Settling In

[I’ve been in Freiburg for over a month now, and have yet to make a post about my new home city.  I finally decided that my problem was that I was focusing solely on the city itself.  Instead, I chose to write instead about my personal insights since moving here and intersperse it with pictures of this beautiful place.]

Sometime between the fifteenth and sixteenth time I packed up my stuff and moved across America, I came to the realization that cities are little more than the people who live in them.  Sure, physically a city consists of brick, concrete and steel, but its soul comes entirely from its inhabitants.  This was a somewhat unsettling idea for an introvert who enjoys being and traveling alone, but it did explain why I’d like some places and not others:  my impressions were heavily influenced by the people I’d met in each place.

It was always so easy to make friends as a child. I could be at a pool or a playground or on vacation in a different state and instantly find someone to play pirates with. But as time went on and we progressed through high school, everyone found comfortable niches within a small group of friends and rarely branched out. I only recognized the inherent issue with this strategy when I left for college and had to start over from square one. I’ve moved to six new cities since then, and although it gets a little easier each time for me to put myself in the vulnerable position of needing friends, I typically run into the same problem everywhere I go: people are still nestled into the same group of friends they’ve known for years and aren’t interested in making an effort with new people. I’m certainly not saying this is a bad thing – old friends become your confidants, the people who know all your secrets and hopes and have been there through life’s losses. But the flipside of that coin is that, by knowing only the same people your entire life, you miss out on all the experiences and insights that new friends bring to the table.

It was these many years of struggling to make new friends that injected a slight dose of fear into my initial excitement about moving to Germany. I was apprehensive about the language barrier and bureaucratic matters, sure, but such hurdles always seem much less insurmountable when you can complain to friends over a beer at the end of the day.

    

But here’s the wonderful thing about Freiburg: while it’s a small city by German standards, it has over 200,000 residents, 10% of which are students. Many of these students are international and likewise came here without knowing a soul. Within a week of being here I’d conversed with over 50 people, from countries as diverse as South Korea, Holland, Ghana, Brazil, Japan, Serbia, Iran, Venezuela, Australia, Scotland, Poland, Turkey, and Canada. I managed to worm my way into so many new groups that I couldn’t keep names and faces straight. I became one of those annoying “yes” people, saying no only when I already had something to do. I even went with a friend to meet people from the Internet, and that sketchy “yes” turned out to be one of my best decisions to date. I’ve seen some of those wonderful bastards every week since then.

In this hilarious way, making new friends also feels a little bit like dating. I frequently come across people I really like, but sometimes they don’t feel the same way back. So many questions run through my head: How many times a day can I bug this person?  Does it look needy if I ask them to hang out tomorrow?  Will I scare them if I show them how weird I am this early in the friendship? But when you’re living an ocean away from everyone you’ve ever known, it’s either learn to swallow the occasional rejection pill or come up with really creative things to do alone.

I’ve mentioned this before, but Freiburg teems with people at all hours, from dawn until well after dusk. Weekday nights and weekends especially bring everyone out of the woodwork, dropping them on the cobbled sidewalks instead of sending them running for their pajamas and couches and Netflix. Large cities have never been my friend in the past, because even though you’re surrounded by people, it can be the loneliest thing in the world for every one of those faces to be unfamiliar. But here, from day one, I recognized passersby, whether from classes or SLI events or even just people I’d never actually met but had seen before.  Sometimes I hop aboard a tram and hear my name (and I know it’s me, since I don’t have a European name). Other times I’m sitting at a streetside café eating Flammkuchen (below right) and look up to a wave from someone walking by. It has a fantastic feeling of community to it, even moreso than the suburbs I once inhabited.  There’s even a community garden in front of the theater (which is next to the library) where anyone can go and pick fruits and vegetables for free.

 

The normally placid cathedral square comes alive six mornings a week, hosting the city’s largest daily market. Stands are completely built up and torn down every day by citizens of all ages; young women with pink dreadlocks sell squashes next to adorable cardigan-sporting old men offering apples. Every day the market is packed with Europeans stocking up with more daily vegetables than the average American would buy (and probably ultimately throw away) for a week. The colors of the market seems to be overwhelmingly yellow and red, but I have yet to decide if this typical or if it’s just a harbinger of fall nipping at our heels.

Freiburg also sits like a gate at the feet of the Black Forest. The famous hills literally sprout from the suburbs, where paved residential streets turn into dirt paths leading up into the forest.  It’s so close that within a five-minute walk from the university, downtown, or my dorm, I’m surrounded by silence and the forest. I and both Canadians in my program have admitted to wandering in the forest alone sometimes, using it as free therapy and an escape from the occasionally overwhelming day. The thing about temperate forests is, if you don’t look too closely at the shapes of the leaves or listen too carefully to the bird calls (even when they sound like freakin’ pterodactyls like one bird species here), you could be in any Northern country in the world, with the same sun shining down on you through the canopy.  No matter where I go, the trees greet me as a friend, and I feel at home.

   

There are always challenges with moving to any new place, but coming to Freiburg has proven to be a pretty great choice on my part so far.  The hurdles have progressively gotten smaller and my nights are spent with new foreign friends that I haven’t scared off yet.  And despite the tone of some thoughts shared in this post, I love it here.  When I come back to this city after spending a few days exploring other parts of southern Germany, I truly feel like I’ve come home.