Bonn, Germany



The only two public bathrooms in Bonn I have visited in this first month have special lights installed to prevent mainline injections. One’s in the university palace, the other under the train station, both flooded totally with the same radioactive glow of blue light that leaks through the doorway gaps. The whole idea is that this blue ligh reflects off the skin and blinds the addict’s eyes from tracing the oxygen rich veins down his or her arm. Looking at the mirror in these bathrooms will hollow your skin to a dull milk color and make you look for only a second that you’re the one who’s been foiled again by German anti-drug techniques.

I go back after this pause to the room where a 100+ group of Program students from the far east and the far west were received to learn how to navigate a webpage for course registration for international classes, all of us now with one-month’s experience in Bonn. One month ago, we all were in this same room watching another bilingual presentation in German and English with the windows open to the evergreen, manicured, and trash-free lawn, after just being received in the central court of the palace in which Kaisers of the disintegrated German history were also once received. There’s no ceremony like the one in my head with the horns and complexly dressed ladies overlooking from open windows. We’re clustered and fragmented, all remotely similar in clothes, but already blindly picking who we’re going to be best friends with for the next month of the introduction course, which is now over. I picked a girl, Sam, with eccentric antique class and a 6’6’’ man who picked up a nickname, Buffalo Dan, immediately on arrival. This is because he is from Buffalo, where the people, according to Buffalo Dan wear sweat pants and eat chicken wings all day. He’s told me twice about a story he’s been trying to finish about a cat that gets stuck on the moon but finds it better and wants to stay. The other in the circle was a girl who many have not seen in weeks. It’s rumored that she wants to be a German teacher but hates Germany and lays in bed for days only skyping her boyfriend in America, waiting for our departure day. The German past tense of skyped is geskyped.

In the long presentation hall of today, the view to the Rhein is again just out of reach, and the international staff draws the billowing peach curtains which run the 6-meter-high windows, leaving the windows open for a good chill. It’s dark so that we clearly see for the second time this month the mood graph. And I prove to myself that my mood meter is haywire. The Mood Curve is a rollercoaster of a chart in the PowerPoint presentation. Spanning the whole experience of a semester, it presents the whole group with their emotions: how they’ll probably feel for the next five months, so as to tell us don’t worry when you feel bad, feel like you don’t belong, feel like you’ve made a mistake, feel set back years, feel misunderstood for walking, feel like there was never any reason for you to leave, feel like you're stepping on flowers when you’re in a group with eight other Americans you have to take the bus with to class, feel bad when you finally get used to it and then have to go back home, how you feel when your memories of home grow stark, linear, and infinitely nowhere, how you feel when the present makes you tired and forgetful, how you feel when a foreign eye becomes a monster that is out for your soul, how you feel when you’d rather be deaf then here a word you don’t understand, how you feel when the ground beneath you sways and dances you like an exotic dream, how you feel when you hear a voice you’ve never heard, how feel when you finally get to see how it ought to be. It rises and sinks past days specified by our excursions, the highest being the day we tasted six glasses of wine in a basement. The next slide on the first day was the one where they talked about beer. Today is the lowest point on the curve. I know that the most of the students from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan don’t know English or German well at all. The Chinese do, though.

The class breakfast this morning with Frau Paust, whose resemblance to my mother is something I sometimes brag about, also marks the end of the first month. Last night I was told by the friends I’ve made how easy I am to embarrass, how often I just need to let go, because after all, I’m in some place I’ve never been. This morning she asked why I was always so afraid. I explained away my fear of surface relationships, something she noted was nearly impossible to pass in five month’s time. This is an especially difficult task, and I explain to her the American ideal of Study Abroad, the experience of endless befriending, endless minutes of sheer shock from the fun that comes with leaving America for change. But now I’m excited. Tomorrow I am going by bus (German trains are too expensive) to Berlin to see Sarah, whose year-long absence from home breaks hearts in Kansas, whose earned respect is expressed through long sighs of friends at home who need to see her now, but who I get to see.

On the plane here I watched the night as I was hurled into the future to find myself reverted to a child-like status. Being abroad is turning back a clock but drinking more. A balance made nearly impossible by not being able to communicate to anyone but people of the same status.

I crept to the kitchen late one night to open the door with the same involuntary embarrassment I with which I take every step on this land. I opened to the door to a dark room with a dark sofa and the dull outline of a figure in the chair. This pause would have lasted ages and likely been forgotten had the man in the chair in the dark not gently told me to come in. I gestured to the light switch and with minimal German requested that I flip it on. He was there on the phone making small Cameroonian French noises into the microphone. I avoided contact and swigged from a cardboard juice container. I still question whether this looks barbaric as it does when anyone else but you notices it. This could or could not be a sign of American upbringing. This question becomes a clout of worry that seems at a constant glandular drip on in the frontal lobe. This then makes it very hard to not be anonymous where ever you decide to place yourself.

Naoya is a Japanese student with loud camouflage and thick denim pants. His face looks rendered. His hair is buzzed and mowed with asymmetrical patterns across his temples, where his smile can reach when he laughs. But with a blink and a look back, his mouth is closed and stern. One day in class, after he spent the last night with his razor, he stood up to present to the class over Japanese religions in 15 minutes. Frau Paust sprang up and waddled over to grip his head and gaze at the two and half or so lighting bolts cut out of his thin whiskery head. She explained the dangers this symbol and the SS, which would possibly make him the wrong friends. Always in fun she has to explain, but being a German, she had to tell him to change it. After class he went home and made a few more cuts in with the same erratic gestures and it came out looking like bows, his head wrapped like a present. Naoya is now gone, having only stayed in Germany for one month. After visiting Berlin, all he could say about it was that is was very, very sad. I will remember the day I walked by the giant lawn in front of the palace, explaining to him in broken German the feelings of smoking pot, aided by the wobbling of my head, which he repeated and smiled to his temples.

The Cameroonians, Dany and Erik, may or may or may not live together in the same room. This has been a common question among the American girl across the hall and me. They walk in and out of the door at different times, are often together, and are often in the same room. These rooms are very small and built for one. If they do live together, an amazing sense of personal space these men must have. One is taller, smiley, and sings deeply throughout the halls. He sings Lady Gaga very deeply. I cannot escape a discussion over her, but my opinions are forever concealed and irrelevant to this man. The other never shows his teeth and speaks English with demand. They question why Americans learn another language. He does have a point. It is mostly in jest, why we are here. Sam from Michigan is having one big adventure just across the hall. I later learned that Erik studies mechanical engineering and left to go to Frankfurt to study. They were indeed living together. I danced at an small African club with him and other sturdy Cameroonians and Tunisians on the other side of the Rhein. Inside was a humble portal to world under think sand colored arches and mirror in which everyone saw themselves. Ben from Wisconsin was told, “You must show America your dancing.”

We arrived later that night a Turkish all-night restaurant, one of thousands across Germany that sells very cheap lamb or chicken sandwiches. When Americans pronounce this word is sounds like doner. After ordering we sat and watched Lady Gaga on the television screen. This lasted a time that does not matter to anyone any more. Behind me were two track jacket college students with their faces in the steaming lamb meet and onions. He yelled at me to see who we were, European exchange students or Americans.I told him who, and my friends walked out as I lingered around to see what he had to say. He seem to refuse to accept the Americans girls' hilarious surprise that when he studied in Albany, shit-town U.S.A, as he called it, he would tell girls to this hilarious surprise that he spoke more than one language. I told him it was a big country. His friend told me they were drunk. I told them I was here to study the German translation of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I asked his friend if he'd heard, and he said, "Yes! The new Dostoevsky!" I was missing my bus and quickly hurried out to the sight of the sloppier one, the one who studied in America, pumping his fist forward in the air and chanting "America!"

Before I left for Germany I pulled up a satellite’s eye view of Bonn and the surrounding area. At the same altitude, I then looked at Lawrence. Kansas City is in the Netherlands. This is also to where a students from Chicago, a neurosciences major who loves to write stuff, escaped during our first excursion, which was two busloads full of students. Soon the program will be over and the Americans will be let off a leash to wander this dense country with almost no room to spare. No room in the people’s head for curiosity, at least to anyone but the pretty American girl glasses across the hall. I have not been lost yet.

I am only a stray who only wishes to not cause a nuisance. I’ve spent time wanting to fit in but never sticking. My tactile nature has been reduced to stomach pains in the morning and mud on the paths around the lawns in front of the palace that is now the University’s main building. A Japanese girl whom I've not talked to besides a few greeting with is someone who I know I can identify with. Talking with Sam, the word she came up with was scared. She searched some more, but yes it was indeed scared.

I’ve seen four very old churches, two central shopping districts with the same cobble stone streets. The people cling in groups and remember silently, talking mostly of food.

Sarah, with her first blog post, put "settling-in" in those quotes.

I can't wait to see her.