Word of the Day: Vereinsamung

Today was  catch-up day for me.  The business of the last two weeks has kept me from attending to many of the “normal” classroom responsibilities so familiar to every teacher–reading student assignments and grading.  My study abroad gig also requires me to submit monthly accounting reports so that the university knows I’m not out carousing with my P-Card.  All of that takes time, and it’s not exciting work.  But I worked steadfastly today in anticipation of this weekend, my family’s first travel weekend away from the students.  Don’t get me wrong; my students are awesome, but travelling with them can be stressful.  To explain: throughout this semester, I travel with my students to several places as part of our Global Studies curriculum.  We’ve been to Eisleben, and we spent the last weekend in Berlin.  Next week we’ll spend a day in Weimar and one at Buchenwald, and we’ve got additional global studies trips scheduled to Wittenberg, Dresden and Prague plus our long trip to Turkey.  This doesn’t even account for some of the local global studies visits to important sites here in Leipzig.  It’s a lot to do!

As much as I love my time here, being the on-site director entails a great degree of responsibility, enough so that I’ve never felt entirely relaxed at any of the sites we’ve visited.  I’m always thinking about the next step.  Okay, where do we need to be?  Are we at the right platform?  Are all of the students here? Where is Gabe?  When we arrived in Berlin last weekend I went up to a police officer and inquired directly, “Wo ist die S-Bahn?”  The police office looked at me and said, “Guten Tag.”  I stared blankly for a moment.  Why is he saying that?  I want to know where the S-Bahn is!  But then after a moment I realized, “Oh, he’s wanting me to be more polite, to greet him as I should instead of pushing so quickly to have him give me directions.” Rude American, I am.  I smiled, shook my head and said, “Guten Tag!  So sorry! (Shaking my head), Ich bin Amerikaner.” “Ahh yes,” said the police officer. “But you say good morning in America too!” As friendly as he was, I was so embarrassed.  Stress makes one forget even the most basic of courtesies. Perhaps in a future post I’ll share my other embarrassing moment in Berlin: missing the Damen symbol and ending up in the women’s restroom of a restaurant.

So today’s word of the day, Vereinsamung, is a fitting one for me personally.  The word means in various contexts, “seclusion,” “isolation,” or “being alone.”  I’m an introvert by nature, so I’m thrilled by my family’s plan for our travel break, which I’m fashioning as a sort of retreat after a month of business (another possible word of the day that captures this would be Freiheit).  While we’ve got students travelling to Austria, Nuremberg, Cologne and Venice, our family will be sticking a bit closer to Leipzig, taking a regional train tomorrow to Heidenau, a small village just east of Dresden.  We’ll spend two nights in Heidanau and two days travelling around what German residents lovingly call Sächsische Schweiz, or “Saxon Switzerland” (Trust me, the German pronunciation of that does not roll off the tongue easily).  Far from the urban crowds during an off-peak time of year, we’ll be hiking, enjoying the great, possibly snowy outdoors, eating at small German pubs, and enjoying a brief rest before returning on Sunday to a new week of teaching and living in community in Leipzig.  Vereingsamung has never sounded better!