Utah sunrises and taking the trouble to practice

It's been very very cold here in Stadtroda this week; there's a light coating of snow on the ground, and every now and then we have flurries of tiny flakes, like God's sprinkling the world in powdered sugar. It's clear and wonderfully sunny and just above freezing now, but it feels like it's below. Still, it's quite lovely, and the temptation of the rolling hills was too strong yesterday, so I took a walk up one of Stadtroda's many valleys. I found a guest house among the trees along the half-frozen river most of the way to the next town, and was thoroughly frozen by the time I found my way back.

The days have gotten long enough now that the sun has risen before my first class starts, which goes a long way towards making that first 8am class better. Sunrises always remind me of one of the last days of the RV trip that I took with my mother and some friends many years ago--I was maybe 14 or so. We wanted to make good time, so before sunrise, while our friends still slept, my mother and I unhooked the RV and started off. I remember clearly pulling out onto a canyon road, with the sky neon yellow and orange, that rich fiery color that makes you think that if you could dip a goblet into it and drink it, it would taste like mead, warm and sweet. We turned on John Denver and sang "Take Me Home, Country Roads" and watched the sun rise, alone on the road. That song may be a bit cheesy, but it still is close to my heart.

In a mostly unrelated note, I was (finally!) asked by one of my students to help him with his English homework. As far as I can tell, this guy is kind of a teddy bear; he's smiley and friendly and laid-back and, heaven forgive me, farmer-y. I'm not sure how else to phrase it, but there it is. Now, I'm sure this guy is good at what he does, but English, at least, is not his forte. He's consistently lost and confused in English class and struggles to put even basic sentences together. Part of the problem is the aforementioned mixing of English levels, so that it's almost impossible to try to explain something to him without losing control of the rest of the class. I'm sure it's equally frustrating for both of us.

Now, school has always been my thing. I love being in schools, I love teaching and learning and studying and discussing things and I have trouble understanding why some people...don't. For me, a life of learning and scholarship sounds pretty darn good, whereas a job like, say, farming, would be like death sentence for my soul.

Anyway, after I helped him translate what we'd done in English, he had to pull out his computer and show me pictures of his tractor. They all inevitably do this, and I'd never understood it; how interesting can pictures (and video) of tractors possibly be? But listening to him talk--about how he was so glad that school was almost over, and how he couldn't wait to get back to work--I started to understand, just a bit. As far as I can tell, farming is his calling. It's what he loves, it's what he does best, and my kind of life would be just as strange and distasteful to him as his would be to me.

I've wondered a couple times--with, I must admit, insufferable arrogance, so I beg your forgiveness--why some of the intelligent, strong-willed, ambitious students who study here would ever want to spend their lives working on a farm. Is it because they have no other options? Not enough money to do something else? Is it just easier? The more I talk to them, though, the more often I hear that they simply love to do what they do. This guy yesterday, I could hear it in his voice. And I should know by now that everything is more complicated than it seems; if I've learned anything at all from Bienenkunde, it's that taking care of even the smallest animal is an exhaustive undertaking, demanding time and patience and skill and practice and years of dedication. My students--for very many of them, it's the same thing. Their craft is more complex and takes more acquired and natural skill than I'll ever be able to appreciate. It's what they want to do; it's what they love. I desperately don't want to sound condescending here; it's hard for me to comprehend the attraction of a passion different from my own, but I'm learning to appreciate their own feelings about their work and, by extension, the true worth of the work itself. I may get frustrated with them for their lack of enthusiasm for what makes my heart flutter and my soul leap, but the least I can do then is have respect for the calling that does the same for them.

It's still hard, nevertheless, to sympathize. I don't share their classes, their cares, their interests, their lifestyle; and this makes it hard(er than normal) to connect with them on a meaningful, personal level.

Part of this is that one facet of myself that is and continues to be a frustration and hindrance to me is my stunted ability to make conversation and, by extension, to get to know people that I want to make friends with. I have a blind terror of intruding on other people's private lives and thereby making myself obnoxious to them. As a result, I generally refuse, out of pure insecurity, to take the risk of seeking out others, and make friends instead with those who choose to come to me. If no one manifests the courage that I so markedly lack, I don't know how to bridge the gap to make a connection with another person.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, because this painful and humiliating process seems to take, for me, about half a year. It takes me that long to get accustomed to other people, to get to know them a bit and to slowly gather the courage to knock on their door for no other reason than needing someone to talk to. Half a year--sound familiar? That was the duration of my exchange in Germany the first time, and how long the AUAP students stayed at WWU, and how long the Winterschule students stay at the Fachschule before they return to work. This means that consistently, I have gone through the long fight to make myself make friends, only to have them leave just when I finally am getting comfortable with them.

This is ridiculously frustrating, and I wonder sometimes if it's even worth the trouble; but I simply can't just sit in my room and Internet all day. I have to have other real people to talk to, to hear other voices besides my own, to be in proximity to other humans. It's like having a deadly thirst that can only be slaked by drinking molten lava.

This all reminds me of a conversation from, somewhat oddly (although appropriately), Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett is sitting at the piano and engages in a witty repartee with Mr Darcy on the topic of the reasons behind Mr Darcy's failure to dance with some of the ladies at the last ball:

"I certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done."
"My fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault--because I will not take the trouble of practicing."

Elizabeth's reproof is the solution to this problem: if you want to get better at something--piano, underwater basketweaving, or making conversation--you have to practice. In other words, there's no way to learn to do it other than doing it. This is exactly the last thing I would want to hear. As I learn the guitar, my fingers are clumsy and uncoordinated, and the strings buzz and twang and make all sorts of awkward noises. It's embarrassing and frustrating and it makes my fingers hurt, but there's simply no other way to learn.

I know this very, very well. I realize it and understand it and comprehend it but still catch myself hoping, at least a few times every day, that somehow I will find an easier way and suddenly I'll go from being quiet and awkward to being eloquent and brilliant and everyone will like me. Not likely...

Welcome, Christmas, bring your cheer!

[UPDATE: Christmas market pictures now posted in my Picasa album!]  

The title is sarcastic. Um, sort of. Or maybe not? I don't really know.

This was a very easy week for me at school. I showed the original How the Grinch STOLE Christmas! movie to each and every class. On the plus side, this meant very little actual work for me, since the movie's about 25 minutes long and I only have 45 minutes total. The students seemed to enjoy the movie (I mean, really--who doesn't like Dr. Seuss??), and I was quite amused by some of the answers to the last two questions:

Q: What is your favorite thing about Christmas?

Student: Ente! (Duck!)

Student: That it will be over soon.

Q: What is your least favorite thing about Christmas?

Student: Presents.
Me: Giving or receiving?
Student: Both.
Student: I don't like going to church and celebrating the birth of Jesus.
Me: That's kind of the point...

On the downside, I showed the movie to every class. That means my poor mentor teacher and I watched that movie three times a day, every day this week. I'm pretty sure I can do the entire thing from memory by now. Also, I made the mistake of deciding to bring Christmas cookies to every class, which meant a lot of time spent baking.

In other news, I've been spending more time with the students in the Wohnheim. It's amazing how fresh cookies will get you at least a short conversation! One girl that I've talked to a bit came into the kitchen to get some food with a couple friends, saw that I was baking cookies alone, and hung out with me in the kitchen after her friends left to keep me company and show me pictures and video of her tractors. The downside to all this friend-making is that the two 2010 classes, which are the friendliest and most inviting, are both starting practica in January, so they'll all be leaving and I won't see them again.

To offset this, I'm trying to spend as much time with them as I can. Yesterday I had a linguistics class and an Italian class scheduled, but I bailed on both to drive to Weimar with some of the Hauswirtschaft students instead. The journey that takes about 25 minutes on the train took us about an hour by car. It didn't help that we took back country roads through rolling hills covered in dry, powdery snow; the wind was blowing hard, making dunes and ripples in the snow and piling up drifts where the road used to be. It's eerie, looking out the window at a purple-grey landscape made sickly by the distant reflection of orange city lights off the clouds, unable to discern where the interminable hills of snow end and the murky sky begins.

We made it alive to Weimar, but by the time we got to the Christmas market, we had only 15 minutes to look around before it closed. We split up for dinner; I had Chinese food with two other students while the rest had döner. We trekked wearily back to the cars and inched our way back through the wildly blowing snow to Stadtroda.

I'd barely made it back to my room and taken my coat off before someone was pounding on my door: another student from a different class, inviting Bethany and me upstairs for some Gluehwein. Bethany declined, but although I was exhausted, I plopped myself in a chair upstairs and did my best to converse intelligently, with mixed results. Möhre, the student who invited me, has discovered that I like to sing, and tries to get me to do solo performances whenever possible, which is usually when I'm tired and trying to focus and figuring out what people are saying to me. It's both flattering and irritating.

Anyway, Christmas is just around the corner, and that simply astounds me. The snow continues to fall determinedly, but Stadtroda is greeting the holiday season with its customary stoic indifference. I finally decided to take my mentor teacher up on her offer to spend Christmas with her, but I'll have four whole days between Christmas and New Year to do...well, I don't honestly know. The Christmas markets will be closed, and everything will most likely be deserted. Altogether, without Christmas parties, Christmas shopping, lights, decorations, music, companionship, family, and all the other trappings of the holiday season, I can't help but be a little bit apathetic.

In other news, my beloved Kindle is having issues, and by "issues", I mean, "Amazon says it's defective and I have to send it back." They already sent me a replacement, but whaddayaknow, the replacement has the same problem as the first one! Just brilliant.

I hope I don't sound too grumpy. I'm not really unhappy, just a bit...listless, maybe. Some meatloaf and festive singing will do me good, and that's the program for tonight! I hope that everyone who reads this has a wonderful Christmas and a warm, snug, enjoyable evening wherever you are. Miss you all.

Snow and ice and snow...and ice

Well, winter has long since come to Thuringia. Two weekends ago was the first major dump, and there's been snow on the ground ever since. Of course, the first time it was magical; Washington gets very little snow normally, and even less that sticks, so we have rain and wind and rain and sometimes even freezing rain all winter. Snow is more dangerous than rain, but it's also much more fun and more beautiful, and I don't have a car anyway.

It started to get interesting, though, last Wednesday. I had to go to Jena for Russian class, and the walk to the train station is about 20 minutes long and (so not kidding here) uphill both ways. As I left the dorm, it began to rain, and by the time I was heading down the hill, the bricks of the sidewalk were all coated in a thin sheet of ice. I somehow made it alive and with my computer undamaged to the train station, only to find the same story in Jena. I tottered and slid to my Russian class and back, disgruntled and twitchy, and considering just going home and skipping our English Stammtisch.

The 20-minute walk to the restaurant where we have our conversation group took me about 45 minutes this time. Not because it was slick--oh, it was slick!--but because I was taking pictures. The rain had frozen, not just on the sidewalk, but on every leaf and branch of vegetation along the road, creating perfect imprints of the leaves' veins and making whole trees shimmer and shine in the light of the streetlamps. I imagine that if we ever figure out how to stop time, a rainstorm will look like the road up the hill did last Wednesday night: branches encased in clear crystal, raindrops frozen in the act of dripping. It looked like every twig had been dipped in molten glass. I'm sure I was quite a sight, oohing over half-dead bushes on the side of the road, and I never saw anyone else stop to look, which was a shame, because I got a lot of joy out of that slow walk up the hill.

It was still raining, and I stopped at one point until a tree to listen. All the snow was frozen over with a skin of ice, which made it shine oddly in the orange light. The falling rain made a gentle hiss, like white noise on a television, as it fell, but on the leaves above me, it clicked and clattered. By the time I finally made it to the restaurant, the rain had frozen and become...well, somewhere between rain and snow, without being hail. I tromped into the restaurant half an hour late and had a lovely time chatting with my companions and planning our Christmas party, and we left the restaurant an hour and a half later to find that the snow/rain had become straight-up snow, and a brand-new blanket about two inches thick had already fallen. So, now we had old, slushy snow covered in a sheet of ice covered by new snow. Thankfully, one of our Stammtisch companions drove us back to the dorm.

Now it's been warming up and melting, so the remaining snow has all been compacted into ice again. And now you know what the title of this post was about. Exciting, eh?

Playing with bees in the snow

Going to Bienenkunde today, I thought we were going to do something winter-ish, like watch a video about bees, or build more honeycomb frames, or something like we've been doing for the last few months. Uh...nope.

I came into the teaching room right at the beginning of a lecture on Oxalsäure. What exactly Oxalsäure is is not entirely clear to me (Leo says "oxalic acid" but that doesn't help at all), but that wasn't too important since I'm not sure what half the things we use in Bienenkunde are called in English anyway. It's kind of better that way. In any case, der Bienenmeister explained to us that we would be mixing distilled water, sugar, and Oxalsäure to make a thicker-than-water, highly poisonous concoction that we would then give to the bees. Apparently, the water dissolves both the sugar and acid crystals (this doesn't sound good), so that when the water evaporates, the bees eat and store the resulting crystals. The Oxalsäure is apparently not poisonous to the bees, but it is to the Varroa (a red-copper mite no bigger than an asterisk), which can kill off a hive during the winter if they're not treated. The varroa get into the cells with the larva and kill them before they can hatch. We had to treat for them now because the bees are not currently laying new young, so the mites won't be able to survive.

However, what this means is opening up the hive. It was warmer today than it has been recently, but the snow is still thick on the ground, and it was cold for even us. Imagine for a second...

It's comfortable in the warm, humming darkness inside the hive. The workers take turns beating their wings to generate heat, swarming in a clump around the all-important queen. The dark, furry mass migrates slowly around the hive, working their way gradually through the precious stores of food they've industriously stored during the summer. Inside the styrofoam boxes, they are safe and warm, content to stubbornly wait out the chilly winter outside.

Sorry, meine liebe Bienchen.

Then, like the ending of the world, there is a loud crack, and their warm, snug home splits open. The cold whiteness of the outside world spills into the hive and the workers buzz frantically as their hard-earned heat disappears into the freezing air. The bees cling to each other, stumbling confusedly as the shock of cold numbs them; a few take to the air, rocketing around their attackers' heads, but their aggressiveness is suicide. Once they leave the hive, it will be shut behind them and they will absolutely die. It doesn't take long; some last longer than others, but all eventually plummet into the snow and struggle weakly against the remorseless cold until their meager warmth simply vanishes into the winter air.

If you feel just a bit sad and horrified, that's how I felt today. We cracked open every hive to douse the confused bees with our concoction, which had to be dripped right on them to be effective. They didn't like it much, and I don't blame them at all.

As you may imagine, the first hive was the worst. The hives are built of several levels, in most cases three or four: a bottom level full of combs (Waben) that also has the hive's only entrance and exit to the outside; a second level (Zarge), completely open to the first, also full of combs; and sometimes also an extra level that earlier contained the sugary feed (Futter) that the beekeepers give them to replace their stolen honey; and last, the styrofoam roof (Decke). At the first hive, Manfried (one of the other beekeepers) didn't realize that the bees would be clinging to the bottom of the second level, and instead of just tipping it, he lifted the whole thing off and swung it over the snow. The bees were scattered, dropping dazed and twitching in the snow, and the shouting began. The Zarge was replaced, and we rescued as many bees as we could from the snow with a dustpan and a bird's wing, but the whiteness was still pocked by little black specks. Then the Bienenmeister doused them with the chemical and we moved on. I felt a little shaken. For heaven's sake, they're bees--but it's still heartbreaking to see them fighting to crawl out of the deathly cold, waving their legs and fluttering their wings, freezing to death, and know there's no way to help. I took to killing the ones that lay helpless in the snow. I don't know if they felt pain as the winter stole their tiny whiff of life away, but I tried to make it fast.

We went on to the next hive, then the next. Some were alive and abuzz with anger when we let the cold in; some sent out kamikaze pilots that flew at our faces, and one even stung Rolf; some were tiny groups, huddled determinedly around their queen and meekly accepting their chemical baptism; and two of the hives were ghost towns, all of the bees dead, frozen or flown or killed by varroa. Only once more did one of the beekeepers make mistake and spill the bees into the snow, but it wasn't so many as the first time. My job was mostly to follow and watch, or help clean the snow off the top of the hives to open them, but a few times I got to take the bird wing and gently sweep the staggering bees back into the hive before it closed again, crushing them or stranding them to die.

Like I said, this was more than a bit heartbreaking. It seemed cruel, too, to disrupt their warm seclusion, even though I know that the varroa, untreated, can destroy the hive. I picked one fallen bee out of the snow and it crawled on my finger, its tiny feet gripping my skin, its feelers wavering feebly. I tried to flick it back into its hive; I don't know if it made it or not. I hope so. Today's lesson made me look forward all the more to springtime--and swarming season...