It’s been 2 months since I arrived in Germany! Here’s how my experience has been so far:
Munich has one of the easiest airports I’ve ever been to. The gate we arrived at wasn’t crowded, I breezed through security, and it took less than 10 minutes to get my luggage (very different from the 40 minutes I waited in Orlando). I was nervous about getting from the airport to the hostel on my own but that ended up being pretty easy as well. The train system was really easy to figure out- even if there hadn’t been English translations to help. Once I arrived at the Hauptbahnhof (main train station), I started having problems. First I couldn’t find my phone and was convinced I’d left it on the train. After several minutes of panicking I found it in a random pocket in my backpack. Once that was figured out, I couldn’t find my hostel. It was supposed to be close by but I couldn’t find a street name the matched one on the map I had downloaded and without data or wifi, Google Maps was useless. I decided to ask a waiter for directions. He didn’t know but a nice woman from Frankfurt got up to help me. She couldn’t find it either so she ended up calling the hostel for directions. Two things surprised me about this interaction: First, I was surprised by how helpful she was. She didn’t have to help me at all, so I was surprised that she went out of her way to call them for me- I don’t think I would’ve done that for a stranger. The second thing that surprised me was how we communicated. I’d purposefully asked the waiter because I thought he’d most likely speak English. This woman spoke a little, but by the end of the conversation we were speaking in German. I’ve always done well in German class, but had little faith in using the language in the real world. I was really pleased to find I could understand almost everything the woman said to me. Responding in German was a bit of a struggle but the interaction was enough to reassure me that I knew enough German to survive on my own. Something that amused me was how familiar somethings felt. Mostly small, insignificant things, like the cars or trees, looked familiar enough to make me forget I was in a foreign country. When I was taking the but to Tübingen, I’d look out the window and it felt like I was on the Peter Pan bus back in Massachusetts, maybe heading back to Umass after a long weekend. Of course for every one thing that’s familiar, there are 10 things that aren’t. There are big differences, like the University and recycling systems (which I’ll save for another post) but then there are other things that throw me off like the extremely large variety of cheese you can get in any supermarket (with usually a disappointing lack of cheddar) There’s also the amount of bikes. There aren’t quite as many as there were in Amsterdam but it’s much more common to ride a bike here than in the U.S. and you always have to be careful you’re not walking in the bike lane or you risk being hit. No one jaywalks either, something I noticed immediately in Munich. Even if there isn’t a car in sight, people always wait for the light to turn green before crossing. Despite the differences, I’m really enjoying my time in Germany. Tübingen is a great and very unique city and I’m really glad I got opportunity to live in it.
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AuthorHi, I'm Michaela! This blog will follow my adventures in Germany for the next 11 months (September-July). Archives
January 2020
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