I'll miss you Marburg

When I started the language course in Marburg, I apparently stepped into a black hole of writing. To be fair it's entirely my fault. I mean, I'm principally a procrastinator (then maybe a Chemist?) and there were always other things to do than write... so now that it's 6 weeks later and I'm back in Munich on a national holiday I've run out of other things to do instead of write.

I think it would be impossible to recount everything that we did over this time. Not only impossible, but boring and worthless too. What I'm going to attempt to convey is the overall feeling that I, and I think everyone I was close with in Marburg as well, have when I consider that period of time, even after only a few days of it being over. Brace yourself.

I think my overall feeling for Marburg is tied closely to, and thus well explained by, my relationship with my friend Ghislain. Ghislain lived on the same floor as me in my dorm and we met while making dinner in our shared kitchen one night. It was probably about 4 of us silly Americans, Ghislain, and a friend of his. Ghislain comes from Cameroon and has been living in Germany and studying for a couple years. The national languages of Cameroon are English and French, which means he has a mother tongue, French as a second language (which is nearly perfect from what I understood), very very good German (from studying and living in Germany), a passable amount of English (he can understand pretty decently and speaks more than he would like to admit), and I think some basic Spanish as well. The point of that list is to explain that my relationship with Ghislain exists almost entirely in German, but since he does know some English he's able to translate words for me here and there. My first impressions of him were that he was amazingly patient with my crappy German and just a really nice and fun guy. Our ability to communicate was stunted at first, but as my German grew (which was in a big part thanks to him) we were able to understand each other much better.

One of the ways this group of Fulbrighters chose to pass their time was to hold amazing Potlucks on a weekly basis, amazing because for some reason the group was filled with god-damned-amazing cooks. Since Ghislain, as already mentioned, is just a super cool guy I started inviting him to our Potlucks. Not surprisingly (did I mention he's super cool?) he meshed great with the group and so we all ended up spending a lot of time together. We talked about life in Germany, Cameroon, the US. We laughed about each others mistakes in German (apparently one does not visit toilets in German). We discussed whether the question of gay marriage is a moral question or not (this required some new vocabulary on my part, including 'to procreate'). So a big part of this experience was getting to know this awesome Cameroonian guy, an experience that I've never had, especially not in a foreign country AND language. I think it's noteworthy that this was my first friendship auf Deutsch... a language which is neither of our mother languages. That's a milestone.

My last day in Marburg Ghislain saw me off at the train station. We got some innocent bystander to take a few pictures of us, including the one above, and said our goodbyes. It was my last goodbye in Marburg. I received an email from him later in the day which ranks up there with the nicest e-mails I've ever received. The gist of the email was that he had a great Summer getting to know all of us and getting his first real contact with Americans (although according to one of the employees at a Döner shop in Marburg, I'm not a real American). He said we changed his general opinion of Americans such that he no longer believes us to be as arrogant as the world seems to want to believe we are. Here's a little excerpt:

ich freue mich echt eure Bekanntschaft gemacht zu haben..deine zuerst..du bist wirklich ein netter mensch, du bist ruhig, ehrgeizig..ich kann soweiter nennen...du bist einfach ein wunderbarer Mensch..bleib so...das ist gut.

which loosely translates as:

I'm really happy to have made your (plural, as in ours... there's no distinction between singular and plural you in English but there is in German) Friendship. Yours (this time singular, as in mine) first.. You are really a nice person, you are calm, ambitious... I can keep on naming... You are simply a wonderful person... Stay so... that's good.

The nice part is this is basically exactly how I feel about him. My justification for talking about Ghislain was that he's somehow symbolic about how I feel about Marburg, so now it's time for me to clarify that. Our course in Marburg was this really tight period of time, with a solid start and a solid end. But the results of that course -- the friendships, the experiences, the sentiments -- will stay with me more vividly than any other 6-week period of time thus far in my life. I doubt I'll ever go back to Marburg, but I'll keep the memories, the feelings, and (I'm positive) many of the people close to me for a very, very long time. This of course includes him and all of my Fulbright friends. I consider it kind of a magical time. I think these pictures prove that magic.

these pictures courtesy of the lovely Rachel

I'm off to meet a couple of my boys and explore my beautiful city for the day, before hitting up Oktoberfest tomorrow. Sorry again for the long delay, but at least you were saved from pretending to read my droppings. Hopefully I'll become more regular again and you'll be pretending much more often. Also something to look forward to is that with increased regularity, the size and consistency should be more... digestible.

That was a disgusting metaphor.

-Shane