Posted October 30, 2022
Diary thoughts, from moving to my new East German city of Leipzig during my CBYX fellowship
My time in Köln has come to an end. Last Saturday, October 2nd, I took my train out to East Germany to my second and possible final placement in Germany to a city called Leipzig. The train ride took 7 hours with three changes. I was carrying one giant suitcase, my backpack, and a carry-on the entire time. Luckily, the strangers I encountered were extremely friendly and kind, making me relax for the new city I would be facing. I was waiting at a station in Manheim when an obvious elderly man with money was holding the hand of a pretty young lady no older than 24 years old at the train station and saying sweet things to her in German. It was obvious the situation was that of a “Sugar Daddy” and I started laughing when I saw the encounter as she was paying no interest in what he was saying. Next to me was a young man who started laughing with me. Our train came and he told me he couldn’t give me all of his money but he would carry my suitcase through the remaining train switches. He was 25 and from Croatia working in the administration for a welding company here in Germany. He kept me company and we talked about our lives from home, our experiences in Germany, and what we hope to do soon. He helped me one last time with my luggage before we parted ways in Frankfurt.
At 8:30 pm I was greeted by Julia, my new host mom at the Leipzig main station. She works as a translator/interpreter, from English, French, and a bit of Russian to German. She’s a freelancer working mainly for patent companies but she also teaches young students in schools and tutors children regularly in German. She’s a single mom, living in an apartment close to City Center. The weekend we met, her daughter Charlotte, was at her father’s house for the weekend giving us the next day to spend time with each other. She loves baking so I was presented with a delicious quiche she made by hand, on the table ready as soon as we arrived home. We talked for hours about our lives, her daughter, and our families before we put the lights out at midnight.
The next morning, she had an array of breakfast items on the table: German sweet and savory breads, cheeses, jams, soft boiled eggs and teas, and coffee. We ate and cleaned up so we had a chance to go harvest vegetables from her Garden. Julia doesn’t have a car so she rents cars that are scattered around Germany that you can use and pay for through an app much like the electric scooters that are in big cities nowadays. We drove 10 minutes to the outskirts of Leipzig to a Community Garden where we gathered 3 giant tote bags worth of chard, onions, peppers, kale, broccolini, zucchini, and kohlrabi. Once home we fed my other siblings: two bunnies – one black and one white with black spots named Guard and Bunny. “The duo is called Guard Bunny”, says my host sister Charlotte. On Sunday’s my host mom sometimes has to tutor children but that day it was canceled so she took me to the nearby lake instead. In the evening, we ate dinner and watched a traditional German crime tv show, Tatort, on the couch until the show lulled us to sleep.
The city of Leipzig is half the size of Köln, it’s cleaner and while Germans still do nothing but stare, it feels friendlier. The architecture of Leipzig is beautiful, all the buildings have a romantic powdery color palette and the designs are still standing from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.
Julia took me on a tour of the city by foot this past week including the St.Thomas Church – where Bach performed and taught and is now buried 6ft under. She also took me on a tour of her old university where I will be studying starting October 11th called, Leipzig University. It’s a beautiful school and it seems like there will be plenty to get involved in. However, when speaking to the admissions office, they told me that all of my classes will be in full fluent German in the degree track I was interested in. While grades don’t matter and there’s no end of the year test, the hours of German lectures do seem too hard for my language level. Instead, I am taking classes that are in English from the political science department with an extra German language course.
I’ve been dealing with a lot of German TVs lately it seems. In Köln, my roommate who was a Production Assistant, invited me to sit in the audience for a late-night German talk show called Stern TV. The host is a tall, slender man named Steffen Hallaschka. It was interesting to see how live tv plays out from their in-person audience perspective. There’s a person who tells the audience when to clap, people in the audience who are supposed to speak are already mixed up and positioned in a certain place and there’s a countdown that starts for each segment so the host doesn’t go overtime when speaking to his guests. An audience member near me said he goes to these every week just to give himself something to do.
The second occasion was at the Friday’s For Future rally, the Climate Strike that Greta Thunberg started in Europe, and this one was the day before the German Chancellor election. There I brought my camera and interviewed students, moms with toddlers, and everyday workers as to why they were attending today. Many were demanding for more green energy, increasing the transportation for those living in the countryside, and closing down fossil fuel plants in Germany as a whole. As we were marching we passed by the rally for Candidate, Olaf Scholtz from the SPD party. There I was talking to two middle-aged men who were in favor of his values and would be putting the working class first. A reporter from the station Tagesthemen, a popular news channel for Germany, was making her way through the crowd asking the audience’s opinion on Scholtz. After asking the person beside me she turned the camera on me and began her interview. She asked me questions relating to my experience being here as an American and watching German politics, and if we’ve even ever heard of this candidate in the US. I did what I could in German and answered the remaining questions in English. Next to me were 3 girls my age, making fun of Scholtz and were instead members of the Green party, the environment’s first party.
The Green Party’s candidate is Annalena Baerbock, whose rally I attended only two weeks ago. At her rally, I met a mother and her 14 year old daughter. The mother said she wasn’t going to be voting for the Green Party’s candidate but it was important for her daughter to get out and see what all the candidates had to say so she could understand it for herself. Her daughter is planning on studying in the US once she’s older and I told her that my program would be a perfect opportunity for her. The mom then invited my friend, Fatima and I to stay at her house whenever we wanted and that we could even have her bed. One of the most generous gestures I’ve had from a stranger in Germany. The final time was just this week in Leipzig when I was with my friend Nora and a tv show for a bed making contest asked us to see who could make the beds in front of us the fastest. I am proud to be your champion.
Köln was an amazing experience that went by incredibly fast. I spent my remaining days, traveling through the Vineyards on the Mosel river, climbing 533 steps up the Köln Cathedral, being fed delicious dinners from the home country of my hair braider, traveling to the Netherlands and biking to Belgium, and spending time with the amazing friends I’ve made from my language classes and from my program. The only real downside was having my iPad stolen from my classroom – a story I can elaborate on another time. I said goodbye to my language school, my friends, my roommates and my host family in the final hours before moving to Leipzig. I forgot how serious German’s take what we consider polite invitations, and before leaving I told my host parents in Köln that if they ever wanted to come and see Leipzig they had someone they knew who could show them around. Two days after I arrived, I read their text message with hotel details for their arrival in Leipzig in December.
These last two months felt uncomfortable in the sense that I wasn’t working and honestly in my opinion having a little too much fun. The two months of intensive language was incredibly necessary for living here but now is the studying and working phase. Last Saturday I was offered a productions Assistant position for a documentary on singer, songwriter and activist, Harry Belafonte. I was also looking at an immigration organization that allows you to travel to neighboring countries to document stories with those migrating as well. I’m still getting that part figured out so more updates to come.