Maggie (Without) Borders: My Year in Germany

This post is gonna be another one about how lucky I am so buckle in, y'all. So anyway, on March 15, 2018, I turned 22. Hooray! But that's not important. What is important is that my birthday was another reminder of how much I am loved. And in the midst of a cold, stupid, stressful March, I needed that. It started with my dad coming to visit (I will elaborate more on this later). It was really, really good to see him, and he bought me a wool jacket as a birthday gift! LOOK:  So hip! So trendy! Very warm! Now, of course I know that my dad loves me. His visit was expected, though. What I didn't expect was walking down to breakfast on my birthday and seeing this: 😍 Directly translated: "Heartfelt good wishes!" Basically, "Congrats!" Before I could even get out "Dankeschön" my host parents busted out into the Happy Birthday song in German and English. It was 10000% the cutest thing ever. I mean, I suspected that my host pa...

Last week, on Monday, February 5th, 2018, the Berlin Wall had officially been down as long as it had stood. The wall was up for 28 years, 2 months, and 27 days from 1961-1989. For 28 years, 2 months, and 27 days, Berlin was divided; split between competing ideologies and warring countries with brick and mortar. Streets were interrupted, families were split, communities were destroyed. With a wall. I have realized through my college education that US Americans don't actually learn all that much about the walls that divided what were once the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD) and the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) . In my primary education, I learned about WWII (often) and you can bet that I studied the Holocaust multiple times over. Don't misunderstand me: it is incredibly important to learn about these things--but after that, we learned that there was a wall, and that was it. We didn't learn the unbelievable speed with which it was erected and then steadily ex...

Get it? Because I'm halfway there? Okay, so this post isn't at all punctual. Allow me to take you back in time to my perspective from one month ago when I was officially halfway through my grand German adventure... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ *twinkly time-travel music* ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So, it's mid-January and I'm officially at the halfway point. I want to first mention that I'm pretty proud of myself. I had lots of reasons to want to quit this experience, but I didn't. I had absurdly stressful times, excessive homesickness, endless frustrations... but I didn't once think that I was going to leave Germany early. No way. I've still got waaaaay too much to do here. Though it's still kinda sucky living in my gross dorm, change is on the horizon. I will be starting my internship soon, I'll move in with my host family, I'll see my boyfriend, spring is coming... the only way from here is up. I'm starting to realize just how v...

So I've been wanting to write about making mistakes for a long time, but I kept forgetting and writing the wrong post. Ba-dum-tish.  --- I've been making mistakes for six months now. (For those of you keeping track at home, that is indeed  how long I've been in Germany, good on you for noticing.) I've gotten really good at it. It's like I think something, and it's incorrect. Without even doing anything, I've gone and made a mistake. At this point, I've come to think of it as a talent.  Okay, so maybe it isn't that bad. But I do think that I've made more mistakes in the past 6 months than I have, say, my entire college career. I wish that part were a joke, but between the new culture, language, schools, cities, families, friends, transport systems... there's a lot to mess up.  At some point in my life, someone made it very clear to me that making mistakes was entirely unacceptable (everybody wave to my dad as I inte...

Frohes neues, und einen guten Rutsch! Germans don't just wish you a happy new year; they also wish you, directly translated, "a good slide" into the new year. In essence, they hope that you enter the new year happy, healthy, and on the right path to personal success, and I think that's a nice sentiment. I usually don't bother with new year's resolutions, as I don't see the sense in putting things off to the new year. If I want to be a better person, why not just start improving as soon as I note something worth working on? This year, though, I reflected on things I both did and didn't do, and decided that I did have one new year's resolution: follow through. (Okay, two. The second is to eat less cheese). It's not like I don't have the capacity to follow through on the things I plan on doing. I mean, I told myself in 2015 that I was going to apply for PPP, and here I am enjoying the start of 2018 in Germany. But I realized that there w...

A few weeks ago, I ran into an American friend on the train. I greeted her in English, but since she was with one of her German friends, we continued the conversation in German. A few stops later, my friend exits the train. I continue speaking to her friend, but I hear someone faintly repeating "excuse me," as we chat. I finally realize it's the man next to me trying to get my attention. I make eye contact with him. "English?" He asks. "Yes, of course," I reply. He looks, to be honest, a little worse for wear. Tattered clothes, unkempt nails, and skin smudged with dirt. English was clearly not his first language, and he didn't speak German. He smiles and shows me his phone. He's on an online German job board. "I'm looking for a job," he says in somewhat broken English, "but I don't know what this says. Can you help?" "Sure," I reply, not at all sure if I can. "What kind of job?...

I'm a person who's pretty in tune with their personal identity. I've been through dozens of hours of RA training and have read endless works from people both like and unlike me about what it means to identify as something and how those identities steer your existence. Before leaving for Germany, we had to do an activity where we wrote down all of our identities on a sheet of paper. The task was to name at least 6; I named 33. Up to this point, I'd taken a magnifying glass up to most of my identities: my race, my age, my body type and ability, my gender, my sexual orientation, my class, my relationship status--you name it. However, one thing I hadn't really been able to analyze before was my American identity; that single identity that has steered my perception of myself in society, my view of history, my understanding of the world... all because of where I was born and raised. I knew that my identity as an American ran deep. There's no escaping my clear, mid...

I knew going in that one of the hardest parts of my year abroad would be experiencing hardships that are difficult enough to handle at home. I  knew that watching my family and my friends suffer from afar would be one of the most emotionally taxing and mentally trying things I had ever done. Let me start this particular post by saying, however, that the topic I'm addressing here is relatively minor compared to the tragedies that I could be experiencing, but I'm going to take it as a moment to assess what it's like to be sad and worried and in mourning from half a world away anyway. So. My dog's name is Taffy. Taffy is a distinctly medium-sized, tan-colored mutt with button ears and curly tail. Look at those ears. Not mine, Taffy's. Taffy is old. Really old. We're not sure exactly, but she's probably about sixteen years old. Come to mention it, her birthday was two days ago. Since she was adopted from the Humane Society, we weren't sure of her re...

One thing people seem to doubt is the fact that I'm participating in this year abroad while in a committed relationship. For some, that may seem crazy. People say I'm going to experience a totally different country for a year, so how can I possibly dive into a new culture headfirst when I'm anchored so strongly to my life back in the US? How can my relationship be strong enough to spend a year apart with less and less frequent communication? Why would I do this when I'm in college and don't have to force myself into adulthood just yet? Those are fair questions for someone who isn't me, and who isn't in a relationship with Pat. I'm in Germany because I needed to experience it for myself, and I know that I will learn so much and be a better person for it. Pat supports my personal and intellectual growth, so he's incredibly happy for me and listens to me blab on about my new experiences. Our relationship is strong because we choose to make it strong. ...