Moin, or should I risk sounding garrulous and write: “Moin Moin” instead?
As this year’s DAAD Teaching Assistant, I have now spent almost three wonderful quarters—which translates to almost three wonderful(ly rainy) seasons—at the University of Washington.
As with any experience abroad that disrupts our habitual ways of going about life and in abiding to cliché and cheesy accounts on living abroad, I am writing candidly when I say that my time in Seattle and at the University of Washington has taught me at least as much about what I would like to subsume under the umbrella term of “home” as it did about the country, region, city, and microcosm that has been hosting me.
I feel grateful for having been given the opportunity to teach the language I call my mother tongue to curious minds, to dive into the higher education system in the US while gaining new perspectives on already familiar research interests of mine, and of course for all the inspiring encounters I have had along the way. It has been incredibly rewarding not only to see how my students' language skills improved over the course of these three quarters, but also to see how new bridges have been built between cultures (or so I hope). Having talked about e.g., local phenomena like the Münstermareike who likes to take photos on Münster’s cherry blossom streets, the etymology of the word Kaiserschmarrn (i.e., what Austrians call “scrambled pancakes”), the concept of Gemütlichkeit, the constant Verspätung der Deutschen Bahn, and contemporary (political) discourses in Germany, I hope that my students have been enjoying their journey with me as much as I have.
During these past months, I was also fortunate enough to have traveled to Berkeley, CA, for a DAAD workshop and to Chicago, IL, for the ACTFL conference last year, with the latter destination bringing back memories from my time spent in the Midwest many moons ago. Very recently, I presented a paper connected to the research I did in my MA thesis at the interdisciplinary grad student conference “Culture and Conflict” (organized by some of our very own grad students), which was similarly exciting and stimulating! Going back to Germany, I will certainly miss the proximity to trees this gigantic and gorgeous, seeing the mountains on a crisp and clear day, accidentally stumbling into yet another cute coffee shop and independent bookstore, and so much more!
In keeping with the tone I have chosen for this little piece of writing, I would like to end by saying that farewells are bittersweet but, as we all know, man sieht sich immer zweimal im Leben!
Tschüssi!
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