So, How is Germany?

Before uprooting your life and routine to move to a foreign country, creating content while living abroad seems easy. But then, the whole moving-abroad-and-uprooting-your-life-and-routine thing tends to get in the way. So, in short, I am dutifully trying to document my life in Deutschland, but it won’t ever be perfect.

Now that the perfunctory excuses are out of the way, I want to answer the most frequently asked and broadest question ever. “How is Germany?”

My immediate response to this question is to pull all my favorite adjectives out of my back pocket; Germany is breathtaking, amazing, charming, and everything I hoped for and more. I wake up feeling like the luckiest human on Earth every day. While this answer is honest, it doesn’t fully answer the question. The past two-ish months in Deutschland have been phenomenal (another great adjective), but I am not walking in a field of daisies. (Well, excluding my podcast walks in the vineyards.)

My life has changed rather drastically. I am no longer the straight-A student sitting front and center in all her advanced classes. I no longer shoot my hand up at every question, and I no longer spend hours a day on homework. Now, I sit and class and try to stain out common words from the surrounding dialogues. I only do math homework, and even then, it takes me quite a while to complete. Last week, I got a 5 (the English equivalent of a low D) on my math test and physically jumped for joy. So, in short, I am no longer a model student.

While I lost the part of my identity so deeply rooted in academic validation, I still had plenty of identities left, right? I stopped swimming after several years of daily training, I am no longer able to go to youth groups and church, and I don’t get to talk to my friends very often. After being in Germany for a few weeks, I realized that I didn’t quite know who I was without these things. An alarming amount of my identity was very deeply rooted in the things I did and the people I knew.

Without my “activities” to fall back on, I had to do some thinking. And trust me, a two-hour-long physics lecture in German gives one plenty of time to think. I’ve started finding my identity in who God thinks I am (chosen, worthy, loved, fearless, etc), and I have started to explore all the parts of myself that couldn’t be squeezed between swim practice, school, homework, and club meetings. The parts of me that are interested in feminism, obscure world history, books, travel, and so much more. Now, I take walks around my host community and listen to podcasts. I sit at the dining room table and work on German, partly because I have to, but mostly because I love language learning. I sometimes spend an extra hour talking with my host parents over coffee after lunch. I seek out activities that I want to try, even if I am not great at them.

Not only have I learned a lot about myself, I feel consistently humbled and awed by the world around me. Deutschland is not only beautiful, but it is also completely foreign to me. Before this year, I had never traveled out of the country, and most of my traveling experience revolved around the beach. I had experienced other cultures, but I had never lived in a new culture. After only a few weeks, I feel infinitely wiser and more tolerant to new cultures and less attached to my American point of view.

So, I guess the answer to the notorious question is quite broad too. I simply can not sum up my time and Germany. In the past fifty days, my world has expanded infinitely. Yes, there have been hard days, but I have also been blessed with the coolest adventure ever. My perspective on myself and the world around me has been shaken completely, and frankly, I believe the world would be a much better place if everyone studied abroad.

Until next time,

XOXO Bookish Babble