Since then

I know, I know, I haven’t written in forever. I’ve been busy. I’ve got my traveling boots on and I am rolling.

But I will try and recap.

Bonn

I’ve always liked class trips; not the wimpy day-at-the-art-museum field trip sort of thing, but the kind where you all travel somewhere together. Living with someone, ipso facto means you get to know them, really know them, for better or for worse.

But this time it was for better. We took a 1 PM train from Freiburg to Bonn, no connections, filling almost half a wagon with our assorted baggage and ourselves. Most of us would be traveling on to our Christmas destination instead of going back south, and were thus equipped for visits with grandparents, gifts for smaller siblings and relatives, and large quantities of alcohol for consumption during the week as we had been told the bar in the hotel was not priced “student friendly”. We spent the train ride reading horoscopes out of a trashy Swiss magazine we had found, pretending to read our assigned material and getting to know one another.

After a minor disagreement with the ticket machine we managed to find the correct S-Bahn to the hotel, following our professor like a row of ducklings with backpacks. The room assignments followed with little ado, and I ended up sharing a room with Sandra, a girl I had gotten to know from class who grew up in Indonesia and studies in Germany.

Our contact at the hotel, a Frau L_ffe, managed to spend about an hour telling us what we already knew or weren’t interested in and eventually turned us loose for the night.

The schedule for the rest of the week was invariable; breakfast until 9 AM, at which time we would hear a presentation for an hour, followed by two hours of Q&A. The subsequent hour was reserved for our working groups, then came our two hour lunch break, then working groups for an hour, another presentation, another two hours Q & A, somewhere in there a coffee break, and dinner. Evening program consisted of working groups, either planning or presenting.

Planning or presenting what, you may ask. Well, our themes, I would reply.

We had been split into groups based on different themes, which we were to condense and present. We had about three hours total to plan a half hour presentation, with substance, but mostly something that was supposed to be funny. The groups were: Good Governance; Fair trade vs. free trade; Women and Development; Financing Development; Theories of Development; and Climate Change. I was in the Trade group, as the only female with eight guys.

I should mention that our group was not the only one attending the seminar. A group from Freiburg (us; bottom left corner of Germany) plus a group from Rostock (upper right corner of Germany) were meeting in Bonn (center left). Our class was an upper division class; in order to take part you have to be in at least your 5th semester. I am between 3 and 5 years younger than most people in my class. The class from Rostock, however, was a lower division class, with some ,,Ersti”s, some first semester kids. Which means, they are lacking some of the base knowledge.

The group on Free Trade vs. Fair Trade consisted of nine people, myself, four from Rostock and four others from Freiburg. Our group consisted almost exclusively of economists and one individual with a desperate need to control everything, whose deepest desire was to give a factual presentation on Ricardian Trade Theory. This theory is the theory explaining comparative advantage, and how a land with a comparative advantage in a specific good can gain from trade even if other nations have an absolute advantage in that same good. It’s been referred to as the most basic economic principle that is completely counter-intuitive. We wasted an hour of our lives trying to explain this to some of the Rostockers. For those of us who understood it, the explanation was superfluous, and for those of them who didn’t, they still didn’t completely understand. And in the end, this trade theory is the basis of many free trade arguments but has nothing to do with fair trade. In the end, amid protests from our self-proclaimed ‘leader’ we decided to do a mock WTO round to air some of the free trade/fair trade arguments, and ended up hammering out what was to be said only a half hour before our presentation. I was the moderator, so I had to get someone to help me with parliamentary procedure in Germany. (‘enthalten’ means ‘abstain’, by the way). It went well. A bit long, but whatever.

Other presentations included several skits, one for Good Governance with a dictator who had to decide whether to trade with the EU, with China, or follow WTO guidelines, one for Women and Development with a poor starving mother with a million kids who manages to get a micro credit loan at 20% interest, one on climate change (a theater piece in three acts—the best presentation of the conference), one talk show presentation, and one CNN news report.

Everyone brought drinks to the presentations and had a good time; they were an opportunity for us to take things less seriously. Afterwards we adjourned to the cellar, where there was a pingpong/foosball room and a bowling alley. Except it wasn’t bowling, it was Kegeln, and the ball has no holes. Some kindhearted individuals took it upon themselves to supply the group with alcohol and managed to smuggle in several cases. We sat around and talked and bowled, sometimes until 3 or 4 AM. And our professor, a gentleman in his late 50s, I’d guess, sat right there with us, beer in hand, till 3 AM. He was looking decidedly more chipper at breakfast the next morning than most of his drinking partners.

The presentations that we had every day consisted of various people out of the Development Politics world. In Germany there is such a thing as a Ministry for Overseas Development, with main offices in Bonn, and the head of the Asia department gave us a presentation during our visit there. The head of the HR department also came and gave a presentation on careers with the ministry. Other presenters included a representative from Miseror, which coordinates religious and missionary development aid, from Global Policy Forum, an NGO, and related. All fascinating subjects, mostly decent presenters and occasionally fantastic presentations.

That was Bonn. I was sad to leave, sad that it would be over. We spent a week together, three meals a day and everything in between. I got along smashing well with almost everyone I talked to, and I made an effort—which, every time I do something like this, gets easier—to get to know as many people as possible. I made some good friends. Our seminar has one session remaining and then it is finished for the semester, so if we want to see one another it will only be by private initiative. But I think we will, I hope we will.

So, sad to be leaving, not excited about the coming 7-hr, 5-connection train ride before me, I left Bonn for the Baltic.

I arrived at 10:30 at night, and A. picked me up. She filled me in on the latest family drama, which that day had consisted of a dog that didn’t want to be washed and some problem or another with the new practice. We didn’t chat too long as I was pretty tired.

The rest of the week seemed to go by in a blur. I went running every day. The house was full of people, the five family members, the current aupair, the grandmother, myself, and eventually also the aunt and uncle. Before Christmas was a flurry of packing and shopping, organizing, cooking, cleaning, more packing, more shopping. We went to Luebeck for a day, saw the Christmas markets, and I found my favorite candy, which apparently does not exist in Freiburg, enjoyed the city and had a lovely day.

Christmas in Germany takes place Christmas eve. We spent the morning preparing the ‘dinner’ (mid-day meal) of cold potato- and chicken salads, shrimps, fish, vegetable salads, rolls, antipasti, and all sorts of crazy other stuff. After dinner we got dressed, the girls wearing their ball gowns and I a borrowed skirt, and opened presents.

Christmas and Thanksgiving are the dangerous times for homesickness for me, and of course I cried when I read the note my mother had sent me. But I was thankful to be with a family, with my other adopted family, not to be celebrating Christmas alone somewhere. It was nice to see the happy faces and squeals of delight as everyone opened their packages, candles burning on the tree (yes, real candles). A happy Christmas.

Some of them went to Church in the evening, to 11 PM service, but I of course did not go and turned in early. The entire time I was there I slept poorly, either because someone would come in the room at some point or because the stupid aquarium was glowing like an atomic reactor in the corner. I usually went downstairs and slept for the last few hours on the couch.

The rest of the week sort of slipped through my fingers. I spent a lot of time and effort writing a term paper, which A. corrected for me, finishing up some assignments from other classes. The eldest daughter went to Austria with her new boyfriend to go snowboarding, the middle daughter, her boyfriend and the littlest spent hours competing in the Baltic All-Age Foosball Championships with Ch.’s Christmas gift. I was sort of turned loose. It was nice to be back; it felt like home it was for the year I lived there. I had to resist the temptation to go up the stairs and straight into the room on the left, which was then my room and now belongs to An. (At least she took the posters down—the last Aupair left my posters up and my books in the shelves, and it was just creepy to be in there). On one hand, I didn’t expect everyone to drop what they were doing and figuratively glue themselves to me—it honestly probably would have annoyed me if they had—but on the other hand most of the time people went on living their lives and I was left to live mine, which I am quite capable of doing, but defeated the purpose of my being there.

But somewhere in there I received an email from K., who had spent the last 6 months bouncing around Australia. She had traveled back from Sydney, flew into Frankfurt, took a train to Berlin and rang the doorbell at midnight with $7 in her pocket as a surprised. She was back! We arranged that I would come for New Years, as the family on the Baltic had no specific plans and I was already in Northern Germany. So I snuck down to Berlin to see my little sister, who has grown up.