .

At least I've a whole three weeks before I start attending German lectures.

Vienna sightseeing was complicated by self-imposed restrictions on language, by difficulty in navigation (the streets go in odd directions), and by having almost no cash on me. In the morning I got lost in the hobby-shop district, and saw all sorts of fantastic shops selling Turkish carpets and model trains and used stamps. In the afternoon I got (mostly) bored in the Museum of Natural History. In the evening I attended Mass in the big cathedral, relishing the sit-down and the nice slow clear German narration, and then happened to run in to a free organ concert on the way home.