Famous view of Tübingen with the Neckar River in the foreground

Hallo aus Deutschland! It’s Sunday the 28^th of August and after being here for three days, I can finally say I’m all finished unpacking, organizing, and moving into my little room here in Tübingen. It’s a little smaller than a freshman dorm at Valpo, but I get it all to myself and the entire building has been newly renovated. I’ll post some pictures as soon as I take some – knowing that I’ll be here for the entire year takes away the urgency I typically feel while traveling to capture every potentially-memorable photo, so I haven’t really taken any pictures yet.

I was hoping to do a blog post a little earlier, but I am still without my own username and  password to access the internet. With this blog post I’ll do a little bit of catching up of everything that’s happened over the past few days. It’s been pretty busy, and my jet lag still isn’t completely gone, so I’ll do my best to remember it! It will probably be another week or so before I’ll have internet in my room, but Jake, Hannah, and Emily have all found ways to get online, so I’ll at least be able to borrow their computers for the short term. (By the way, there are five us altogether from Valpo who are studying here in Tübingen – I’ll refer to them often throughout this next year of blogging, I’m sure!)

Both flights here went very smoothly and without problems. For the music people who may be reading this, the band My Chemical Romance was on our flight from Chicago to London! I had no idea of this, but Rachel stood in line next to them while boarding and was excited to tell all of us after we had landed at Heathrow.

When we arrived in Stuttgart I was tired and very hungry – being gluten intolerant, I could only eat about half of the surprisingly good looking food on the plane. Professor Malchow, the resident director for the Reutlingen program (and also the de-facto go-to person for the Tübingen program), met us as soon as we had collected our luggage. While we rested and ate some lunch, he filled us in on a lot of really helpful information while we waited for the Reutlingen students’ plane to arrive. I was so jet lagged and sleepy, so hopefully I’ll be able to remember all of the important points, anyway…

A big coach bus brought all of us Valpo students to our respective buildings in either Tübingen or Reutlingen. I was the first one dropped off, so I didn’t get to see where anyone else was living right away. As the bus pulled away, I was left standing on the sidewalk with three heavy suitcases and a backpack staring up the two flights of stairs leading into my building. At this moment, I was feeling pretty lonely and in shock about being dropped off in a completely foreign city that I knew next to nothing about. Luckily, that wore off soon enough.

All of us were very lucky to have Clara Ullrich and Stefanie Merk (two German students who lived in the German House and studied at Valpo last year) to help us move in and acclimate to our new rooms. Having also lived in the German House last year, Jake and I know them very well. This was especially helpful because they offered to drive us to go shopping for food and other necessities for our rooms, which I was extremely appreciative of.

On Friday, Jake, Hannah, Emily, Rachel and myself spent the day exploring the city, buying cheap cell phones, and visiting/comparing each others’ rooms. With the way the student housing agency is set up here in Tübingen, none of us knew very much about where we would be living until we actually got here. Hannah, Emily, and Rachel have a much more “urban” living experience than do Jake and myself. Their rooms are located right in the middle of Tübingen’s “Altstadt,” (historic, old part of the city) and very close to everything. Their buildings are older, but they are in easy walking distance of all the famous sights downtown, the university buildings, and many stores, restaurants, bars, ice cream shops, etc.

Jake and I live in an eight-story building that is much more similar to an American-style dorm building than to the house-type buildings where the girls live. It is about a half-hour walk to the city center and university buildings, but the building itself and rooms are pretty nice. I was surprised at how extremely messy all of our buildings are. Because of the way the German semesters are set up, many of the students who lived here prior to us just moved out at the end of July. I think move-out must work differently here, because all of our four buildings are full of junk in the hallways that old students apparently didn’t want to take with them. Pulling a suitcase down the hall was a bit of a challenge in some areas on Thursday… We have been told that a “deep-cleaning” of the buildings will occur sometime in September before all of the German students move back in, which I’m really hoping is true. Out of my 5-room wing, there are only three of us here, which is much more full than other parts of the building. On every floor or the “Neuhalde,” (the name of my building) there are five locked wings, with five rooms in each. Every wing shares one kitchen, two showers, and two bathrooms, so it feels much homier and more interconnected than the freshman dorms at Valpo.

On Saturday, the five of us had quite an eventful, adventure-filled day. We all split the cost of a “Baden-Württemberg Ticket,” which allowed us to travel anywhere in the state of Baden-Württemberg by bus, train, or tram all day long, as long as we were together. It is much cheaper than all buying individual tickets, and every German state has tickets like this. I am pretty familiar with “Deutsche Bahn” (“German Rail,” the national train system here) because I traveled by train very often as an exchange student here in High School.

In the morning we took the train to nearby Böblingen, where the closest Ikea is located. We all found some pretty neat things for our rooms, whether plates and silverware, bedding, or decorations. Ikea in Europe is almost exactly like Ikea in the U.S. I recognized many of the items from having seen them in Chicago, and it is still cheap, amazing, blue, yellow, and giant even by American standards – just like at home.

We all had a good laugh at ourselves after lunch. After we had checked out and bought everything, we decided to go back into the store (with our purchased merchandise) to eat lunch at the cafe. The lines were extremely long, but well worth the wait. After eating and visiting in the cafe for a few hours (to avoid the heavy rain outside) we were faced with the question of, “What is the best way to leave the store carrying bags of things we have already bought?”

Looking like the stupid and confused foreign kids, we all walked around for awhile thinking about how to leave and not make a scene. The Germans are very orderly people – the store had stairs marked “Up only” into the store and restaurant, and “Down only” back to the warehouse and checkout section. Even the hallways through the upstairs and downstairs were one-way-only loops, clearly marked with giant arrows.

After going down the upstairs, and up the downstairs, Jake decided that we should take the elevator marked, “KEIN FAHRT,” (NO ENTRY or literally, NO RIDE.) He was convinced that the elevator would take us down to the first floor, and open up right by the entrance where we could simply walk out of the store the way we came in. It did go down a floor, but instead of opening towards the entrance, the doors opened towards the warehouse and checkout area. Some other shoppers stepped out, probably wondering why weren’t doing the same. Jake was convinced the elevator would open on the other side if we just waited.

We did wait, and after a couple minutes, we all burst out laughing. Nothing happened. We were trapped in the elevator. It must have been an automatic elevator, because there were no buttons to control which floor it was going to next. We looked over to to the controls, and there were two buttons: an emergency call/alarm button, and another logo we did not recognize. I pressed the second one.

The doors to the warehouse opened back up, and we walked back into the store with our blue Ikea bags, trying as hard as possible not to laugh and cause a scene. We ended up just walking through the store to the checkout area. Once we got there, the group elected me to explain our situation to a checkout employee. After explaining that everything we had was already purchased, the story of us being hungry and going back upstairs to eat, getting lost, being confused, not knowing where to exit, and eventually ending up at the checkout, she nodded understandingly. Then we got scolded. “Normally, you are not allowed to go back into the store after leaving the checkout,” she said. “I will need to see your receipts.” This wasn’t a foreign concept to us at all – every store in the United States would say the same thing… We should have just eaten before we shopped, so we all felt pretty stupid.

Luckily, I already had my receipt ready to show her, and after looking it over she let us leave. And with a long walk back to the train station, our Böblingen adventure was over. That evening, we were back on the train to Stuttgart. There is a big, well-known “Weinfest” (Wine Fest) going on there right now, and we decided to go. A whole part of the city was designated as the “Weindorf” or, “Wine Village,” which I found to be a pretty accurate title. There were tents sponsored by restaurants serving food and delicious wine everywhere, and accordion players in the streets. The atmosphere was stereotypically and unmistakably German, and absolutely wonderful. It was extremely crowded and it took us forever to find a free table. Once we found a place to sit down and take in the atmosphere, it ended up being a very great and memorable night. More to come about the Weinfest on Jake’s blog, if he hasn’t already posted!

This has gotten to be a pretty long entry – I’ll have to stop being so long-winded…

Bis dann!

Links:

Hannah’s blog: http://www.travelwithsimba.blogspot.com

Emily’s blog: http://www.germanymeetsemily.blogspot.com