We're coming to your town, we'll help you party it down, we're an American band.

So, among the several good things that are happening this week, I'm on Easter break until April 15th. I usually would have work today and tomorrow, but today is a field trip day, and tomorrow there's one of those things where a few classes are taking a bunch of tests and the rest of the kids have the day off. So my break officially started yesterday at 1:25, which isn't too bad.

Second, my mother is here to visit, and we've been walking around a lot and enjoying the good weather. On Thursday night, we're taking a night train to Zurich, where we'll stay until Tuesday and hopefully get to see some other bits of Switzerland as well. Then she's flying home, and I'm going to Istanbul (I only made these travel plans last week, so I'm still scrambling to read up on the city, check the weather, figure out what to bring, etc.). I'm coming back to Zurich on Easter Monday, then taking a few days to work my way back to Berlin by train.

I'm really excited, and will certainly have a lot to report when I get back. I'm starting off the trip with the usual what-on-earth-is-the-weather-doing cold, but hopefully I'll get over it soon. E-mail access over the next few weeks will probably be pretty sporadic, so I'll apologize in advance to all the people whose e-mails are sitting in my inbox - I promise to get back to you as soon as I can, hopefully with some interesting stories.

Not too bad for such an old guy.

So, this probably didn't get too much coverage in the U.S., but yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which set the stage for the development of the European Union. There were a lot of festivities here in Berlin, including a "European Club Night" on Saturday, where 35 clubs in Berlin hosted DJs and bands from different member nations. I went to a few of the venues, but apart from gathering that they apparently like trance music in Slovakia (just like . . . everywhere else in Europe), I'm not sure I learned that much. I did spend a good half hour talking to a Brit, two Germans and a guy from the Netherlands while we were all waiting to get into a club, though, so that lent an appropriately multi-national favor to the evening (plus we were talking about gentrification in Berlin and elsewhere, so it was topical as well). Then, yesterday, representative from EU countries had set up stands around the Brandenburger Tor, where you could buy a cup of Sangria or a slice of pizza and peruse brochures for your next trip to Spain or Italy. It was incredibly crowded, so I didn't stay long.

So, the European Union. It's eliminated most internal border checks (good) and passport stamps (bad), created a common currency (good), therefore getting rid of a lot of interesting national bills and coins (bad, speaking as a pro-drachma person). There are all sorts of issues with the constitution and the abilities of all the countries involved to actually get along and work together (bad), but usually just the mention of the EU is enough to enrage and provoke into huffiness most of the conservative, America-centrist people I know (good, and very funny).

Good luck, Europe, and here's to the next fifty.

In which the Authress searches her Soul and passes through a Dark Night Thereof, but then returns to the Optimism more natural to her Youth

This will be a shock to precisely no one who's talked to/heard from me in the last few weeks, but I'm going to be attending grad school at Berkeley. I just completed the official-sounding Statement of Intent to Register on the website yesterday.

I'm really excited, as well as a little apprehensive. Because of the years of hard work and no money grad school involves, and the really terrible academic job market that awaits those who finish, the general advice I've heard on grad school says that you should only go if you are completely convinced it's the right decision.

I feel like complete conviction is some sort of shy wildlife that appears regularly to everyone else but eludes me, even after I've spent hours, guidebook in hand, wading through brush and wet leaves. To clarify that pretty lousy simile: I tend to go through long periods where I'm happy with the future I've pictured for myself and can see myself enjoying a life in academia. Unfortunately, sandwiched between these longer periods are times where I picture myself waking up on my thirtieth birthday and realizing that I've spent the better part of my youth doing something that has not really made me happy or improved anyone's life. Being abroad doesn't really help, since the European lifestyle is something that you can really get used to.

Still, I've sort of come to realize that I don't have to plan all my life out at age 23. If I don't at least try getting a Ph.D., I think there will be a time when I'll look back and regret it. So I think that this is the right decision, and that a lot of hard work will get me to where I want to go. If it isn't, I hopefully won't need seven years to figure it out. And it's not like Europe, and Berlin, are going anywhere. I can come back.

The only other thing that makes me sort of sad about going to Berkeley is that, just when I'm looking forward to doing a stint on the West Coast, my parents are in the Midwest, and my sister and most of my friends are out East. But I think the solution to this problem is obvious: people will just have to come visit me and tank up on sunshine before returning to their snowdrifts and pale winter sun.

Don't forget to wear a flower in your hair :).

Guess it's not sandal season quite yet . . .

The fact that there is now snow on the ground here suggests that I was a little rash in wishing people a happy first day of spring yesterday.

Incident in the U-Bahn

A few hours ago, I was riding in the U-Bahn (the U2, actually) when a tour group of about a dozen college-aged Americans got on. I could tell they were American, even though I was sitting at the opposite end of the car, becuase they were talking quite voluably - Americans have a well-deserved reputation for being rather inappropriately loud in public places. I wonder sometimes if it isn't some odd result of our Puritanical/Wild West thing about personal space. Europeans are used to living in close quarters, so if they're talking to one another on the train, they tend to lean towards each other and speak softly, whereas Americans tend to keep their distance and bray. I find myself doing the same thing when I'm with American friends, if I'm not being careful.

Anyway, at one point, there was a lull in the conversation, leaving the car silent. Then, one of the young men in the group started whistling what was very clearly "Hail to the Chief."

Did that just happen to be the song in his head at the time? Or was it some sort of dig? I'm going to wonder about this.

The Ides of March . . .

. . . have come, and gone. Hope everyone got through them without any difficulties.

My friends and I here, and the people back home I keep in touch with through e-mail, have occasional keening sessions where we talk about how much we miss college. Reminiscing is silly at our age, I suppose, but the last four years have been on my mind lately, especially since I've been swapping grad school gossip and dilemmas with people from HC and my semester at the Centro. The last two years of college, especially, what with being abroad and then coming back and being a senior, and getting to meet all the younger Classics majors who seemed so much cooler and more self-confident than I was at their age, were particularly fun. No wonder I want to stay in school forever.

Seize the day, people! It doesn't last.

The results are in. . .

This upcoming week, there's a conference in Berlin for all the Fulbrights in Germany. It's supposed to be a celebration of things achieved thus far - there are all sorts of talks scheduled for the people doing research to present their results, the people with musical grants are going to perform, and the teachers and teaching assistants are supposed to deliver warm and fuzzy classroom anecdotes. I'm not attending - most of the conference takes place while I'm at school, and I already work so little that I would feel bad about asking for more time off - but I did go to a party yesterday that another TA in Berlin threw.

It was interesting; I saw people I'd met briefly at orientation in September but hadn't kept in touch with, and got to take the temperature of people's attitudes toward the job and life in Germany. In general, the sort of things people were saying are probably not going to be coming out at official conference events. It was no small relief to find that other people have the same complaints that I do, and that I'm not just a whiner and bitcher (or maybe we're all just whiners and bitchers. I suppose it's much the same). The gist of the conversation was that we're unhappy about signing up to work twelve hours a week and maybe working between five and ten for teachers who are already under a lot of pressure and don't really know what to do with us. We don't like feeling so useless, or realizing that we commute more than we work. We're disillusioned with the Germans; we feel like we came over excited about living abroad and adapting to a new culture and getting to know people, only to find the natives - even people our own age - prickly and difficult to approach. I told a friend of mine, who's a TA in Hamburg, that I felt a little bad about having joined what the director of studies abroad at Holy Cross refered to as "the American ghetto" - that my friends are overwhelmingly Americans or English speakers - a very interesting group of ex-pats, but not the people I'm supposed to be interacting with. He shook his head sympathetically and said, "It's okay, Katie, so have we all." I was talking to another TA at the party last night who said that he'd been told by some teachers at his school, pretty bluntly, that since he was only going to be in his post for ten months, Germans weren't going to make the effort to get to know him.

(That reminds me. I need to warn my friends and readers that in sixty years, give or take some, I'll probably be dead, in which case you'll have wasted a lot of time getting to know someone who's not around anymore. Best not to make the effort).

So, anyway, there was a lot of complaining going on. And conversations like those last night can help breed mutual discontent, but they can also make you realize how lucky you are. I may have expected to get more out of the work I'm supposed to be doing, but at least I'm in Berlin, which isn't a bad place to have a lot of leisure time. My German has gotten better - not as much as I'd hoped, but I'm a lot more comfortable ordering food and asking for information than I used to be. It is strange that my ostensible purpose here - assistant teaching - is kind of marginal to what I actually find important these days. I mean, I try to prepare interesting lessons and be as helpful as I can, but the time it takes to do those things is no comparison to life in college, where my whole day was basically structured around getting all my reading, writing and translating done, and time for fun meant going out with friends once a week and the occasional movie, or putting off going to sleep for fifteen minutes in order to read part of a novel. And I can probably look forward to more of that in grad school next year, and for the rest of my life. So I can appreciate the interlude aspect to these ten months.

I was talking to my mother on the phone a few weeks ago - my family members, bless them, have a tendency to think I'll work myself into the ground given half a chance, which is not really true - and she said, "Well, for someone who's so used to pushing herself as you are, I imagine that the adjustment to having so much free time must be difficult for you."

I thought about it for a few seconds. "No," I said, "I think I'm handling it."

Why I just don't rename this blog "let's commemorate all holidays a day or two late," I don't know.

So, March 8 was International Women's Day. So international that I'd never heard of it until I was abroad in Italy two years ago and the lovely Italian manager of the Rome program gave all the women in the program chocolate. This year, I had coffee and cake with a friend to celebrate (not really. the coffee and cake were indicental. but the importance of the day came up in conversation).

But better late than never. Aren't women cool?

Making a statement

When I was younger, my hair used to be much lighter. I remember, a few years ago, watching a video of myself singing in the fourth grade choir and thinking, "Wow, my hair was really blond back then." As I've gotten older, though, my hair has gotten darker, and for the past several years it's been the same dark brown as that of most of the other women in my family.

It still is that color. As of the last few hours, though, there's a little more blue in it than there used to be.

I'll see about posting a picture.

Turn your back on those Europeans, and next thing you know, they're invading each other again!

I'm assuming every else already knows about this - I've taken to checking the New York Times headlines online, since my morning ritual of reading the paper is one of the things I miss most here. This article made me laugh:

Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) -- What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of
Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

''We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem,'' Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident. Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. ''It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something,'' he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn't have an army.

I'm trying to think of a paedagogical excuse to use this in a lesson.

Weekend in Leipzig: four observations, presented in list form so that I don't actually have to put forward the effort to make them coherent

1. Johann Sebastian Bach is buried in the Thomaskirche in central Leipzig. His grave is smack dab in front of the altar and impossible to miss. I feel like they don't give you such prime religious real estate in Catholicism unless you're a saint, and even then you probably just get a side altar.

2. In my hostel, there was a Japanese student who was taking a seminar on urban planning in Leipzig and enjoyed looking at the ugly, East German-style buildings outside the central ring of the city. He told me that he really wants to go to the U.S. and see Detroit, which he's heard is equally run down.

3. If there's a funny smell in your hostel that you can't identify, I think it's better to chalk it up to the cleaning agent the staff uses. You might be right, and you'll feel better.

4. On Friday evening, I went to a dance club I'd passed eariler in the day - a really neat old building with high brick vaults that were nearly all underground; it was built over the ruins of the city fortress. Anyway, while I was there, someone tried to pick me up. You can all roll your eyes at my inexperience here, but it was the first time that had ever happened to me, so I found it interesting. It was simultaneiously flattering and really weird. This blog entry would get a lot more interesting right now if I'd said yes, but I said no (well, not quite: we'd been chatting for a bit and he'd asked very nicely, so what I said was more like "thanks, but no").