im Thuringen

The Tao of Packing Light, pts. 1-3

2010-01-20T12:52:00.000-08:00

1. “Home”

In chapter 26 of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tze writes, “the Master travels all day without leaving home.” When traveling, you should always have the barest necessities. However, it’s what you bring in addition to the essentials that allows you to never leave home. By identifying and packing the most important nonessentials, you can ensure that you keep your home with you.

For the casual tourist or short-term traveler (the recreational and diversionary modes of travel as described by Erik Cohen) it's not important to keep your home with you, but for the long-term itinerant (as in the experimental and existential modes) or, as was my case, exchange student, which can be likened to the experiential mode, some of the comforts of home are certainly welcome, if not necessary.

2. “Check”

While packing for my six-month stay in Germany, I was limited by the airline luggage allowance: two checked bags, and one carry-on. I began filling two large duffel bags with anything I thought I’d want to bring. My first mistake—I packed far too much of everything. Unpack. Try again. Always make a list. What was I forgetting?

Clothes—check. Books—check. Passport, cash, power converters, travelers’ checks—check. The essentials. Now, on to the non-essentials. Pictures of friends and family—check. Maps of places I’d been to put on the walls of my student flat—check. And so on down the list.

One important non-essential for me was the mobility inherent in a frame pack. I knew I'd be doing quite a bit of traveling around Europe from my base of operations near the geographical center of Germany; a frame pack makes it easy to carry the essentials for a shorter trip. I couldn’t pack everything I would be checking at the airport in the frame pack, but I could pack the frame pack into my duffel. Out came more clothes, out came more books; in went the backpack—check.

I finally worked it out—that non-essential thing from home that I simply could not go without. Music. For most people, traveling with music is pretty easy: iPod, headphones, iPod charger—check. Not for me. At the time, I played the violin, the banjo, and was learning harmonica. Okay, the harmonica I could throw in anywhere—check—but I had bigger problems. First: I could only bring the violin or the banjo, not both. The violin would remain at my parents’ house--it was worth more than the cost of my round-trip airfare. Next: the banjo was much too big to be a carry-on item.

Unpack. Take out half of everything I’d packed. Half the clothes, half the books, half of the passport—no, just kidding. But the banjo had to come. I’d go crazy if I couldn’t play music every day. If I have food, clothing, a place to sleep, and a banjo, then I am home—check.

3. “Home”

Some months later, I found myself busking on the street in a city in Southern Germany. My frame pack sat on the cobbles of the sidewalk. With my banjo slung over my shoulders, I heard the sounds of the city—the trams, the cars, people going about their business, and coins jingling as they landed in my hat—over the sounds of my fairly adept playing and clearly untrained singing.

“Entschuldigung,” came a voice nearby. Excuse me.
I looked up from my banjo and continued to play, nodding at the stranger to go on.
“Was fur ein Gitarre ist das?” What kind of guitar is that?
“Es ist kein Gitarre! Es heiβt ein Banjo,” I replied. It’s not a guitar! It’s called a banjo.
“Ach so!”

The German, who had never heard a banjo before, watched me for a few minutes, dropped a few coins in my hat, and wandered down the road in the direction of another busker—a cellist. Later that day I would be boarding a train back to Erfurt, where I was living in a student housing complex and studying at the University. But there, on the streets of Stuttgart, leaning against my backpack with banjo in arm, I was home.

English, Dutch, German

2010-01-20T12:45:00.000-08:00

Upon hearing I was going to the Netherlands for the weekend, my German friends had one important tip--never speak German in the Netherlands. Everyone there, they said, speaks English, Dutch, and German, but will never admit to the third because they're still somewhat pissed about a war or two that the Dutch and the Germans were involved in. Old news, but I was somewhat disappointed that it would be better to appear to be a stupid American tourist than a somewhat bilingual traveler if one of those languages were German.

All three tongues--English, Dutch, and German--are linguistically similar, all being of the West Germanic language tree. Dutch falls somewhere between English and German. Though I could read some Dutch and pick out a few words in conversation, I stuck to English and the Euro--universal languages in Western Europe.

About an hour after getting off the train and deciding I'd like to walk to my hostel in order to acquaint myself with the city, I realized I was hopelessly lost. My map wasn't particularly good, and getting around Amsterdam on foot is nearly impossible if you don't know where you're going.

The roads look like this: there are lanes for cars, lanes for bicycles, tracks for trams, and canals for boats. Oftentimes the cars drive in the same lane as the bicycles, oftentimes both the bicycles and cars use the same lane as the trams. The rest of the road--sidewalks a few feet wide made narrower by unending clusters of bicycles locked up to fences--is okay to walk on. I spent a lot of the time walking in the bike lanes and looking over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't about to be run down.

"Do you speak English?" I asked a blond Dutch woman who was passing by.

"Of course!" She seemed mildly offended by such a ridiculous question. I might as well have asked her if she'd seen a bicycle recently.

"Ah, wonderful! Do you know where we are or how to get here?" I said, pointing out the hostel on my map and playing the part of the stupid American tourist quite well. She looked at the map, turned it round and round, and realized she didn't really know where she was either.

"I'm pretty sure you want to go that way," she said, gesturing down the road in the direction from which I had just come, "but you should probably ask someone else."

I thanked her, dodged a bicycle or two, and wandered off again. Sometime later, the proprietor of a Shawarma joint told me I was in the right area. This helped a little, but I was still lost.

Next stop: a hole-in-the-wall bar.

"Bier," I said, confident with that word only. It's pretty much the same in all three languages.

"Speak English?" I asked tentatively after finishing my beer.

"No, no. Sorry." I was surprised. Time to break out the language of the oppressor.

"Deutsch?"

"Ja, ein Bisschen." Yes, a little.

The bartender seemed somewhat surprised--at either the fact that this American tourist could speak another language or that this American tourist had the gall to speak German in the Netherlands. I'm not sure which, but he took me to the back door of the bar, which opened onto a street I had not yet seen.

"Es ist in dieses Richtung, auf dem Recht." It's in this direction, on the right.

I thanked him and walked for about two minutes down the road, where I came upon the hostel at last--crowds of teenagers were milling around outside, speaking Dutch, English, German, Spanish, Italian, French--you name it. Hundreds of bicycles, it seemed, were locked up or left carelessly on the ground. This was the place.

Hallo!

2010-01-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

Nearly a year has gone by, but I'm finally beginning to organize some writing for this blog. Oops. I'll be posting fairly frequently for a bit now, I hope.

Greetings aus Deutschland!

2009-03-19T23:18:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting at the Frankfurt Fernbahnhof waiting for my train to Erfurt, which departs in two hours. I could have got an earlier train, but the 903h ICE train has no connections—much easier than trying to figure out where I'm going with all my bags. The terminal is under construction, but the main section has a glass ceiling, which makes me feel like I'm outside. Much nicer than Logan Airport, where I was less than ten hours ago.

I didn't have to wait too long to board the plane. Just enough time to use the bathroom and buy a pack of gum. The plane, a Boeing 747, was packed, but not full up. I was in the forty-seventh row, with an aisle seat, on the right side of the plane. The middle seat, wonderfully enough, was not taken, and the in window seat was a musician named Tim, who was returning to Germany to visit family. He lives and works in Boston, from what I gather, running a studio near and/or with Berklee School of Music. He was a nice enough fellow—we had a conversation about the imminent decline and fall of the great American industrial empire, and agreed that the big automotive companies' economic model is simply unsustainable. As we were taxiing on the runway, the flight attendant came by twice and asked him to turn his cellphone off, as he continued to send text messages. The actual impact of mobile devices on airport communication is next to nothing, so I didn't mind.

We flew south out of Boston, and I caught a glimpse of Worlds' End in Hingham Harbor, and of the Hull windmill, which is right next to Hull High School, where my mom works. I also managed to see Scituate Harbor and scanned the horizon for my house, which I always like to do flying south out of Logan. No luck this time, since the plane turned north. We flew along the coast of Maine and over Minas Basin, northwest of Cape Breton, south of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, and north of Gander, Newfoundland, before the in-flight entertainment started and I can only assume we flew over the North Atlantic. The flight attendants came by with drinks, and I ordered my first legal beer—Weihenstephaner, a German lager. Dinner was served (chicken with) and it was actually pretty delicious. Tim, my seatmate, got some sort of special dinner before everyone else was served—I think it was a vegetarian option—and was finished with his meal before I was even served. After eating, I put my headphones on (thank goodness for noise-canceling headphones) and fell asleep.

I managed to sleep through most of the flight, and woke up JUST after the breakfast cart passed by my seat this morning. I flagged the stewardess down, and got a fruit cup and a chunk of bread. Good enough for me. Landing was pretty smooth, just one big bump as we touched down, and we were at the gate in no more than five minutes. It took forever to disembark, since I was in the back section of the plane, and Tim gave me his email address before we each went our separate ways (me to the Non-EU passport station, and him to the German passport station). Passport control was a breeze, and then I found my way to the baggage claim. My duffel bag was out in no time, and I picked up my banjo at the bulky baggage claim. The TSA locks on my banjo indicated that it had been searched, so I opened it up to find absolutely nothing disturbed, just a nice little note from thee TSA informing me that they did search the case. Not a very thorough search, if you ask me, but at least I didn't have to re-pack everything.

I found the Fernbahnhof easily enough, bought my train ticket, changed some currency, and now I'm thinking about buying an hour of wireless connection so I can post this and let my folks know I've arrived. I'm looking forward to getting to Erfurt, where a German student named Erik will meet at the train station and help me lug my baggage across town to the University and help me get settled in.

So, for now, Auf Wiedersehen!

22 hours to go

2009-03-18T16:28:00.000-07:00

and boy do I feel cosmopolitan. Four different currencies shaking around my wallet--Thirty Euro, Forty-Five Pounds, Two Hundred Kroner, and Sixty-Two US Dollars. Which will pretty much cover my train fare from Frankfurt to Erfurt. Alas.

I'm nearly packed. Found my hiking boots, re-waxed them. I could now step in that puddle on Morrissey Blvd. in Boston (you know the one) and the water would just slide off, easy-like. All that's left are electronics, like this here laptop, and some toiletry items, namely my razor if I plan on shaving at all in the next five months. Who knows? I might.

T-Minus Four Days

2009-03-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

Four days until Lufthansa Flight 423 lifts me out of Boston at around 1730h and lands in Frankfurt around 0530h. As far as I can tell, the first train to Erfurt leaves Frankfurt around 1400h, so, given that it'll take somewhere around half an hour after landing to get to the gate (the Frankfurt airport is a huge, apocryphal maze from the inside, so I can only assume it looks just as confusing from the pilot's seat) that should leave me about eight hours to claim my luggage, go through customs, and find the high speed rail station.

Speaking of luggage, I had originally planned to bring a rolling duffel bag for most of my stuff, a frame pack so that I can go hiking in Thuringer Wald, and, of course, a banjo, plus my carry-on. Lufthansa informed me that it would cost two hundred dollars to check my banjo as a third item, and would almost definitely not be allowed on the plane. Considering I paid less than two hundred dollars for the banjo, this seemed silly. It was time for some creative packing. It turns out my frame pack, which has an internal frame, doesn't take up a whole lot of room empty, so it went in the duffel. To make up for that room gone from the duffel, I fit eight or nine t-shirts, four or five pairs of boxers, and two or three pairs of socks inside my new durafoam hardshell banjo case, in addition to my banjo, harmonica, several sets of strings, capos, tuner and a heavier-than standard frisbee disc.

Which reminds me, I gotta get back to packing.

Anyone seen my hiking boots?