Oakwinter.com

Car’s in the shop, bike needs a new seat, what’s a lad to do? Bus it is, then.

For those in the audience with short attention spans, let’s summarise: the bus system here in Music City, USA, was designed by someone with a serious mental retardation. I don’t think this person even knew what a bus looked like before getting the gig. I’m happy to provide further libelous statements as needed.

Consider the following:

• In real bus systems (for values of “real” approximating “the ones in Switzerland”), they know exactly when the bus will be passing a given stop, down to the minute, and they let you know it; the schedules are phrased like, “a bus will stop here at :03, :18, :33, and :48 past the hour”. Except, you know, in four languages.

  In Nashville, the best they can tell you is the interval between busses. The intervals are usually something like, “a bus will stop here once ever 25-40 minutes”. Let me translate that: “we have no idea where our busses are”.

• In Nashville, there’s a bus stop at every street corner. Americans are apparently too lazy to walk to a bus stop, so busses end up spending more stopped, picking up passengers by the ones and twos, than actually moving. Real bus systems know to space the stops out so busses can actually cover some ground between stops.

• Bus stops aren’t covered, nor do they have timetables or route maps. You should just know. Fool.

• Every route in the city (save one or two) run through a central choke point in the core of downtown Nashville. I don’t mean a covered central station. We’re talking about a single section of street, one city block long, one lane in either direction. Busses end up spending about 10-15 minutes at a dead stop here, waiting for the busses in front of them to move.

• The only places to buy bus tickets are on the busses themselves, and you have to have exact change. Have a $5 bill instead of the $1.25 for a ticket? Well, you get your change back in bus tickets. Sucka.

• In places like Basel, you buy a ticket and it’s valid for a certain number of zones for two hours. You can take as many busses as you need within those two hours, so long as you stay inside your concentric zones. Here in Nashville, everytime you change busses, you have to buy a new ticket, even if you were only on the first bus for five minutes. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is so brilliant.

All this combines to lead to a bus system that is so colossally inefficient, I cannot figure out how it functions. Going the two miles from Centennial Park to 4th Avenue took 45 minutes. Two miles. 45 minutes. I walk faster than that.

Hey, Internet, I know we haven’t talked in a while, but that doesn’t mean I hate you ok? I just kinda got tired of writing about Europe and Paris and trains and self-imposed sleep deprivation and I figured you were probably pretty damn tired of it, too.

Can we be friends again, Internet?

I promise I’m going to finish writing about Europe, honestogod, just not right now. I really want to talk about Spain and Portugal (which you haven’t even heard about yet) and Ireland and England and the Tour de France, but not now. I’m more in the mood to talk about the trip to Portugal in March than the trips to Everywhere in June and July, but you’ll get it when you get it so just stop guilting me already, ok Internet?

In the meantime, I’m just going to talk about my house and my grass (*grumble* stupid lawnmower *grumble*) and my bookshelves.

XOXO,

Collin

I’m normally a pretty healthy person, but since coming to Germany, it feels like I’ve been sick every other day. The most recent attack on my immune system started this past week with the loss of my voice, developing into the full-blown flu by Friday night. The main attraction: 102+ degree fever.

After massive quantities of aspirin and ibuprofen I’m starting to feel better, but I’m by no means out of the woods yet.

Current theory on why I’ve been so sick: it’s the reverse situation of what happened when the Europeans first came to North America; they brought all kinds of new diseases, which the natives didn’t have an immunity to. This is just the Native Americans taking their revenge for all the hard work my ancestors did in wiping them out.

The whole continent here is outraged over the revelation that the CIA has secret gulags and torture flights operating in Europe. Newspapers have daily coverage of the scandal, radio morning shows talk about it, and every news update on the German NPR equivalent includes at least one piece on the progression of the story. All of our friends here want to talk about it with us, about how our government could do such a stupid thing.

What’s the reaction in America? Is it being talked about, is it getting any media play whatsoever? Do people care? What’s happening back in les États-Unis?

• I’m increasingly-unable to remember what language a particular conversation was had in. I can usually conclude that the language was German, but only because that’s the default; I can’t be sure that it wasn’t French or English. This is especially true since I got to know a group of Belgians in the course of our excursion to Karlsruhe: all of them speak English, German and French, but one’s German is weak, while another’s English could use work; accordingly, the language spoken tends to be different every time I run into them, and will switch back-and-forth rapidly.

  On a related note, I generally can’t remember what language advertisements or shop-signs are written in. Again, I default to assuming that it’s German, but my memory has stopped recording that detail.

• The first few weeks we were here, all the exchange student groups (American, Italian, etc) tended to speak only German amongst themselves, seeminly loathe to use their native language. Now it seems that the newness of the thing has worn off, as we all speak our mother tongue much more often than we did in the early days.

  On the other hand, the languages tend to mix much more readily than they used to. I used to make a very clear mental distinction, “I am now speaking German”, “I am now speaking English”, etc, and there would be a momentary spin-up period while those particular vocabulary centers activated. That distinction is no longer made, and I no-longer consider it unusual to switch languages two or three times in the space of four sentences.

  I sometimes get special practice at this during the conversation tables (which are going quite well, thank you). Last week, for example, the English of one of the girls there wasn’t quite up to the level of the others, and she had a tough time following some of the conversations. I played interpreter for her for the duration of that particular exchange, then later, when she and I were talking, we fell into a pattern where she would speak to me in German, then I would repeat back what she had said in English before responding to her question, again in English.

• I had my first experiences with German dialects recently. In the store the other day, and on TV last week, there were people speaking what I could recognise as some vaguely German-related language, but that sounded to me like a simple stream of incomprehensible gibberish. It makes me grateful for coming from a language where the biggest difference in “dialects” is that Americans say “trunk”, while, on the other side of an ocean, the Brits say “boot”.