And You're Here Why?

When I was working, I would occasionally have a weekday off or have to run a work-related errand in the middle of the day. Initially, I would think, "Man, this is great. Middle of the day. No one on the roads. This should be a piece of cake!" Then I would actually get out on a road and I would quickly realize that I was far from the only person out. I would often think to myself, "I know why I'm out here at 1030 on a Tuesday, but what are all of these other people doing in my way?" The tone of that question was generally incredulous and annoyed. I would sit in my car behind someone driving 34 mph in a 50 mph zone and assign random tasks and situations to those sitting in traffic around me. I often find myself wondering the same thing here in Berlin. As I walk to the gym or to class or to the park, I hear German being spoken, but I hear a fair amount of everything else as well. You name it, I hear it spoken on the street or at the park. I know exactly why I am living in Berlin, but what are all of these other foreigners doing here? The tone of this question is usually intrigued with top notes genuine curiosity.

A little bit of background for the few of you who may be wondering: I am living in Berlin, Germany because my husband, Neil, is an Olmsted Scholar, and he is studying at the Freie Universität Berlin. I realize that this is a somewhat obscure reason to be living in foreign country, but it is a concrete reason nonetheless. For now, I am taking German classes, trying to find a Kitaplatz for Annika, and hoping that in a few months my Deutschkenntnisse will be good enough to possibly do a little bit of part-time torturing of Germans and non-Germans with varying injuries. So that explains me. When people find out I'm from the US, the first thing they ask is what I think of Barack Obama. The second thing they want to know is how different it is here vs. there. Initially, I had a difficult time answering that because, for the most part, we live in a major city that is very much like any other major city. I have at times had to remind myself that this is not just another assignment for Neil and that we, in fact, live in Germany. There's constant traffic noise, aversion of eye contact with passersby, and a Starbucks/McDonalds/Dunkin Donuts every few blocks. Day-to-day life is just as it is anywhere else. We're not all that different after all. Blah, blah, blah. Now for the fun part...emphasizing our differences!

My favorite part of any new language class is the first day when we go around the room and everyone says where they're from and what they're doing here. In my first class, there was a guy from NYC who moved here because his girlfriend is German. There was also a guy from Lithuania who got an IT job here that paid about 3x as much as he would have made back home. Then there was the girl from Korea whose husband was going to Humboldt Universität to study architecture. Her husband is Norwegian, and they met in London. These all kind of make sense to me. These people are here for very specific reasons. This course was at a private language school and a bit pricier than my current class at the Volkshochschule (community college). My classmates at the VHS are a totally different (and much more interesting) story. There are 4 girls from Italy and 2 guys from Spain. They didn't know each other before this class, but now I think knowing a bit of Spanitalian might help me get by better in the class than German. All 6 of these people, aged 20-36, moved to Berlin with no job prospects and no real plan in mind other than to make some money somehow. Three of them have college degrees, and one of those has a master's degree in environmental science...her primary goal right now, apart from learning German, is to get a job as a waitress. The other three have completed some amount of university study but put it on pause to pursue endeavors here. All of them are studying things like literature, art, business, sociology, or some combination of those things...all interesting, but none of them particularly applicable to a specific job. I want you all to close your eyes for a moment and think about our terrible economy in the US. No wait open your eyes, or you won't be able to read this. These six individuals (and many many more like them) have put everything on hold to move to a country where they do not speak the language because the prospect of earning any kind of money here is better here than at home. As I understand it, there are jobs in oil and gas in North Dakota that pay into the six figure range, but people don't want to move "so far away." I will say though that I was once on spring break with some guys from North Dakota, and a few of them were really difficult to understand when they got a few drinks in them. All joking aside, as bad as it is, I don't see thousands of young adults fleeing to Canada or Mexico or China for work any time soon. There is also a woman from Turkey who has been living in Berlin for just shy of 23 years, and she only started taking German classes 3 months ago. I have not been able to find a way to ask her in German and/or politely why/how she could possibly have waited so long. Her son is 20, and her daughter is 14. They both speak fluent German.

There is also a girl in my class now from Georgia (country, not state), and she works as an au pair. This brings me to the next set of foreigners with whom I've become acquainted here. It is the random, part-time, childcare worker. When no one could give me a recommendation for where to find part-time childcare here, I joined a website called greataupair.com which is kind of like Sitter City or similar sites in the US. It, however, matches international job-seekers with potential employers in various countries. Within 15 minutes of posting a job looking for someone to watch Annika a few afternoons a week so I could go to class, I had 14 responses from people living in Berlin, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, Ireland, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia. Needless to say, I was glad that I got some responses and also confused about why I had people responding from so far away when the job clearly stated it was in Berlin. As I dug a bit deeper and started to email people, I discovered what I think is an entire culture of people who just family-hop around the world. The girl who we finally decided on to watch Annika is Alice. She is from the UK and is in her gap year between high school and university. She is here until January when she will be heading to China to teach English for 3 months before returning to England to attend university to become a teacher. She is also a tap dancer and may compete in the world championships in Germany next year. She is a real person. A few of the other people who I e-mailed with were looking for a sponsor family. The girl from Georgia is in that situation. She lives with the family, takes care of the kids, and gets paid about 300€/month. When her year contract is up, she wants to find a family in Australia or Brazil, because why not?  One of the other girls I interviewed is from Santa Cruz, CA. She lived in Spain for a year and worked as a waitress. Her boyfriend lives in Aachen (on the opposite side of the country), so she wants to work in Germany and maybe finish school. When she went to Spain last year, it was to take a year off from college (where she was studying economics) to find herself. She may study art or architecture here once she improves her German. I recommended the VHS for language classes on the cheap.

The thought of taking a year off to find myself never occurred to me. I graduated from high school, went to college, and then I found myself a job. I think the general view of someone taking a year off to find oneself in the US is that said person is self-indulgent and will probably never actually get back to the business of going to college or pursuing a specific life's goal...whatever that may be.  I wonder what would happen if the concept of a gap year was normal/acceptable back home. Would everyone go volunteer, travel, learn about other cultures and return as more focused and worldly individuals? Or, would we become a culture of backpacking vagabonds with no discernible or marketable skills? Or, is that what a person with a non-specific liberal arts degree from a random university is anyway? I have no answers to these questions, but it gives me something to think about on my chilly dark runs. Is part of the employment problem in these European countries a consequence of the fact that the people who need/want jobs don't have any of the skills that employers are looking for? Is it possible that those skills can't be/aren't taught in a university setting but rather on the job, and often as a part of an unpaid practicum or internship that people with a university degree feel that they are above? Again, I don't know. What I do know is that if my German improves, there are jobs for physical therapists in Berlin, a city with ~13% unemployment. Until then, I am a lowly Hausfrau trying to learn German, and that is what I'm doing here.

The last few posts haven't lent themselves well to pictures, but in coming weeks, you can look forward to the following picture-worthy topics:

• review of the Midwest Senkowskis visit to Berlin and Dresden
• the winter of our discontent (AKA: it's cold and rainy so we're not going to the park today)
• Berlin Thanksgiving 2K12 

In the meantime, here are some pictures of Annika eating a banana and trying to climb into her crib...not at the same time.

Eating a banana.

Crib climb.

Bis zum nächsten mal Freunde!

In Defense of Runners

I have been active all of my life. I participated in gymnastics, softball, volleyball, and soccer growing up and in college. After college I got into running. I have always been mindful of what I eat. Exercise has been many things to me. It has been, at times, an obsession. It has been a stress-relieving distraction from work, moving, and separations from my husband. It has been a source of pure joy and freedom. It has been a time for me to get outside with my daughter and enjoy beautiful scenery and fresh air. It has given me time to be alone and think and solve all of the world's problems and occasionally some of my own. I have run 12 marathons, a few half marathons, and completed an Ironman triathlon.
I have been called crazy more than a few times. I have had horrible things shouted at me, McDonalds bags full of trash hurled at me, and lit cigarettes flicked at me from car windows as I train. I was nearly sideswiped by a driver not paying attention as he swerved onto the shoulder where I rode my bike in Delaware. As I skidded along the gravel after attempting to stop short, he didn't stop to apologize or see if I was ok. I have had overweight patients tell me I need to get more meat on my bones and tell me how lucky I am that I am skinny and don't know what it's like to have to exercise and watch what I eat (because waking up before 3AM to ride a bike for 3 hours and run 10 miles before working a 10-hour day is mostly luck). In the past few days, I have seen runners called some pretty terrible names on Facebook, Twitter, and in the comments sections of articles on various online news websites. I have witnessed a turning tide in general where people who choose to be healthy and stay active are criticized and derided.

I understand that the NYC marathon was an extremely polarizing event, and ultimately canceling it was the appropriate decision. People lost everything. People are still without basic necessities, and I'm not talking about power. People are without homes, clothes, food, and water. People in NY are living as a good portion of the world lives every day. The havoc wreaked by Sandy is truly devastating. Having said that, I feel the need to defend the runners.

The runners did not cause the hurricane. The runners did not have a say in whether or not the race would go on or not. Yet, somehow, in the discussion of whether or not the race should be run, the runners became the target of a lot of negativity. They were taking hotel rooms from people who needed them. "If you run you have no soul," read one comment on CNN.com. Another in the same article called for the runners to be dragged out of NYC. These people don't care about anyone but themselves. I was unable to find data as to how many people were scheduled to run this year's race for charity. However, in 2011 over $34 million was raised for 210 charities. In every marathon that takes place, there is a large contingent of runners who are running for someone or something other than themselves. I have been such a runner. When running a large race such as NY, you can't run more than a few steps without seeing a shirt or a sign or a picture on someone's shirt indicating the charity for which that person is running. As to the hotel rooms being wasted on runners, there were approximately 20,000 international runners expected to run this year's race in NY. By Friday afternoon when the race was cancelled, most of those runners were expected to be in the city already with pre-booked flights to go home sometimes over a week after the race, during which time they will be contributing to the devastated economy of the city. Those runners are not demons. Those runners are people who have trained 5-7 days/week for months after being lucky enough to be selected in the lottery to run a race that, for some, is a lifelong dream. A man from Japan interviewed for an AP report said that he would be in Staten Island on Sunday helping with the recovery in any way that he could. He also said that if the race had been run, he would have run. I believe that it is possible to feel genuine empathy for the victims of the storm and still be angry and disappointed that a goal and dream to which you have devoted time and money is not going to come true. In almost every story about the race's cancellation, mentions of charity and good deeds done by runners have been mentioned cursorily or not at all. In addition, the economic impact of the marathon in terms money coming into the city was estimated to be $340 million. This is all small potatoes when compared to the very real difficulties facing people in NY and throughout the Northeast as the rebuilding and recovery efforts begin. I simply think that it is important to recognize the time and effort put in by anyone who chooses to run a marathon and the extra effort put in by those who choose to run for charities.

In closing, I have a small comparison to make (and this isn't an endorsement of Mitt Romney...I voted for Gary Johnson). Some people think Mormons are crazy extremists. Some people think the religion is ridiculous. The Mormons I have had the pleasure of knowing in my life have been nothing but generous and kind. They love their families, steer clear of vices like alcohol and caffeine, and go on missions where they promote their religion and provide humanitarian aid. If only every religion was so selfish and destructive.  Running is a stupid hobby. Runners are crazy extremists who wake up before dawn to run in a big loop and end up right where they started. Studies show that people who exercise are more productive at work, happier, are at lower risk for a multitude of diseases that cost the health care system millions upon millions of dollars, and are more likely to give of their time volunteering and to charities (often raising funds as they train for races). If only every hobby was that destructive.