Living in a Dream World

Germany just made sense to me. The stereotypes about German engineering and efficiency are true, especially in Freiburg. I lived in a dream world, where everything worked. Let me break it down for you.

I lived in:
Vauban, the most ecologically sustainable neighborhood in
Freiburg, the greenest city in Germany, which is located in the state of
Baden-Wuerttemberg, the richest state in
Germany, a highly developed  and powerful country with one of the world's largest economies.

The larger German economy didn't really become apparent to me until I traveled to Rome, which frankly, I found to be dirty, inefficient, and with incredibly incompetent and frustrating public transportation systems. It took me one step off the plan to become aware of the difference in the state of economy in Italy compared to Germany. I was never so glad to be in Germany as when I arrived in Berlin from Rome and was greeted with an airport full of immaculately clean (fee-charging) bathrooms, ample recycling stations, and a vast yet easily navigable public transportation system. I don't mean to rag on Italy, but I just had such a different experience that I wasn't necessarily prepared for. The differences were so stark I couldn't help but point them out and think about them.

Vauban was a very interesting neighborhood with a really turbulent history. I lived in the Studentendorf, housing owned and managed by the university. The oldest buildings in Vauban, which comprised most of the Studentendorf, were French military barracks from World War II, because Freiburg was in the French occupied zone. I lived in one of them, in a six-person apartment.

150/06, converted military barrack and my home for four months.

If you don't believe me, check out the gun rack we had recessed into the wall of the common area of the apartment.

Vauban is a vibrant area of town. In addition to the student housing, there is regular family housing and the SuSi, a commune of sorts. There's quite an interesting political history in Freiburg that is now mostly concealed by agreements and new construction. See, decades ago, after the French left town, the area was occupied by squatters, both in the old military buildings and in caravans on the grounds. At some point the city came in and decided to reclaim the buildings, and there was a big battle between the city and the squatters. The city agreed to let the squatters keep two of the buildings, and in them the SuSi was born. SuSi is an acronym that stands for "Selbst-Organisierte Unabhaengige Siedlungs Initiative," which basically translates to "self-organized independent settlement initiative." It's easy to tell which buildings belong to the SuSi, because they have brightly painted murals, grounds covered with interesting recycled art, highly
decorated balconies and staircases, and are surrounded by old vans and RVs that people live and work in.

I walked through the SuSi every day on my way to the tram stop. 

Pippi Longstocking is one of the mascots of Vauban.

The SuSi proved to make very interesting neighbors. There were some students there, but mostly families, and fairly ethnically diverse ones at that. It became a completely normal thing for me to see all kinds of folk around: children with dreadlocks riding unicycles, groups of people on stilts, people wearing all kinds of harem pants and flowy clothing playing outside barefoot. They had really interesting wooden playgrounds, mysterious art installations (this giant white dragon thing made out of lights and umbrellas for the 1st of May celebrations...I wish I had a picture of that), and at the end of my stay, the craziest parties. 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of the SuSi, and so they had the most fantastic three day celebration one weekend. It was like a music festival in my own backyard, except with even crazier decorations. The week leading up to the party, my walk down the street through SuSi included a stroll down a purple carpet under curtains of tinsel blowing in the wind, with mannequins with animal heads and wings guarding the path.

One of the last squatter strongholds in the area was this area called "Rhino," which was basically a lot full of vans and RVs and small buildings and art. The city kicked them out to build a new, super "green" hotel, which was being completed when I was living there. I could still see the scars of Rhino though, with signs saying "I miss Rhino" tied to the fence around the construction area, or Rhino-related sayings being graffitied onto buildings and signs in the area. If you look it up on the internet, the Rhino controversy looks like a pretty big deal:

Rhino used to exist along the tram lines in Vauban.

Here you can see it getting pretty politicized, surrounded by signs and banners.

The people did not let go of Rhino without a fight. There were riots and police activity. 

There are pictures of riots on the website for the state newspaper, Die Badische Zeitung.

And now, where the free citizens of Rhino used to dwell, there's this:

Hotel Vauban, a brand new, just-opened, super modern and green hotel.

Vauban was an amazing place though. I need to get back to telling you how awesome it was. It's basically an urban planning experiment to see how people can live without cars: there is a solar parking garage on the outskirts of Vauban, and there was a small parking lot in the Studentendorf, but other than that, there were no cars inside of the neighborhood. All of the streets were very narrow and pedestrian-oriented, and named after scientists and philosphers and authors, which was pretty cool. Nobody really had a yard like they do in American suburbs, rather people lived together in ecologically designed buildings and used their balconies/doorsteps/rooftop terraces to the fullest advantage and covered them with plants and lights. There was lots of beautiful common space interspersed between all of the houses: several playgrounds, gardens, lots of trees, grassy areas with fire pits. The Strassenbahn (tram/streetcar) had four stops in the area, and there were also bus stops. I lived equidistant from two tram stops, and had about a 4 minute walk to get to public transportation every day.

I should mention that everybody in Freiburg bikes. There are bikes everywhere: in nice bike shelters, along railings, on balconies, whatever. There are well-marked bike lanes on the street and definitely a big bike culture there. The law says you have to have working front and back lights on your bicycle, and I know more than one person who has gotten a bike-DUI. 

Freiburg was set up on a very human scale. What I mean by that is that the infrastructure is such that every neighborhood has its immediate needs taken care of. In my neighborhood, there were three grocery stores (including AlNatura, perhaps a smaller, German version of Whole Foods), a bank, a drugstore, a bakery, a couple of restaurants (including a Doener place, Doener kebab being the most popular type of fast food in Germany), an ice cream place, a bike shop, and a small department store. You can walk to everything and easily get what you need without having to take three buses across town or drive to a strip mall on the edge of town like you do anywhere in America. People buy only what they can carry, and so I went to the grocery store every couple of days to get food, instead of stocking up on two weeks' worth of food like I do at home. The refrigerators are smaller, too. The six people in my apartment shared two glorified mini-fridges, so I couldn't hog the whole fridge with a week's worth of food or anything. 

Nature was also extremely accessible. Vauban is on the edge of town in the shadow of beautiful Black Forest hills. I just had to follow the path out my back door, walk a few blocks, and then start ascending the huge grassy hills that were a combination of fields and vineyards, eventually giving way to forest. I had some amazing hikes in those hills, my favorite places to go to being the tiny hamlet of Schoenberg, and the ruins of castle Schneeberg above it. There were medieval castle ruins practically in my backyard! It was amazing.

Here are some photos from my hikes:

The path out of Freiburg and through the hills of Merzhausen

The hills are covered with vineyards

The ruins of Schloss Schneeberg

Visiting Schneeberg

Looking down on the city of Freiburg

Freiburg from a castle window

Small Moments of Triumph

As an Auslaenderin (foreigner), my time abroad was colored by little victories and embarrassing mistakes.

Some everyday stuff was hard for me. I could never get through the lines at Aldi as quickly and efficiently as the real Germans. It sounds funny, but the checkout at that place was actually kind of intimidating. It took me awhile to fully understand recycling and deposits. I once spent entirely too long unsuccessfully putting beer bottles into the recycling machine at REWE (my neighborhood grocery store) and having them shoot back out at me, while lots of Germans walked by me and looked amused but did not stop to comment or advise me that I was trying to put glass into the plastic machine. I lugged my huge bag of clanking glass bottles back to my apartment, truly tempted to just chuck them all into the recycling bin and forget about the Pfand (deposit) money, but they were too valuable so I carried them back to my third-floor apartment. I swallowed my pride and asked my German roommates, who told me "The glass machine is at the back of the store, silly!"

Cooking and baking with the metric system was strange. Our measuring equipment was in grams and milliliters, with different measurements used for flour, sugar, etc. I was lucky that our cupboards also contained American measuring cups, and I mostly stuck to those. It took me almost two months to brave using the oven, because it had really unintelligible settings without words, which were combinations of lines, squiggles, and triangles.

Honestly, words would have been much easier to translate than cryptic symbols. Where's "Bake" and "Broil"?

Getting on public transportation, I always struggled with whether or not to show the driver/conductor my ticket. Germany works on the honor system, where you just get on and only show your ticket if the conductor comes around. It's much faster and more efficient that way. But whenever I went to other countries, I never knew what I was supposed to do when I got on the bus. Whip out my ticket like a tourist, or risk being reprimanded. 

This is neither here nor there, but the local transit authority in Freiburg was abbreviated VAG. Us Americans loved it, and enjoyed posing by the bus stops that said "VAG" in huge letters, and joked about getting our hands on some VAG apparel. You can probably guess how we pronounced it. The Germans pronounced it by its letters, "V-A-G," "fowh-ah-gay." The VAG was one of the best things about Freiburg, truly. They were so cutting edge with green technology and ease of access and city planning. I wish everybody had a VAG.

On to the triumphs:

I never appreciated Germany so much as when I went to Italy. I don't speak a word of Italian, and of the places I visited, the Italians seemed to be the least likely to speak English. I spent several days in Rome, which honestly, I found to be dirty, poorly organized, and really overwhelming. Within 5 seconds of being in Rome, the economic status of the country became pretty clear to me. It just felt really clearly different from Germany. Their subways stopped running at 11:30pm, and did not have convenient stops near the major tourist destinations in the city, and I found their bus system to be poorly labeled. I just felt so helpless there, and getting lost was a lot scarier than it was in Germany. I flew from Rome to Berlin, and even though I had never been to Berlin before, it felt like I was coming home. Berlin opened its arms to me like an old friend, and even though the city itself is a giant, sprawling metropolis, it is held together by a complex, yet incredibly organized system of public transportation. After being in a place where I did not know the language, when I went to Berlin I suddenly had a lot more faith in my German skills. Anything was better than Italy, where I could barely even say "thank you." Nothing like being a fish completely out of water to make you appreciate what skills you do have. 

People.

I encountered several types of people in Germany.

The first were American tourists. Technically I was one of those, but I was a university student living with other German university students and had a mission to blend in and act "German." I also spoke German. Some of the other Americans in my program could be a little obnoxious at times, but nothing like some of the situations I witnessed. One of the main stereotype Germans have about Americans is that Americans are LOUD. And actually, loud we are. I can't tell you how many times I was on a train somewhere or out at night and encountered a really, really loud group of (usually drunk) Americans bragging about stupid things or just being generally embarrassing. Sometimes they seemed just really uninterested in local culture--I think probably because lots of young people travel/study abroad to drink and party, and really take advantage of the super young drinking age in Germany.

And then, there were the Erasmus students. Prior to moving to Germany, I had never heard of Erasmus before, but it's basically EU study abroad. It stands for European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, and is an exchange program to encourage university students to travel and study in other countries in the European Union. I met a bunch of them in my German classes at the Uni, and they all lived together in one of the student housing areas called the StuSie. They quickly banned together and formed a pretty formidable group: students from England, Scotland, Belgium, Italy, and France mostly. The UK kids dominated. Erasmus seems like a crazy party semester, and when the Erasmus kids took over bars, they took over bars. They came to Vaubar, the small bar next door to me, and drank them out of alcohol on more than one occasion. I thought Americans were obnoxious partiers, but Erasmus students are on a pretty equal level. My Erasmus friends also went on several crazy party trips, to Prague and also to Greece...regrettably I couldn't go on either of those trips for one reason or another, but something tells me I might not have survived at the pace at which they partied. Seriously intense.

Freiburg also had a pretty decent population of students from Spain. Germany is pretty much single-handedly holding up the EU economy right now, and my interpretation of the situation is that lots of people from Spain are funneling into Germany to get a better education and a good job. They don't necessarily speak German, either. Most speak more English than German.

And then, there are the Japanese exchange students. They throw up peace signs next to their faces in every picture, and they take a lot of pictures. There were more students from Japan than any other country in my month-long Sprachkurs (language course) that I took at the university before the semester began. A lot of them were very shy, much moreso than the Europeans. They liked to travel in packs.

Only Americans

Sometimes weird stuff happened to me because I was American. People treated me differently, or asked me really pointed questions, one of which was:

"But why Germany? Why would you want to come here?"

I could never tell if they were just really self conscious about what people thought about Germans, or if they thought their country was really boring, or if it was some kind of test.

Second to that was:

"Do you have a gun?"

No comment.

And a small thought on geography:
And they say Americans are the worst at geography, but the average European I met thought that New York automatically meant the city, or that I was near it. Nope. Also, Connecticut? Forget about it. My German roommates only knew about Connecticut because they watched Gilmore Girls.