Arrivals and Departures.

Entry II- Day 3
8:22
In the middle of a dirty kitchen

Saturday morning here already, and I’m wasting it by quibbling over what I should be writing about. At the moment, due to the conjunction of several inauspicious circumstances, I unfortunately have only two hours and 53 minutes left to write, sort of. After checking in here at our dorms in the Hafenstrasse area on Thursday, I wasted no time in frying the only adapter we had by trying to plug in a miniature travel size power strip into it. I blame a rather acute case of jet lag for the fact that I forgot to check the voltage beforehand. (Even though I didn’t have a rather acute case of jet lag doesn’t mean I won’t blame it all the same) First on my list of grievances against the country: they killed my plug. However, it took us until Friday afternoon sometime around four to think to check the fuse box to ascertain why our lights weren’t working, although Nick Borsch was the one who thought of that. Have I not mentioned him yet? He was the one who was supposed to find Chris and I at the train station. But we’ll deal with one ignoble catastrophe at a time. So then, now we have power, seeing as I’m currently “borrowing” Stephanie’s adaptor whenever she isn’t using it, yet I still can’t post anything online. Out of the six wireless networks I’ve detected here, none can be accessed without a password string that is at least 26 characters long. This outrage quite possibly would have incited bloody mutiny among the ranks, although everyone was far too tired or far too drunk to care at the time.

Speaking of which, the rest of our group has now been assembled. A quick list and summary: Me, Josh Nederveld, the fearless and dashingly handsome leader of the group, a peerless navigator around the streets and alleys of Mannheim, mainly because I was the only one who was completely sober at the time.

Chris, roommate. Stance towards the German language: indifferent. Accidentally bought the only alcohol-free beer in Mannheim Saturday night. That’s really all we know at the moment.

Fellow floor-mates in Building 37: Stephanie, Katy, and Alexa. Stephanie and Katy are in the same room, Alexa, on her lonesome. Katy, who showed us to operate the most amazing windows in the world that rotate independently on two separate hinges, can be described with a line from Billy Joel’s Piano Man: “She’s quick with a joke/or a “light up your smoke”/but there’s someplace that she’d rather be.” And that someplace is Amsterdam. The defense plan while in that far-off burg was left to Stephanie (interesting fact: cannot ride a bike, even while sober), who hit upon the brilliant strategy of telling long, convoluted stories usually involving trans-genders to the attackers, in the thought that their assailants, out of desperation, would slit their own throats rather than be forced to listen to the end. She later became the appointed taste-tester for the group, boldly opening suspicious containers in the fridge and rooting through cupboards looking for clean dishes. Chris and I encouraged her sycophantically in her quest from our positions of safety on the couch, yet she was largely unsuccessful.

Christina talks loud, but has traveled much in Deutschland, doubtless being despised by the natives wherever she goes by the tendency her voice has to bounce off tall buildings.

Cameron and Shannon are in the Building 43, the farthest down, and the only one that we suspect has a laundromat. Many a quest has been undertaken in hopes of locating one around here somewhere, and while I could be little more than indifferent on the matter, the womenfolk are getting a bit hysterical, as if walking to the nearest Münzwäscherei is far too much to bear. “Oh, deary me! Whatever shall we do?”

Cameron is perhaps the only botany major on the trip, and I have yet to understand why he is here. He practically wet himself with delight when we found wild blackberries in the shrubs near the Luisenpark, which I have yet to visit, but has given us vital advice concerning the mortality rate of the bamboo stalks on our kitchen table. Speaking of the kitchen: if there was ever any one room capable of destroying the idea of the German obsession with orderliness, it’s this one. Exhibit A: The Cupboard of Terror, shown here in a photograph before it was removed by the HAZMAT division of German civil services.

Shannon is due to be a senior in the fall at UF, and probably would be enjoying her stay in Germany more if she weren’t allergic to it. Near-sightedness runs in her family, which explains why she confused a bridge for a bus on the first night here. (Still, that wasn’t nearly as bad as Max mistaking a man for the most beautiful women he’d ever seen when part of the group accidentally wound up in a gay bar Saturday night) She makes up for it by drinking large tankards of Viking beer.

There are others that may be of note at a later date, of course, but as of yet have not proved their merit to be included in these annals, for such diverse reasons as a drab personality to the fact that their demeanor vexes me.

Now that the painfully excruciating manifest has been compiled, it is necessary to backtrack in our tale for a moment. I feel as if I am acting the role of a very indifferent tour guide to the reader in my method of recounting my experiences here, yanking them by the hand suddenly and dragging them from the past to the future, stopping in the present for an indeterminate amount of time, and then abandoning them in the ghastly imperfect subjunctive. Therefore, although you may fall by the wayside, fear not, for the road will become smooth once more. Step lively then.

I disembarked from the plane at 7:30, stepping into the frigid air of Frankfurt am Main. I quickly filed into the waiting buses with the rest of the occupants of the flight. I stood in the middle of the bus, the accordion-style part, which rotates when the bus turns. It was only about one or two klicks (short for kilometers) to the main customs terminal, but it still took ten minutes to get there.

During that time, our orientation to the heavily practiced art of driving in Deutschland was completed. I would compare it to a Jackson Pollock painting: it’s random, confusing, not very well understood, and very colorful at times. As long as you don’t kill or maim anyone, almost anything is allowed. The horn and siren are used in the place of swearing; they aren’t used as often, but when they are, it is a command, not merely a suggestion. I made these observations while trying to refrain from knocking into the people next to me while in the accordion-hell of the middle as the bus lurched from side to side. Emerging slightly seasick a few minutes later, I stumbled off to passport control. The procedure for passport control is confusing at first, but for an experienced traveler it is no trouble.

Myself, being an experienced traveler of the world, intuitively came to the conclusion to hand the officer my passport. He glanced at it, glanced at me, stamped it, handed it back, and let me pass. I mumbled my thanks, and stepped into the country. After claiming my bag and putting it in a free luggage cart (first on my list of adulations for the country: free luggage carts), I noticed the sign for customs control. “Blast,” I thought quietly inside my head, “apparently this isn’t over yet.” So I went through the aisle that read “Nothing to declare,” and stepped out into the terminal, where I found a group of roughly two hundred people awaiting me. Well, perhaps not awaiting me, since no one shouted out in recognition. I quickly sought shelter beside a vending machine and joined them in waiting. I grabbed Chris as he passed me 20 minutes later.

At first, I had assumed that he had exited before me, but I soon discovered that I was destined to be the first anywhere on this trip. We soon stumbled our way to the Flughafen Fernbahnhof, the long-distance train station on one edge of the terminal. After sitting around on the mezzanine level for a while, we went down to the tracks below, and then boarded the IC train when it arrived.

Regardless of any vain attempts or superfluous depiction, no one who has never seen or ridden on a German Inter-City can fully understand the thrill of that first voyage. The train itself, a gigantic mechanical beast, blows into the station and screeches to a halt in a way that can be only be described as self-assured, almost cocky. It calmly waits there, patiently beckoning you aboard. Yet it is also graceful, the well-drawn lines giving it a touch of beauty mixed with raw power. It will not often wait much longer after all are aboard—the open rails call to it, as the sky calls a bird. It may seem patient in leaving the station, but once free of that noisome cage it can once again run wild, bounded only by the tracks upon which it races. The rails below pass in a blur, sluicing apart and together, converging and separating faster than the eye can see.

As such did the time between Mannheim and Frankfurt quickly vanish, and soon Chris and I debarked from the train. We exited the Hauptbahnhof, or the main train station, and began dragging our luggage in the direction of the University. I wasn’t sure what we would do when we got there, other than ask for help from the receptionist. This was before I realized that Germans don’t believe in receptionists. When I grasped this concept, we had already stopped in every building with “Universität Mannheim” on the side and were soaked from the first of many, many rainstorms during our stay. Almost a week here, and every day it’s been either overcast, rainy, cloudy, or some mixture of the three. I feel like I’m in Seattle. Everyone else is irritable, whereas I couldn’t be any happier. This, coincidentally, also irritates them. Almost everything irritates them, it seems. Back on our quest, I finally caught the attention of a Japanese German exchange student who understood English fairly well enough to guide us to the Akademisches Auslandsamt, or the foreign student office, where I stumbled over enough German phrases to let them know that we were American exchange students. So they put us in a side room, offered us food and drink, and let us wait until Nick came to pick us up and take us to the dorms.

Our dorms, located one bus stop past Teufelsbrücke, (The Devil’s Bridge) are far from luxurious, but safe to live in. The industrial view towards Ludwigshafen and the East German style of our dorms is a sharp contrast from the rest of the city- it feels more or less like something out of the poetry of T.S. Eliot. During the first few minutes we tested the electrical parameters and successfully blew out my surge protector. There was also a nasty cabinet, of which I have included a picture. I tried cleaning it somewhat, but gave up halfway through. Thus my first meal in a foreign land was a dinner of two raw brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts while looking out upon a glorious sunset. There were still problems to solve, challenges to be met, I thought, but those could wait until tomorrow…

Sorry for such a long post this time. I promise more brevity for my next.