returning to shanghai from traveling makes me feel very weird. my home is shanghai, i pack my bags board a plane and go home to shanghai. this experience of traveling and refering to shnaghai as my home is a rewarding element of the abroad experience. you see how a city can grow on you.

most of the touring in the city doesnt happend in one weekend. you go to a museum one thursday after class, and the park on a sunday afternoon, and a nice resturant and club on your friends birthday. this is how to really learn a city. when you travel you think differnetly and after reading the art of travel i reckognize that sometime we liek a place obly becasue we like vacationing not becawsue we love the place we are visitng. only after a person lives somewhere can they admit their true feelings about a city.

 we are in finals right now and school is winding down. I CANT WAIT TO FINISH EXAMS! most of my friends and classmates are going home next week. i realize how smart i was to learn from my friends on the Place and Literature/Art of Travel site, that i shouldn't rush home. most people sadi they wish they stayed longer and thats what motivated me to stay in the summer.

growth is amazing

Oof. How to make a “reflection” post about the entire semester that I spent in Berlin. Obviously going for comprehensiveness is just going to be pointless, but even so the things I do put down can be worth saying even if they don’t cover everything.

The first thing I’ll say is that my trip abroad wasn’t just a happy-go-lucky tail of adventure, youth and discovery. In all honesty though, there were moments when it felt like that. Sitting on top of a hill in morocco looking over Fes and hearing the prayer call coming from mosques in all directions. Being in a techno club in Berlin, feeling my individuality melt into the crowd, bobbing up and down without a care about what I looked like dancing was another. And the walk back at 8am, with the sun fully up for the day, somehow thoroughly energized by the feeling of being physically tired but mentally so alive and aware was another.

But just as there were moment of feeling alive, feeling like I understood, feeling like there was meaning and clarity to the way that I was living and thinking, there were moments of feeling hopeless, like I understood nothing(other than the simple fact that I understood nothing), like I was stuck in old patterns, like meaning had somehow left my every action. There were times when I felt motivated to do nothing other than sit in front of the computer and just search, for something anything of interest that I could hold onto as an anchor in the sea of information and interpretations and realities and emotions and memories.

TORA TORA TORA

I finished all the assignments but my semester has another 3-4 weeks so I can’t stop traveling in style, and blogging about it. I travel in artistic style, and I like learing about a place through artworks rather than travel books. Unfortunately the internet here is to slow for me to add links and as many pictures as I would wish to. This weekend I went to Tokyo and on the flight to Japan I watched Tora Tora Tora. This was an interesting way to experience landing in Japan. Because they were our enemies not so long ago, and I have visited Pearl Harbor in my life and was extremely affected by the story. I also went to see the main Japanese Soldier memorials which are very controversial because it acknowledges those who were found guilty for committing war crimes as well as all the other soldiers who fought and “honorably” died in Japanese wars. The museum connected with the memorial has many false facts and controversial information to the Japanese’s involvement in World War II. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Before I left to china so many people asked me “Are you excited to eat a lot of sushi?” I would laugh and nod my head. I didn’t believe that they were saying this, and I didn’t feel that it was my responsibility to educate them that sushi is Japanese and not Chinese. In America we assume that Assia is all the same. But China and Japan are not only different because of their cuisine but their culture at large. They are also historically enemies, and rivals. They look different speak differently and act differently. They are both so significantly different its amazing that American restaurants can get away with selling both of their foods together. In Tokyo I went to a baseball game and the world’s most famous fish market, and had the time of my life. It was very expensive and supper developed. Chinese Style ToiletAs china is emerging as a developed city, it still has a long time to go till its Japan. The best comparison is the toilets that I showed in an earlier post about China are the most opposite as the toilets in Japan. In public restrooms in Japan you will see a toilet that has a computer built in with a water bidet that cleans you as you sit. In china not only the public restrooms, but even the fanciest restaurants in Shanghai can be guilty of having a whole in the ground with no seat as a toilet.>>

the Self is an emergent system, like this flower

While I firmly believe that there is not much point in letting regrets get to you, and that it is a waste of time to brood over things you should have done or said in the past, there are a few things that I would have done with my time here, had I had the information about this place(and myself) that I do now.

One of the things I would have done is explored Friedrichshain more. James and I biked through there recently, and we realized quickly that that part of Berlin actually is really interesting. More so than Mitte(which has been totally renewed, commercialized, and made into the center of Berlin) or even Prenzlauer Berg(basically where the punks-turned-yuppies live today), Friedrichshain really feels post-socialist(the picture on my last post was from Friedrichshain), and has it’s own personality, or so it seems. The quick glance I got was of massive amounts of space, a real neighborhoodish feel, and intense communist-style block housing. I’ve also heard that there are a lot of squats doing cool things all the time, and I was constantly seeing flyers and reading stuff on the internet about stuff going on there. Really, I would have liked to explore all of the regions I didn't explore in Berlin.

travelingThe physical art of traveling almost takes away individual identity. Robbing it from the person and putting it down on paper, in a passport picture and a visa. Traveling can be a very invasive process, going through metal detectors, removing shoes, claiming belongings, opening suitcases to be searches, possessions to be rummaged carelessly through by some random attendant. Individuality is diminished to a passport number, to one of millions passing through the system each day. My bags are all packed; tomorrow morning I go through the system, from Berlin Tegel to JFK.

While the physical process of traveling can be so draining, it is accompanied by a whole host of other experiences and emotions that makes it more then worth it. Traveling can be very emotional. For me, the physical act takes away individual identity, but my travel this semester has given me four months to re-strengthen who I actually am, and I think I have really changed during this process. Being so far away from home, for the first time in my life, has been really good for me. It has forced me to step outside of my comfort zone, away from my old friends and old routines into a completely new way of life in a foreign country with a foreign language. It was a big adjustment at first but now I really love Berlin and am sad to leave.

Overall, I really liked this course. I liked the freedom it gave me to write about whatever I felt like, to read whatever I wanted, to reflect on my experiences abroad. I think it was a really positive experience and I am really glad I participated in it.

The Art of Travel was a really good book that I did not expect to like as much as I did. Reading it as I came to Berlin not only shaped this course but my whole experience here. It made me reflect much more and think about what I was experiencing. I enjoyed blogging so much because it allowed me to really think out everything that was going on around me.

I think I fell off blogging a bit towards the end of the semester, in the spring when everything got busy, during spring break and after especially, and I definitely fell off on posting comments on other people’s blogs. Still, being invested in a class like this, even if it is hard to make it the number one priority, was really important to my study abroad experience. Reading other blogs and learning about other experiences in other cities gave me a better perspective on my own.

socialism worship site in east berlin

One of the most interesting things that I’ve thought about since I showed up in Berlin is the kind of sensibility that the Germans seem to have about industrial relations and economic planning, and how the way that Germany approaches the economy manifests itself in the everyday lives of Germans and me.

Upon getting our visas, Germany gave everyone in our program 110 euros of “Wilkommen Geld.” While I don’t know if this happens in the States really, still, it seems pretty amazing to me that in this places they actually give you money when I get the opportunity to come here. They even will offer welfare to immigrants who come into the country and register with the government on an agreement that they are trying to find a job. In the US welfare is skimpy even for American citizens, nevertheless immigrants.

When you do a little research into how Germans deal with poverty, you find out soon that the idea of homelessness kind of isn’t the main issue being discussed. While this might not seem to make sense, the reality is that there really just aren’t that many people that are homeless here. German welfare is concerned with giving people quality of life, not the bare minimum. And you can see it walking around Berlin. There’s no one sleeping on cardboard, and it seems that everyone really does have a place to stay. Even those who refuse to pay can live in a squat and still enjoy some degree of quality of life. In New York the story is different. Squatting is more illegal and way less common, and there are homeless people everywhere.

Today I was watching a documentary on Walmart. It was really interesting because a chunk of the way through they have a little section on Germany, and they interview a bunch of workers who were organized through Ver.di, one of the big trade unions that is a part of the larger DGB union coordinator here, and they say they’re amazed that in America there’s no unions for the walmart workers. Straight up, my political economy teacher told me Walmart tried to make it in Berlin and had to leave: Germans don’t like cheap low quality products, and they don’t let companies exploit their workers (as much).

I also heard that recently the head of the Deutsche Bank got in trouble for making 15 million dollars in private gains recently. Supposedly people were freaking out, saying this should never happen in Germany. 15 millions seems like a lot, but compared with the US where CEOs with stock options can easily make hundreds of millions a year, and where I get the feeling people take this to be the norm, the gap between the rich and the poor in America seems much larger than in Germany, and Germans seems much more interested(and the statistics support it) in spreading the wealth out a little bit.

But alas things are changing, and I think for the worse. My German teacher who was 22 when the wall came down, and has lived in Berlin his whole life(in other words, someone in the know about the state of Germany) told me things are heading in the direction of less regulated markets, more privatization of everything(like health care, which he told me in 1970s and 1980s was good even though it was socialized), and a bigger gap between the rich and the poor. And all this can be backed by statistics, just look up studies done on equality in America versus Germany. Deregulated markets, privatization, and more liquid capital(basically the values of fundamentalist capitalism) lead to greater poverty levels and inequality: this is just material reality. And in Germany, things are headed this way for a number of reasons, but mostly because of the pressure that the global market puts on countries to get with the picture and be more price-competitive, not quality-competitive(which is how Germany has been for a while. Just think of all the quality stuff that comes out of Germany - BMW, Sennheiser)

So while in America, embarrassingly enough, we seem to unabashedly push forward with ridding all barriers to those with power and money to make more money and gain more power, in Germany they tried to not let that happen, but their economy hurt as a result(just check how the economy plummeted in the 1990s) and now they’re basically meshing into the globalised market like most of the other advanced capitalist countries.

But even so, Germany is still much more socialist than the United States, and honestly I’d say the quality of life is just plain better for most people. People work less(no more than 35 hours a week) they go on vacation more(you get on the average 10 more weeks off here than in the US) there’s less homeless people, more organic food is eaten than in most places in the world, and workplaces have the ideals of industrial democracy legislated into them. Really, the expression seems true that "Americans live to work, Europeans work to live."