COLLECTIVE EMAILS (11/2005)

(Subject: Life in a new place......in a new language.)


Oh dear oh dear....



......friends.

One night, not so long ago, I came home from a terrific party very late, happily drunk but with a notably clear mind, and I thought: Now I've done it. Now I know what it feels like... For for the first time in my whole long life and, especially for the first time during my long six weeks as a Berliner, I had spent the whole evening communicating with people, many different people, real GERMAN people, and I had actually talked and we had actually understood each other. The feeling was intoxicating. (Or then it was the consumption of great amounts of cheap Lidl Vermouth earlier that evening, but I don't want to think so.)

At the moment I'm not feeling notably drunk, clear-mindedly intoxicated or in any other way happy - only very exhausted and truly discouraged. I've been wanting to write you, dear friends, for weeks, and tell how splendid everything is here: how beautiful Karl-Marx Allee can be when the sun shines; how delicious and ridiculously cheap food the Chinese place on the corner makes; how Germans love to queue; how my life here was at the beginning; how pretty our flat is and how totally *nett* the flatmates are, and how our cat has started to like me, and how we are going to paint our wall; and about the university, how it started at last three weeks ago, how I got to join the university choir, how huge the university is, how many lovely quaint houses I see on the way to the university, how there are no lectures, only "seminars"; how we've been practising fire poi with some new friends of mine (even though almost no one seems to do it here); how we're going to have our big house warming party next week; how Bri's grandfather died and he had to suddenly fly to the US, where he still is; how I've kept to my enormously difficult decision to not speak any English here; how we're going to buy an Ugandan xylophone from Uganda; how all the best Hausprojekts and Voküs are nearby our home and how Friedrichshain is in every way the best place to live; and so on, you know, everything. But instead I've been obliged to use all my time to translate texts I have to read for my courses - excerpts of novels, short stories, articles, essays, academic texts on comparative literature - for hours, days, weeks. I don't understand how it can be so and it makes me utterly sad. I only have lectures (er, seminars) on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so one would think that there is enough time for reading too; and to be honest, there isn't really that much to read. But there is hardly ever a full paragraph that I can understand without consulting a dictionary. And so, in the end, I don't read the texts, I translate them, and I sit with them and stare at them and don't understand them, and I don't understand why I don't understand. How can it be so difficult? Why are there so many words? Why does every word have so many different meanings? And WHY isn't it enough that I really want to learn?

I've spent all of this Sunday translating, and not happily: I might be only a Berliner of six weeks, but I do know many better things to do in this city on a Sunday. Now I'm tired. I won't tell you about Voküs or the cat or the queuing. Desperately I cling to the hope that if I just keep working, not giving up, working hard, it will get easier. It will have to. And then I'll write my dear old friends back in various European countries about everything. Perhaps in German. In any case I should try to concentrate more on making friends here... I've come to the conclusion that Germans, in general, are nice, but not any easier to approach than Finns. So it's great there are other Erasmus students. Their German is also so much more understandable than that of Germans, and they understand my German better...