Noch drei Wochen!
I drink twice as much tea now as I do in the U.S. I’ve even been working on a chart to mark the exponential increase in my consumption. I start my mornings with a black tea (with milk and sugar). I take a tram to school a little after 8am. Class starts at 8:30 and at 10:00 I take my herbal tea with 3-4 cubes of sugar and a snack. After class gets out at 1pm, I head out to find something to eat with my classmates. I have to use some self-control when it comes to iced tea in restaurants. It’s always the worst combination of perfectly-sweetened and overpriced. The days that no school activities are planned, I have nothing planned. My afternoons range from spontaneous gelato and bookstore visits with friends, showing new students the sites, to quiet lunches alone. Wherever I go, I try to remind myself to get some sketching in. When I finally get back to the apartment, I’m often very tired and lightly sunburned. On a productive day, I’ll finish my homework right away. After dinner and some relaxing, I go to bed and look forward to my morning tea.
Having finally passed the halfway mark, I really can’t believe I’ve been here for over a month now. It feels like I’ve been here both a long and extremely short time. I’m comfortable showing new students around, yet there’s still so much of the city and the surrounding area I’ve haven’t seen. I’m also surprised by where and when I have started to feel homesickness. Last week I tasted my first Berliner. The first bite was admittedly unimpressive–your average doughnut. Once I reached the center, however, I was shocked by the taste of raspberry jam and the accompanying ache for my father. Once in a while, dinner cooked by my host mom will taste strangely like my mother’s. Walking by certain stores makes me think about my brother and my close friends. My aunt and uncle came to visit me last weekend and I was reminded how small the world is. The other day I had to say goodbye to a friend I made here and the world became so much larger again. I’m realizing that, while home is connected to place, its core is the people who inhabit it. Traveling abroad and meeting new people means building a bigger home.
Studying abroad like this, I can’t help but feel the increasing importance of making new friends. Everyone in the school is staying for different lengths of time, and the pressure of time has really motivated me to invite anyone who looks like they might be lonely or bored to join me for lunch or a walk with other students. My time here is so temporary, I feel that it’s a concentrated experience of life itself. As existential and corny as that sounds, I feel like it’s something you need to be confronted with to fully understand. People come and go from our lives in different ways. Without a foreseeable deadline, like my departure date from Germany, it’s difficult to really appreciate the impact we have in each others’ lives. I may just be sentimental, but I really love my friends and family. Each person is a small piece of home to me. Das klingt echt blöd, ich weiß. Vielleicht soll ich meine peinliche Gedanken in (schlechtem) Deutsch schreiben.
With just three weeks left here in Germany, I hope that I can take full advantage of the time I have. Here’s to more sketching, tea, journaling, bakery visits, walks down Hauptstraße, usw.
Sketching: June 30-July 9
I took a friend from Switzerland up to the castle since she hadn’t gotten the chance to visit it during her short stay yet. We sat in the Schlossgarten and we walked for a while while I tried to sketch the tallest tower. She remarked that I was drawing a really strange “tree” and I admitted I needed to practice more.
I spent the next day with my good Swiss friend again. Before we got some food to eat, we sat down in this little park in the same neighborhood as the school. It was drizzling, and she held her umbrella over us as we chatted on the park bench and I sketched the trees (or “castles” as she called them).
We went to the nearest open bakery where I attempted to draw the main counter. The second page is from the day my aunt and uncle came to visit me. We stopped for a short coffee break at a cafe in the Altstadt before saying goodbye at the end of the day.
Here is the finished painted sketch from my aunt and uncle’s visit to Heidelberg last weekend. It was so nice to see family so far away from home. I had a lovely time showing them around the sites in the Altstadt. While we were at the castle, they were kind enough to wait for me and watch me quickly grab the view of the vineyards across the river.
Yesterday I spent most of my time finishing painting the previous sketches, but my evening was spent on the Neckarwiese waiting with my classmates for the Schloss Beleuchtung at sundown. I was very excited to see such a big and colorful hot air balloon so much closer than I see from my bedroom window and painted it immediately. I made a quick sketch of all of the people packed onto the bridge, and thought I was finished with the page. But when the castle finally lit up, I had to include it. The Schloss Beleuchtungen in summer commemorate the days in history the castle was damaged by fires and lighting. I didn’t know it would be so mesmerizing. If it lasted longer, I could have stared at it for hours.