My beloved Sam,
As this
March, my first month abroad in Frankfurt am Main, draws to a close and as I
find myself having an hour or so to spare, I have taken it upon myself to write
you this letter. Granted, not many people would consider writing a letter to a
cat an enterprise worthwhile, but to me it seems a fruitful medium to tell my peers about what a brief period of studying abroad is like. The point
here being: I am not on vacation. I am not primarily trying to have a good
time, I am here to study. Now, I fear that a straightforward story about what I
am up to here would resemble too closely the kind of shallow “It’s wonderful,
wish you were here”-nonsense quickly jotted down in a hotel room on the back of
a postcard before the evening calls for the more pressing matter of getting
drunk on local booze in some tourist trap of a bar.
Before I even left, I wanted to make it
perfectly clear to myself that studying abroad is (or, in any case, is supposed
to be) something wholly different from a vacation. Even if you’re the
culturally minded type, like me, that tends to fill one’s vacations with museum-visits
and so on, it’s still another ballpark: even if only for half a year, I live
here now. Even if, at first, everything comes at me with the intensity of a
rollercoaster-ride, I’m fully aware that this is going to wear off. So when I
see fellow students in my language course jump at every opportunity to get
drunk on near nightly basis, I can’t help but think they are deceiving
themselves. Or at least setting themselves up for a fall later on this year,
when the ‘vacation-high’ wears off. Knowing my disposition to the kind of
sociability that fares best when fueled by alcohol (I am, as a matter of fact,
getting drunk on local booze right now), I do not believe I was mistaken to
warn myself of this pitfall.
In need of a medium, then, corresponding more
closely to what I am experiencing and what I hope to experience, I fell back on
the simple idea of writing letters. If you ask me, I think it is a lost art. I
assure you, I am not a pessimist regarding the cultural influence of social
media, but anyone who has ever read a good letter,[1]
cannot deny that there is a simple charm, a powerful potential and a warm
intimacy all combined and disclosed through this medium that lends it a flavor
that one simply cannot get across within the narrow confines of a Tweet or
Facebook-update (useful though they may be in other paradigms of human
interaction). As for you, Sam, my conversation partner in this enterprise, it was
not hard to choose you. In this day and age, one can easily keep in touch with
all of one’s human friends (see, I do think Facebook is useful), but there is
no way, digitally speaking, to even approach the experience of living with a
cat. Even if the technological means were there, I guess other animals still
confuse us too much (they do me, anyway) to enable us to digitally schematize
the kind of relationships we have with them. Thus, because it corresponds to a
real experience of missing you and, in the process, handily provides a way of
venting this experience, I choose to write to you. Because I dare not to hope,
I can only wonder if you miss me too.
Before you write me off as sentimental, an
emotion of which I know you have always looked down upon, let me say in my
defense that the past few weeks have been very hectic. So much so that missing
you seems like the logical outcome. Keeping track of everything related to a
study abroad is hard enough when you are in an exchange programme (such as the Erasmus
programme), so you can imagine how much more stress is involved when you are
simply a guest student beyond any programme and therefore any established and
official guidelines. Finding a place to live (an enterprise that is even more
painstaking in Frankfurt than it is in Utrecht). Counting my blessings when I
did, even though my landlord is very annoying at times and I pay a small
fortune for a room that is located 30 minutes (by public transport) from the
city center (the housing shortage is even greater in Frankfurt than it is in
Utrecht). Not expecting any cooperation from the university, either the Goethe-Uni
Frankfurt or Utrecht University. Being grateful for what little cooperation I
did get. All this and more is involved in setting up a study abroad as a mere
guest student. Modern universities are in an uncanny proximity to the Platonic
Idea of a bureaucracy and, even if it runs as smoothly as the German stereotype
prescribes (which it by no means does), a bureaucracy is inherently and
inevitably hostile to exceptions to a rule. And guest students, so I have learned,
are very much an exception, at least here. To paint you a picture, just imagine
wasting three hours at the International Office here in Frankfurt, waiting in
three different lines because each and every class of student falls under a
different sub-office and nobody seems to have the faintest clue of how to point
you in the right direction. Indeed, matriculating here presented a special kind
of hell, a level not mentioned in Dante’s Inferno,
but I imagine it to be the one where they sent Kafka.
This is not to say that being a guest student
is not without its benefits. To start off: the federal state of Hessen, like
many other states in Germany, has made it illegal to charge money for an education.
Thus, the little money you do pay as a student is strictly used for
extra-curricular facilities (including, but not being limited to a
semester-ticket for public transport in the greater Frankfurt area). This means
that I pay as much as any other student, whether he/she is in an exchange
programme or not. To go on: the technical term the Goethe-Uni uses for guest
students is “Free Mover” and this term is not without adequacy. So-called
‘learning-agreements’ do not apply to me, I require no minimum of ECTS, and, in
principle, it is up completely up to me to decide what to do with my time here
in Frankfurt. You, my dearest Sam, above all, would know how to value such
freedom, even if you wouldn’t feel obliged to make much use of it. I guess you
could see it as two sides of the same coin; if you’re up to the challenge of
taking full responsibility for your study abroad, the way you fill it in
remains completely up to you.
But it has been stressful. Especially the first
two weeks before I was able to move into my WG (“Wohn Gemeinschaft” or: ‘living
community’), I moved around a lot, staying in a hostel one day, crashing on a
couch the next. Knowing I could properly move into a room only after the 18th
of March, being, however, occupied with a language course at the Uni from the 6th
onwards, I took the opportunity to try something I wanted to do for a while
now: couchsurfing. The basic idea is that one tries to solicit participating
members in an on-line community and stay with them for a night or two. You pay
their hospitality back in gratitude and pleasant company (no, not that kind,
though romances have been known to sprout) and at the end of one’s stay, provided
everything worked out, one might just have gained a new friend. I was lucky
enough to land three addresses where I could stay for nine nights in total.
Lucky because, first off, it is apparently quite difficult to convince someone
to let you into their home if you’re new to couchsurfing (and have therefore
not gotten any reviews from other participants) and, second, all three of my
hosts were amazingly hospitable and, moreover, very friendly people. I wouldn’t
recommend this strategy to you, dear Sam, because a necessary precondition is
the willingness to be technically homeless for a week or two, never staying
more than three nights in one place, relying completely on the kindness of
strangers, as they say. Knowing how much you value your groundedness, the experience
might prove to be too much of a challenge. To be honest, I myself was also
quite relieved when I could finally settle into something more permanent. I
regret nothing, however; especially if you want to make friends in a strange
new city who actually live in this strange new city (beyond the host of
international students you primarily meet), this is the way to go.
And what a strange city Frankfurt is. I was
warned by a lot of people before I came here that Frankfurt is not what you
would call a beautiful city, and to tell you the truth, it really is not.
Neither is it ugly, however. To clarify, take the local dialect. The charitable
reading says it sounds like the drunk murmurings of one linguistically impeded;
the word “Aschebescher” apparently means both ‘ashtray’ and ‘person from
Aschaffenburg’. It is, on all accounts, a rather silly way of speaking.
However, whenever I’ve heard it used, it was spoken frankly and wholeheartedly,
without even the slightest hint of cynicism or irony, and it thus instills a
certain kind of charm that is hard to pinpoint. I find this sort of paradoxical
union between ugliness and charm, tacky beauty and stylish kitsch everywhere in
Frankfurt. At least through this lens I am able to make sense of a new city in
a foreign country (a process, by the way, that is absolutely fascinating in
itself). There is a plaque near the Dom in Utrecht with a memorable quote by
the Dutch poet Marsman, loosely translated it is as follows: “No style, but all
the more character this city has, a harsh and narrow-minded obstinacy that
thinks itself the measure of all things.” I have always thought it a
description very accurate to the city of Utrecht. With this example in mind, I
would tentatively say of Frankfurt: “No character, but all the more style this
city has. An unwitting and cacophonous eclecticism, that never cares to measure
anything.”
I now have two weeks of free time, an interval
between the end of my language course and the start of the semester proper. The
language course itself was surprisingly fun, even though, in the end, the level
at which it was taught, was still too low for me. Maybe I have a knack for
learning new languages, something you can imagine is very useful in a country
like Germany, but I guess the most important contributing factor to my fast
progression up the so-called ECFR-ladder was the fact that from my arrival
onwards I spoke virtually nothing but German. Whereas my fellow students
reverted to English at any given turn, I consistently did my best to speak
German at all times, only then falling back on English when I would not have
the faintest clue how to describe a phenomenon (in this context, I am still too
ill at ease to go to the hairdresser’s). Learning a new language is not
something one should do rationally or with any forethought at all, it is a
sloppy process best approached by rushing into it, head first with reckless
abandon. Now, through this strategy, I was able to learn more quickly than
others and soon the lessons became a bit too easy for me, but I would not say I
regret taking the language course. Over and above some useful rules of thumb
regarding grammar and the like, my teachers actually made an effort to keep
things interesting, giving out handy information regarding life in Germany and
Frankfurt one moment and then starting off a discussion on Goethe’s Faust the
next. Imagine getting into a discussion with your teacher about Goethe’s
Spinozistic religious tendencies, while noticing half of the class has mentally
switched off due to a complete lack of interest. That was a delight in itself,
if only a cynical one.
I do not know yet what I will do now during
these coming two weeks. A lot of my fellow students have decided to travel
about, to Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and so on. This I can understand
if one is from a distant country and therefore not often gets the chance to see
more of Europe. For me, however, I feel it is not yet time for a vacation,
although I might book a small vacation in the Black Forest during the summer.
The prospect of writing my finishing papers in a small guest house in the
middle of beautiful nowhere, alternating reading and writing with long walks
through the forest: it sounds simply too delicious to pass up. But for the
present, I will probably use my free time to study here and prepare for the
coming semester. Presently, I also hope that all is well back home. I hope
Willem is taking good care of you now that I am gone. And I really hope the guy
who is subletting my room is not living it up in there (the prospect of him
possibly having sex in my bed is something I try not to think about). I will
write you again at the end of next month. Until that time I remain
Yours, with love and compassion,
Clint
[1] I can heartily recommend the
exchange between Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, downloadable for free
(but in German) at: http://ubu.com/sound/benjamin.html
