Time goes by faster than I thought. The first day I arrived (exhausted from the flight, forgot to eat in 20hrs and very frustrated trying to jumpstart my german language) still doesn’t feel that long ago, and I am already at the end of my Austauchjahr, ready to leave.

Three days before I have to check out of my room, I finally made the effort to sort my messy room out and started to pack. As I went through all the bits of stuffs I stacked around here and there in the corners, I found the process very therapeutic and even somehow inspiring. Anyone who is used to travel back and forth in different periodic settle-downs (z.B., college students who study away from home) might be familiar with this: you always have a little handful of things that are only useful in one of your “home places”, and they are somehow essential to your survival there. But as you travel around, they are totally useless in other places. Even so, you have to carry them around. Things like local currency cash, local IDs, electricity adapters and converters, an old phone with local handy number, or that pile of “only acceptable within CC campus radius” style hippie clothes you accidentally brought to Europe. They are kind of like first-aid kits of different places, and when you settle down in another place long enough, you might completely forget about them— until you have to go back again.

You sometimes forget about how if feels like to live in those places faraway too. I was surprised to see my “China first-aid kit” contains a large amount of cash (wow, brand new 100RMB bills!), while in my kit for the U.S., I was down to only 5 dollars cash. I got so worried for myself and started to recall the ATM machine location in Denver airport. Then I remember: huh, you don’t really need cash back there if you have your cards. The German way of living apparently spoiled me to be less dependent on modern technologies, how interesting. As for the cash in Chinese RMB, I then realised that the last time I was back in China, it was the traditional new year and I received my lucky money from the elders… well, I don’t remember anyone ever handed me cash in 100 Euro bills here, not even the ATM Geldmaschine…

The last two weeks has been kind of chaotic here. All the final papers, Klausuren, and Referate all happening at once, the Babylon Theater’s performance was every night the last week, alongside with the bureaucratic (man I retyped this word for 7453578 times to get the spelling right, why doesn’t english just adopt the umlaut büro!) Abmeldungen I have to do for my student status, student card, radio tax, bank account, insurance, rental status… Sorry, no intent to bore you, the list goes on. Now this is the point where you really miss block plan. At least they come one at a time monthly, not all in this one crazy wave at the end like a Durchfall.

I know my nagging has been very interesting, glad that you enjoyed it, I will get back to my packing and paper and panicking and everything in between.

Oh and here’s some photos from Babylon Theater (ft. Frankie, Jack, u. me)

Local news Mittelbayrisch covered it too 😀 go practice your german reading and happy hunting my name 😉

http://www.mittelbayerische.de/kultur-nachrichten/eine-englisch-internationale-teufelei-21853-art1400738.html

About two months ago, when I finally got back China after a year at CC, everything seemed so familiar yet so strange. My hometown was still building its new metro, the symphony of cicadas was still overwhelmingly annoying, and the summer there was still like a burning hell but also with crazy high humidity. Everything was almost exactly the same as (thanks autocorrect for correcting my German “als” back into English “as”. But yeah, remember kids, if it IS really in German it should be “wie” not “als”) when I left. With a sigh compounded of 30% joy, 40% indifference, and 30% repulsion (the same recipe for the feeling of a 20 year-old dying marriage may I point out), I whispered to my town: “Hey babe, I’m home.” (Exactly the way that married-for-20-years couple would do to each other)

The backward culture shock has been real. So many people, oh my. “Relearning” Chinese and trying to kick the English words out from the middle of my Chinese sentences was painful. Crossing roads was like Fast and Furious (let’s just say the pedestrians don’t really have the right of way no matter what signal’s on). And what’s up with the physical intimacy between girls (And I used to be ok with that?!)? The on-going false alarm of “dude you must be flirting with me oh no you can’t all be gay” took some time to really wear off……

But anyways, there’s no place like home, huh? Home is home. It is the only place where all the knowledge and experience of the first 17 years of your life would always make sense and be valued. Do you know that, there’s a kind of fish called Periophthalmus that have feet and are able to live on the land for quite a while? No? Go check it out, they are so cool. I am saying here that, I felt like this kind of fish diving back into the water after a long walk on the beach (holding fins maybe). Yes, sure, I could survive living on the land and I really liked it. But now I am back into the water.

Plus, the transition from Colorado back to my hometown felt exactly like “back into the water”. The high humidity makes you wonder if you are walking around or actually already swimming.

Ah home. Sweet home.

Except that I had only two months before I started my journey here in Regensburg.

Regensburg rains a lot. I made jokes about how this fact should vermutlich be the reason of Regensburg called Regensburg, (“Es regt immer hier. Regen, Regen, Regensburg! Ach so!”) and then the Germans would correct me (yes as they always so passionately do) that it was eigentlich because of the river Fluss Regen. Ok, weather jokes do not work well here as back in Colorado. (I guess any sentence with the two words “Colorado” and “weather” in it works as a joke, ja?)

I have been here for two weeks now. It has been quite an experience. So far everything is just great, but moving to a new place and settling down always has its own thorns, especially when it is a new culture, a new language environment, and totally new groups of people. I wonder if it is because that I still often come back to English as my rescue when I fail to communicate in German, but I caught myself looking back into my first experience going to CC a lot. And all these flashbacks made me a little bit “homesick” for CC. I would be sitting on the super convenient 5-minute-get-you-everywhere city bus and miss the long exhausting car drive to ski on a block break; or when I look at the well-dressed serious, pünktlich people walking in the ancient Altstadt and suddenly miss the hipster kids dragging around their longboards and hairbands on CC campus. I have always claimed that I’m not a homesick(das Heimweh) type of person but a wanderlust(das Fernweh) type of person. But there is certainly something so comforting and homelike about CC, that leads my mind constantly back to it while enjoying a brand new life all the way across the Atlantic.

I found myself scaling the degree of familiarity for the places I have lived in. Changsha, my hometown, can definitely be called home. I spent the majority of my lifetime there. However, the rapid pace of me changing starts to distant it from me. It is now a weird mixture of close-to-heart Herzlichkeit and “I-am-so-tired-of-you” Unheimlichkeit. And for now, I caught my thoughts referring to CC as home too. People there make me comfortable with myself being among them, and there is something about the mountains and the beautiful sky that soothe my immature, unsettled soul. And I already can tell that there is also something calling for my attention here in Regensburg, something that would eventually bind the yet still young me with this old city deeply for the rest of my life. And later in life, every new place I settle down in would carry parts of shadows of Changsha, C Springs, or Regensburg. And they would slowly climb up my familiarity scale and become indistinguishable to my identity of self.

On that scale, the concept of “home” is no longer a definite point, a label you stick onto the dearest place to you, but a spectrum, a feeling that is different with different places and would always be developing. There is a saying in Chinese, “四海为家” which literally means considering anywhere you go as your home. So how should we not have a spectrum for the concept “home”!

I would follow up on the details of life here in my later blogs to come(if I really remember to keep up with these). But for now, it is 0.36 in the morning and I have my 8.30 Deutsches Kurs in the morning. And my new Italian friend, Stefano, just persuaded me, somehow with the teachings of Taoism, not to be late for class again (yes he did that…).

So bis zum nächsten mal, ja? 🙂

Sidney,

17-09-2015

Regensburg, Deutschland