Monthly Archives: April 2010

Let's go on a trip – U.S. edition

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A few months ago I wrote about which European cities I would love to travel to, and as I am currently having a phase of longing to travel (or move) to the States, this is the U.S. edition. I actually thought of doing this back in February, as my blogging ideas list suggests, probably during my last ‘I want to go back to the States’ phase, but then forgot about it over exams, until now.

As you may know, I lived in the States for a year, and while I did go on a few trips, there are so many more places that I have yet to see.

I did spend a week in San Francisco, a place I loved, as well as three weeks on the east coast (Boston, New York City, Philadelphia & Washington, D.C.), which I enjoyed as well. Though I’d pick the west coast or the South to live (better weather and friendlier people).

I also spent a few days in Dallas, where I spent two weekends at a friend’s house (and subsequently didn’t see anything of Dallas), and a week in Kansas City.

And a year ago, I finally got the chance to go back to the States and spent another week in NYC. While I loved that trip, I had been there before, and my list has yet to get any shorter.

Las Vegas

Las Vegas
Photo by Roadsidepictures.

Who wouldn’t want to go to Las Vegas? I’m not big on gambling but I’d love to see the city, all the lights, and buildings, and the atmosphere.

Colorado

Colorado
Photo by stevewhis.

I am not an outdoors type of person, and I’ve lived in the city all my life, but I think for Colorado I’d make an exception. Colorado and the …

Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon
Photo by James Marvin Phelps.

The Grand Canyon looks absolutely breathtaking in pictures, I cannot imagine how amazing it would be to see it in person, with my own eyes.

San Diego

San Diego
Photo by slack12.

San Francisco

San Francisco
Photo by SF Brit.

I’ve been to San Francisco before but I’d love to go again, as I truly enjoyed my last trip there. I would also like to visit the surrounding area and maybe visit Yosemite on one day.

Dallas

Dallas
Photo by ragingwire.

While I didn’t see much of Dallas on my two visits there, the main reason for my wanting to go there is that essentially all the friends I made at OU now live there, and I would love to see them again. It’s five years in June that I left. I would also like to drive up to Norman to visit my old stomping grounds there and to see what has changed around the city and university.

New Orleans

New Orleans
Photo by ohad*.

I wish I had visited New Orleans when I lived in the States (pre-Katrina), but I didn’t. Back then, who would have thought that the city would be devastated by hurricane Katrina only three short months later? But I reckon that by the time I can afford a trip to NOLA, there will be little to remind a visitor of the damages caused by the flooding.

Florida

Florida
Photo by Express Monorail.

Not only do I want to visit Florida for the beaches and alligators Everglades, I also want to go to Disney World. I have never been to Disney World or Disneyland (in California or Paris, heck I’m not picky, though I’d prefer Mickey Mouse and Cinderella to speak English and not French), and even though I am 26 years old now, I’d still love to go and be a kid for one day.

Georgia

Georgia
Photo by ceejayoz.

I would really love doing a road trip, from Florida up to Georgia, to …

South Carolina

South Carolina
Photo by Kyle Kesselring.

… and from South Carolina to …

North Carolina

North Carolina
Photo by Martin LaBar.

I do not have any specific places or cities in mind, I’d just really like to see the southeastern US. And a road trip would be perfect for that. Not to mention fun.

Hawaii

Hawaii
Photo by David Winnie.

Do I really need to explain why I want to visit Hawaii? Hello, gorgeous beaches, landscape, weather. What’s not to like?

I know, that’s several weeks of vacation right there. Not to mention how much it would cost to see all these places. Maybe I should start playing the lottery.

But just looking at all these amazing places that you can find all in one country (granted, a big one) reminds me of one reason I love the US. How anyone could not be interested in traveling there (*cough*my parents*cough*) is beyond me.

How about you, which places in the US do you want to travel to? And which places you have traveled to did you enjoy most?

Faking it?

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If only I too had been born in Connecticut or Virginia, [...]

I would say things like

- From How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, 94-95.

I came across this quote in a book I am reading for my upcoming Spanish exam and it stuck with me. As you all know, I am not a native English speaker. I started learning the language in 5th grade, when I was 10 years old, like most Germans nowadays. I did not particularly like English nor did I do well in it for the first five years, but at some point, it just clicked and I started enjoying the language.

My neighbors were from England, and they had a subscription to Sky (UK television). Every week I would drop off a video tape with them, they would tape Buffy the Vampire Slayer for me, and I would pick it up the next day. I think that was the turning point. I started watching movies in English, and reading books in English (when the original version was in English), and I started enjoying the language. I never enjoyed sitting down and actually studying grammar or vocabulary, but at some point I didn’t have to do that anymore. I developed a feeling for what was right (though I obviously still make mistakes) and I would learn new vocabulary automatically, just by watching movies and reading books in English.

In 2001, I started keeping an online journal on LiveJournal, and from the beginning I wrote that in English. I have always blogged in English. Blogging in German feels unnatural to me, I’ve tried. Sometimes I feel more comfortable speaking in English about some things, which is why I chose to write my thesis in English, and take my English exams entirely in English, even though I don’t have to. I figure that if the primary and secondary literature is in English, it is easier for me to stay in the language, than having to awkwardly translate into German. And trust me, it would be awkward – I am not good at spontaneously translating into idiomatic German because when I read a text in English, I think in English too.

But regardless of how much English I integrate into my life, my English is not perfect and it never will be. When I read old blog posts of mine from a few years ago, I can see that my English has vastly improved, especially over the past six years, but there are so many idiomatic expressions I come across in other blogs, or in books that make me think, “huh, you know that sounds really good, maybe I should try using that expression sometimes.” And sometimes that’s what ends up happening, a lot of times I just forget about the expression until the next time I come across it.

There are so many things I don’t get. Puns, jokes, cultural references. Thanks to movies and TV, thanks to the internet and to bloggers like you, I understand many of them, and I am constantly understanding more. I used to have a t-shirt that I bought in the States. It said Monkey Bars, and it depicted some monkeys sitting at a bar. One day I was wearing it, when I was on an excursion with a bunch of American exchange students, and one of them said something about my t-shirt, when someone said, “don’t you get it? Monkey bars?” And he was like, “oh yeah, duh!” I was thinking, “what the hell are they talking about?” Back home, I looked up monkey bars and found out what monkey bars are. I did not know. I had no idea how funny the t-shirt I was wearing was. And thank God, monkey bars did not mean anything awkward. That would have really been embarrassing. I didn’t let on that I didn’t get the pun either, and I doubt they noticed, but I did. And years later, I still remember it as one of those situations that reminded me of reality.

No matter how fluent my English is, how good my accent is, how many compliments I get, I am not an English native speaker. I am not American. And no matter what I do, I never will be. And sometimes that makes me feel like I am pretending. Imitating someone else. Not being real. And that even wanting to speak English as well as a native speaker is a ridiculous goal, because it cannot be achieved. I wonder if native speakers secretly laugh at me because they think I am pretending to be something I am not. Be part of something I don’t belong to. When really, I do truly love the English language, and that is why I love speaking it, hearing it, writing it, reading it. I loved living in the United States, and I feel at home in the American culture (well, for the most part, anyway), so I do seek it out. I like making friends with (nice!) Americans, I like speaking English with my American friends, and I like to have little things in my life that are American.

And that is part of me. It is who I am. Who I really am. Some people may not understand it, some may not like it. But it is me, and doesn’t that make it real?

How to be prepared even when you aren't

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A week ago, I took my first exam. It was a five-hour exam that took place on Saturday at 8am. No, unfortunately I am not kidding about that. The good thing was it meant I would be done with the exam at 1pm and get to enjoy the rest of the weekend.

When preparing for my exam, I had grand plans of having read through and taken notes on all texts and articles three or four weeks before the exam. But I did not turn into a model student over night, and I am still the same old procrastinator I have always been. Up until five days before the exam, I regularly experienced days when I pushed the studying back so late in the day that I ended up going to bed and not having done a single thing for my exam. In those times I spent more time thinking about studying than actual studying. However, a week before my exam, I had finally read all texts and articles and was done typing up my summaries of everything important, and after that one day of not lifting a finger at all, I spent four days at the library cramming everything into my brain that I could.

Some of my study notes

For me studying for an exam is not something I do frequently or am very good at. I am particularly bad at sitting down and just memorizing stuff. I get distracted, my mind starts wandering and at the end of a day of studying for 7-8 hours, my brain feels so drained that I have no idea how much of the day I remember because I cannot even think one coherent thought.

Four days is incredibly short to memorize as much as I had to, and my only hope was that I already knew a lot more than I thought from simply working with the texts for the past semester and weeks. I did not have much of a choice: MA exams are no dress rehearsal. You do not get to not show up because you’re not prepared. If you don’t, it means you failed. I do know that you can fail once or twice and can retake it, but I have no idea what the procedure is if you do. I don’t know this because I never read up on it because I decided that I would not fail. Even if my preparations didn’t go quite as planned.

So I decided that I would simply make the best of the time I had left. I decided that four days can be a lot of time if you stay calm and focused. I decided that becoming nervous or thinking negatively would achieve exactly the opposite of what I was trying to achieve. So I didn’t become nervous and I did not break down crying. I stayed positive and calm and collected. I stayed rational. I told myself that I would do the best I could with what time I had left and then that would simply be it. I would do my best, and I would not be able to do anything to change it, and whatever I did not know by Friday evening I would simply not know on Saturday morning. I would not be able to change anything about that either. So there was absolutely no use in wasting any time or energy on worrying, being nervous or upset. Makes sense, right? The amazing thing is, it worked.

I stayed calm. I went home from the library at 6pm on Friday (as opposed to 10pm the previous days). I ate dinner while watching The Vampire Diaries, I read through some of my notes again, took a shower, packed my bag for the exam, and was in bed by 9.30pm. I did wake up once in the middle of the night but other than that I slept well, I got plenty of sleep and was well-rested by Saturday morning.

Saturday morning I left for the bus stop a little early to make sure I would not miss the bus. So far so good. The bus ended up being a few minutes late but no problem, I left so early I could have walked to the university and still have been on time, right? Well, when another girl showed up at the bus stop and pointed out to me that it’s Saturday I realized that I had checked the bus schedule for the wrong day. There was no bus at the time I thought on Saturdays. I must admit, I did get a little nervous then.

And then things got a little funny. I wanted to tweet about the bus mishap but I had left my phone at home (on purpose because no phones were allowed during the exam). Then I wanted to tweet about wanting to tweet and not being able to … Errrr, being up at 6am does strange things to my brain. But as it provided some comic relief to the situation, it was welcome. It also made me think that chances are, most of my friends would not even get it and look at me like I’m crazy. Please tell me you do? That I am not the only one who something like that would happen to?

The bus would get me to the university 10 minutes before the exam was due to start but I had planned on being there 30 minutes early. And what if the bus was late? It wasn’t, and I was not the only one taking that bus who was taking the exam, so that calmed me down immensely. I ended up getting there 10 minutes before it started and I was fine. Even though it didn’t work out as planned, everything worked out.

My hands did shake a little as I was opening the envelope that contained my question and the sheets for me to write on. But that only lasted for a few seconds and once I knew what my question was I was focused again. I worked away quietly for the next five hours. About an hour into the exam, I took a short break and reflected a little on the situation. After all, this was it. The first of the exams that the past 7 years led up to. And this was it? Seriously? To me it felt like a bit of an anti-climax. I had expected it to be bigger, but in the end it was just an exam. A very long one, granted. But it was an exam, and I did and applied just what I was taught and had learned in the past 7 years.

I don’t think I did perfectly. There were probably people who studied loads more, and there were probably things I forgot or expressed poorly. I also doubt that my exam was well-structured, but unfortunately, with paper and pen, you do not have a copy and paste function. The exam lasted five hours. I wrote roughly 16 pages. I ran out of time before I ran out of things to say but I was able to answer all parts of the question, which I think is a good thing.

All in all, the exam was a positive experience because I felt like I knew what I was doing. I think a lot of students make the exams to be this huge insurmountable thing, which it is not. We have been studying for this a lot longer than just the past few weeks and by the time we take the exam, we know what to do. This is our field, we studied for it (even if it wasn’t as much as we had planned) and we do know what we’re doing. I have no idea how well I did, how much the professor expects or how tough he grades, and I won’t know for a couple more months.

I would certainly be disappointed if I got a bad grade, as I am not expecting to, but I do have this little voice in me that makes me fear I am judging my work completely wrong and really did horribly, on the exam as well as my thesis. Because I would be absolutely crushed if I got bad grades on either. But before I find out about the grades, I have another exam to take, and if it goes as well as this one did, I will be okay. Because nothing could be worse than thinking you performed poorly and having to go into another exam with that feeling.

And next time, I will remember that it is Saturday when I check the bus schedule.

How do you feel about taking exams? Do you get nervous?

A blog makeover

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One of my favorite ways of procrastinating – yes, even better than cleaning – is giving my blog a makeover. And that is what I did tonight. I had found this theme a couple of weeks ago and decided that I wanted to give it a try. I had been eying the Thesis Theme that so many of you are using now, but to be perfectly honest, spending $87 on a blog theme is just not possible for me right now (or maybe ever, because I like to change it up every now and then).

Which is why I was absolutely thrilled to find out that someone modified another theme by the same designer to look similar to Thesis. It kind of does, doesn’t it? Close enough for me anyway. And this one is free. Like most people, I am a huge fan of all things free.

After some further editing on my part, the theme now looks the way I want it to. I kept the background and colors from my old theme because I did love that part of it. I redid my category pictures (changed some pictures and kept some), so all in all, it doesn’t look terribly different. A little less colorful and a little more clean & grown-up (but not boring!) is what I was going for.

My blog's new look!

I cannot believe how long all the editing took me. I am the kind of person who loves playing around with a theme, and who is an absolute perfectionist as to how the theme has to look at the end. If something doesn’t look the way I want it to, I keep trying until it does. That would explain why I am still up even though it is almost 3am and I have a cold and am absolutely exhausted. But you know, regardless of how grown-up my blog may look, I can still be a little crazy sometimes. Now that everything does look the way it is supposed to, though, I can finally get some well-deserved rest.

I would love your feedback on the new look!