Heimweh

The weather's been a little better the past few days, like Frankfurt's sort of vaguely starting to remember that there's this thing called spring. The snow that had been on the ground for weeks finally melted, and I decided it was time to start riding my bike to work again, now that I wasn't so scared of hitting an ice patch and dying.

And it's been really great, except for the part where I learned about a rule of the German road through a guy on a bike yelling "Rechts vor links!" at me as he cut me off the other day. Or so I thought -- turns out according to the rules of the German road, I was actually cutting him off, because unless there is signage to the contrary, the person on the right has the right of way, even if the person on the left is CLEARLY on the main street and the person on the right is flinging himself bodily into the middle of traffic.

When I learned what the deal was, from my coworkers, I was all, "This is a stupid rule! Who the hell would ever think of that?" But it's not a stupid rule -- it's just not a rule that makes sense to me. This is not my culture. And yet I've lived here before, and I speak good (though far from perfect) German. I find it too easy to forget that this is not my culture. It's not that I feel equally comfortable here and in the U.S.; it's that I feel comfortable enough. A lot of the time, where living in Germany is concerned, I know just enough to be dangerous, to think I have it all figured out, even though I should know better. I don't know why I feel like I should have it all figured out. I have at least one moment of "how do you do ___ here?" or "how do you say ___?" every single day. I've lived in Germany for a little over a year, versus a little over twenty-two years in the U.S. The U.S. -- the middle of the East Coast, specifically -- is where I'm from. I don't know why it should surprise me that my reaction to traffic laws that are not the ones I grew up watching my parents apply, that I learned myself, is, "Well, that's stupid." What I'm working on is getting past the initial moment of "that's stupid" and accepting that's it's not stupid but rather DIFFERENT, and that that's how it is here.

But oh, getting yelled at in the morning for something I had no idea I was doing wrong really makes me miss being in the U.S. sometimes, where my twenty-two years of being steeped in the culture help me a lot more than my one year and change do here. Not that I never have moments of not knowing what the heck is going on in the U.S., particularly in NYC, but I felt like I had it together a whole lot better in New York than I do here, and that, among other things, makes me miss that city acutely.

Indulge me for a minute.