Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Two

A motel and a Seventh Day Adventist church in Hope,
British Columbia. All rights reserved.

On the second day of the holiday, I woke up at around 5:30 a.m. Mist was creeping through the Hope Lookout mountain above the motel, and it reminded me of First Nations legends of bears and witches; it wasn't hard to imagine supernatural beings.

A faint rain was tapping at the windows. A few of the fellow motel guests were already up and about early, lights in their rooms if they hadn't already set off.

We walked up to the church, discovered a stencilled cut-out parking lot gate with the design of a family of deer behind it. From the Private Property forest beside it, a woman in a beanie came out of the sea of fallen maple leaves with her dog. The fragrance of woodsmoke hung in the air.

At the foot of the hill, on the other side of the highway, we investigated the Mile Zero post, and a sign that Emil Anderson Construction had put up to commemorate the building of the Hope-Princeton Highway in the 1940s. Interned Japanese-Canadian labourers had also had to help construct the highway.

I wasn't sure what "rip rap" meant, on the sign, so I asked an orange-vested technician who was just lowering a wire into a rectangular pit in the lawn nearby. He took a moment to reflect, then answered that "rip rap" are large boulders, adding that they are used to strengthen river banks, for example. On the other side of the historical information, a sculpted relief artwork showed two workers using old-fashioned methods of hand-drilling granite.

When we reported our findings to Uncle Pu afterward, he remarked dryly that in his day, nobody would have thought of considering the Highway as a historic site. It had just been built!

WE DROVE OFF soon afterward, along the Coquihalla River Highway. Warning signs told us of avalanches and dangerous winter conditions, and we also ended up behind a logging truck or two: long strips of bark flagging behind the tree trunks in the wind rather like the hair of a corpse in a horror movie, and blue squiggles of paint that marked the trunks' ends. Speed limits went up to 110 km/h, but we had to slow down for construction zones.

It was remote enough that we saw the first signs that any drivers who run out of gasoline are in for a rough time: "Check fuel. No station ahead for 110 km." But it was also populated enough that groups of children were gathered at random points, presumably waiting for their school bus.

Pictograms showed that bicycles were meant to ride along designated portions of the highway. But, as these portions looked identical to the usual, narrow, unshielded highway margin to me, I wrote in my notes that the 'trails' were "not terribly enticing." The other wildlife, besides cyclists and logging trucks, to which highway signage alerted us were mule deer. But we were also warned of a forest fire danger.

We crossed "19 MILE CREEK" and then the "SKAGIT RIVER," the latter of which the family had met in 1998 when we started a road trip across the United States; and the Similkameen River kept us company on our journey as well.

A few highway signs (e.g. "CHECK YOUR SPEED") might be designed purely to keep long-haul truck drivers awake and stimulated. 

TRUCK DRIVING is a dangerous job. Many trucks passed along the highways and many signs explained varying dangers unique to large vehicles, so I learned to appreciate the profession, and the challenges of keeping grocery, lumber, etc. stores in remote parts of Canada well stocked, a bit more.

We saw one or two accident sites during our road trip. Not far from Hope, there was an "OIL SPILL" sign at a bend in the highway. Behind it, truck wheels were lying upside down behind the triangular concrete barriers of the roadside. A few metres on I remember seeing twisted wreckage of the truck's white cab.

Right after, in my notes: "brake check for trucks; runaway lane; truck trailer flipped on side beside highway."

The brake checks are side lanes; truck drivers pull into them to pause and test their brakes. The runaway lanes are roads that split off of the highway. According to the Wikipedia entry "Runaway truck ramp," the problem is that trucks can accelerate too much if going downhill, and brakes can fail through overheating or through wear & tear. So truck drivers are permitted to divert onto the runaway lanes, gradually letting their vehicle run out of (metaphorical) steam.

As far as I saw, even 6% slopes cause problems for trucks: evidently, mammoth vehicles are sensitive machines in their own way.

THE FURTHER AWAY from the coast we sped, the more Texas-style terrain, typical of British Columbia's Interior, we met. Instead of the Douglas fir and cedar forests of the rain-soaked Coastal areas, we began to see livestock fences (I sketched one; it looks like barbed wire) in ranch land, sun-bleached golden grass, sagebrush, and dark green pine trees. It's rattlesnake country, too. Fortunately we didn't meet any.

WE LANDED in Princeton (no, not that Princeton) around 9:45 a.m.. Uncle Pu remembered having eaten fried chicken beside the highway in the 1970s. Being a bad niece, I privately thought this was no reason to expect a nice breakfast in the same spot 50 years later. But I was wrong.

We parked near a pick-up truck on the other side of the fence from a roadside inn, and walked in to the family restaurant near the former chicken spot. It had a splendid cowboy-style breakfast menu.

It looked like six table nooks were already occupied, one of them by an invisible baby that occasionally raised a ruckus. It was nice to listen to the conversations. It seemed as if a lot of diners were regulars. One or two of them wore plaid shirts, and a man wore a black cowboy hat. Two motorcyclists came in later, laying aside their helmets. On the TV beside us, sportscasters were discussing an ice hockey game: a Canadian touch. The cook was rattling away somewhere in the kitchen, out of sight.

We ordered coffee. We put in creamer from the little plastic tubs on the table. And I ordered a cheddar omelette, opting for brown toast over sourdough or white.

The three-egg omelette arrived with two slices of toast (buttered and cut into triangles), grated potato hash browns, and an orange slice with a sprig of parsley as garnish. Uncle Pu ate hotcakes, and my brothers ordered sausages and bacon with eggs (over easy) as well.

J. thought that he was duty-bound to finish the glass jar of maple syrup that was handed to him with his pancakes (I think it was a litre) that the waitress brought. But in retrospect, I'm not sure.

Our waitress came around and topped up everyone's coffee, two or three times. In general I thought she was tremendously hardworking and efficient.

I was agog. Last time I went to Canada I still thought that I'd die if I needed to live in the countryside for more than a few months at a time. But this time it was not hard to picture myself living out on a farm, coming in to town once or twice per week to eat breakfast at the restaurant....

I'd probably still make a poor country dweller. But the main realization of the Canadian journey was that I don't like my life in Berlin as much as I'd thought. It might not only be the restricted lifestyle while the anaemia was in force that disenchanted me. I think that the city feels like more of a wasteland since many friends have moved away, and I don't have many routines that bring me into regular contact with the friends who do still live here.

Regardless of cause, small signs had been nagging at me before that all is not well, for example that my houseplants have almost all died even though I was at home to take care of them; in retrospect I was right to worry. I'm hoping that being enrolled as a proper student will be the change that I need, but I guess that daydreams are also fun to have.

AFTER BREAKFAST we drove onward to fruit orchard country. It wasn't growing any lusher, old wooden mining shacks were dug into desiccated slopes, and a sign warned us "CAUTION BIGHORN SHEEP," a species I'd never have bumped into on the Coast. But at Keremeos we disembarked from the car as Uncle Pu pulled us to the roadside, and we ambled through a fruit stand. We found plums, Concord grapes, pears, apples, and even cherries. The stand also sold gourd vegetables and corn cobs and chili peppers, tourist items like maple syrup bottles and Ogopogo sauce, and bags in woven fabrics made by Indigenous artists. (Other markets advertised peaches and nectarines.)

I walked behind the fruit stand to look at the apple trees, which were all relatively short and so densely packed with fruit that it was clear that they were specially bred and pruned for commercial use. Big, dusty wood tubs, stacked nearby, were used to gather the fruit. There was also a long vegetable patch. On the other side of the highway, a moisture-less slope of what looked like fine, dark grey volcanic silt rose above the asphalt.

We passed wineries as well as fruit stands after that, as we neared Kelowna.

I've never been to Kelowna except to the airport, but my grandfather worked there for a few years as a professor of German literature at Okanagan College, his new doctorate from UBC in hand. At first he lived in a rental apartment, but then he bought a plot of land on a pine forest slope at the southern periphery of Kelowna. On that land my father (with help) built a two-story wooden house that unfortunately burned down decades later, in a forest fire around 2003.

Its main bridge was replaced around 2008, and I wrote in my notes "a ton of urban development, new high-rises, subdivisions." What's there now seems, architecturally speaking, rather at war with whatever vestiges of nature, landscape, or 20th-century architecture remain.

Road construction work at Okanagan Lake

At any rate we drove the car back down toward Okanagan Lake and then stopped by the beach at Cache Creek. It seemed to be a fishing spot, and back in the 70s and 80s had been a favourite haunt of my grandparents. I read the warning signs to see if there were any problems with water quality, but they mentioned nothing. A film of brown organic debris or growth on the smooth stones in the water, which was lukewarm even in September, suggested that maybe I was right to be wary. But the temperature was pleasant. A few little fish visited me in the shallows, while a larger fish hopped further out. Ge. even went swimming.

AFTERWARD WE DROVE to the Orchard Park shopping mall.

Wild geese were migrating and flew behind the trees near the parking lot. The brothers sorted out a Canadian telephone contract, as I walked back and forth along the tarmac and the two drought-nipped plane trees that were out of their element in a roadside planting. Ambulance sirens went up and down the street and I felt rather anxious, unhappy about being in a city again and being exposed to daily symptoms of the miseries of others.

Then we went over to the mall proper.

My uncle and I walked around, seeing Roots and Old Navy and Aritzia and other clothing retailers, Purdy's Chocolates, a Shoppers Drug Mart, and a man who looked bored as he waited for someone to buy pierogis from his Ukrainian stand. I made eye contact. (Ever since working in a Christmas market, I try to smile at salespeople now and then.) And I think we both half-smiled; not sure if he also had the sense that here were two transplanted Europeans adrift abroad, as he had no way of knowing where I was from.

The mall wasn't busy, or it was too large to tell that it was busy. The brothers went to Tim Hortons, and we met them there as they were just finishing their doughnuts and drinks.

IN THE AFTERNOON we drove out of Kelowna, along the Shuswap River, toward Cherryville, which is small and unpopulated enough to be unincorporated.

We drove through Lumby first. As the biggest settlement near Cherryville, Uncle Pu thought it was likeliest we'd find a place to stay overnight there. Having driven through and gotten an idea, we proceeded to our adventure.

My grandfather had lived in Cherryville, in a remote wood house amongst the hippies in a forested, farmed area. It was a green and pleasant territory, with pale blue chicory flowers at the roadside, and a sign "Watch for Livestock." Looking at the rural plots of land, rattling along fine gravel roads, as we struggled to see any sign of our grandfather's house and only Gi. managed to see a glimpse of the roof, J. remarked ironically, "Can't argue it's been gentrified."

In fact, the gravel roads were wreaking havoc on the formerly gleaming white expanse of our minivan, and I was worried that the windshield would crack or the paint be irrevocably scratched.

Adding to the natural idyll, however, my uncle and brothers sighted an owl.

WE THEN ROAMED the forest service roads to find the trail to a hiking path that my uncle remembered walking along in the 1970s ... once. The charm of it, he said, was that the hiking path leads you to the top of the tree line, where the forest ends and the bald rock begins.

I was a skeptical niece again, thinking privately that vague recollections of 70s wilderness aren't a reliable basis for 2020s walking tours. This time I will say it was justified.

We found out that the Kate Creek Forest Service Road was out of commission, past a certain number of kilometres, and that some bridges were out, based on a sign. That road looked like it was the likeliest to bring us near the hiking path, so that was a bad precondition for our plan.

At any rate we found Sugar Lake, which is the reservoir for a hydroelectric dam.

Being the reservoir of a dam brings with it dangers to life and limb: sudden changes in water levels, hazardous debris, etc.

What we saw was a jewel-green, placid body of water that might have sprung from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. A motel/RV park at one side transplanted it into the modern age, but otherwise it was embedded in forest. Ripples flowed across the water where fish released bubbles, hinting at a paradise for fishermen.

We'd hoped to stay at the motel, but it became clear that wasn't happening. The individual houses were being put up for sale; it looked like the owners were giving up the old business. Besides, the motel's rules were that we'd need to book a week at a time.

SO WE DROVE back to Lumby. It was bliss when our wheels hit an asphalted road once more.

We turned in at a motel at one end of town. A pair of deer antlers were nailed over a restaurant, at the entrance to the highway. Then, further in: a two-level brown motel with dark wood siding, and hanging planter baskets of petunias in keeping with the floral decorations on the old-fashioned lamp-posts in the village proper. Beside it, a creek trickled away in the underbrush to one side, as another watercourse roared through a rocky channel on the other.

The motel seemed popular: trucks and motorcycles and cars etc. filled the parking lot. There was a freewheeling, beer-swilling Friday evening mood. In retrospect there might have been a sports game on the adjoining field.

WHEN WE'D SETTLED IN, we walked over to a nearby Chinese restaurant. A waitress, so young that I felt like I was complicit in child labour, was tending to the two or three tables of guests including us. She was handing over paper take-out bags to men (at least one of them wearing the ubiquitous plaid flannel shirt, as far as I recall) who came in to pick up their telephone or online orders, too. Sometimes a woman drifted in from the kitchen. I vaguely remember colourful patterned vases and artificial cherry tree branches as the decor over the bar counter.

We ordered a Dinner for Five. It came with egg rolls, deep fried prawns, breaded almond chicken, chop suey, ginger beef, fried rice, and chicken chow mein, as far as I recall. So it was Chinese-North American fusion food. We also had pots of green tea.

Besides I saw Shirley Temples on the menu, and ordered the drink for the first time since I was five or six years old: This Shirley Temple was dense red cherry syrup at the bottom, golden pineapple juice at the top, served in an ice cream sundae-style glass. It also had two maraschino cherries with stems in it (I know these cherries are not everyone's cup of tea, but I like them); and it was everything I wanted. 

As we left the parking lot I took a photo of a vintage pick-up truck from the 1940s or 50s, and then we walked back to the motel.

GE. AND I were sharing a room with two queen-size beds: microwave, TV, refrigerator, a bathroom with a tub that had a thick ring of green oxidization around the drain. When I used the shower, the wet orange-hued floor tiles became so slippery that I wondered if they were made of soapstone.

It was awkward when we first dropped off our bags in the room, as we heard loud panting sounds coming from a TV on the other side of the wall. We froze and stared at each other in Munch-esque horror. At first Ge. offered that I could switch rooms with J. But it soon turned out that it was a violent action movie, instead of the boudoir alternative. (I wrote "extremely loud" and "could feel rumbling in the ground" in my notes.) It stopped before 10 p.m., at which point the fellow motel guest switched to listening to anodyne pop oldies. The experience still reinforced for me that I would not like to travel alone.

Between 2 and 3 a.m. I woke up to feel an insect scuttling up my leg. I flung aside the bedclothes, stuck out my leg, and gave a kick that launched the bug into the atmosphere, then went back to sleep. I didn't think the insect was a scorpion or a venomous spider, but I didn't know for sure. Fortunately I saw a tiny ant wandering around a vinyl floor in another motel room the next day, and figured that one of its buddies had been the culprit.

Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part One

It's been a long time since I did a post that is indulgent to read, so while I am recovering from the flu, I will try to describe the family holiday to Canada.

First I should explain that my mother did not come along, in line with her long-held conviction that she's done enough trans-Atlantic travel.

***

THE FLIGHT from Berlin to Frankfurt was not so exciting, except insofar as a police escort led black diplomatic vehicles (one of which bore the flag of India) onto the tarmac before we boarded the airplane.

Flying from Frankfurt to Vancouver, I watched the 2011 German film Der ganz große Traum over the shoulder of a pixie-haired woman, Gi.'s seat mate, who seemed to be a Canadian schoolteacher. And I received my vegetarian dinner with great ceremony, before everyone else's lunches rolled down the aisles.

I was happy with the dinner. But I began to feel nauseated soon afterward, which I hypothesized might be the consequence of eating the whole mini-tub of vegan margarine with my bread roll instead of just taking half. So I could not face the tempting-looking vegetarian breakfast when it landed on my tray a few hours later, with a vegetarian moussaka and a mango-flavored fruit bar. J. kindly ate it for me.

The film was a rather ham handed critique of early 20th century educational philosophy and Prussianism. Daniel Brühl plays the hero: an independent-minded, idealistic young teacher who liberates his pupils by teaching them soccer. 

I was convinced the film was scripted by a man: one of the scenes has the mother of a pupil accidentally walking in on Brühl's character naked; besides the implausibility of the scene as written, I'd argue that the filmmakers frame this as a 'God's gift to women' serendipity, rather than as an awkward-for-everyone thing as it would be in real life. (Maybe I was reading the film too subjectively; besides I was reading the subtitles instead of listening to the original audio. But I'd argue it doesn't matter if someone is conventionally good-looking or not – it's sexiest to respect other people's boundaries.)

I also enjoy the irony of soccer being celebrated as a vehicle of social progress, since of course it's often linked to reactionary politics now.

It was a longish flight at 9 hours 51 minutes, 10+ kilometres in altitude.

It was a sunny day and I wrote in my notes that over Greenland there was "some clear visibility." But since I had a middle seat, it didn't make that much of a difference.

*

WE LANDED in Vancouver in the early afternoon. Canadian customs were not as gruelling as expected, but like everything else it's highly automated now and required finding and operating the correct stripped-down analogue of a telephone booth.

We found our luggage too, as advertisements for American voter registration and Canadian for-profit universities played on the screens above the conveyor belts.

Then we headed out of the Arrivals terminal, across the familiar interior drop-off lane where taxis etc. throng past and a security-vested crossing guard wrangles traffic, to find our rental car. It was a bright white, spacious, four-door minivan. And it was parked at the back of a parkade on the airport grounds, right below a small lot with Royal Canadian Mounted Police cars, flagpoles, and nearby a Japanese hot dog stand. (We would come to regret the 'bright white' part.)

Exit tollbooths at Vancouver International Airport's parking lots. Behind it,
the dark blue banners show Indigenous art.
All rights reserved (as for all other photos).

Inside the airport itself, it is much as it ever was, indoor waterfall at the passport controls and all. But at the exit, a new building was being put up, and signs acknowledged that the airport partly stands on Musqueam territory.

The banners were the first sign I saw that many Canadians are reconsidering the history of colonialism since the Kamloops Residential School graveyard news broke in 2021.

Taxi cab and skyscrapers, somewhere around Vancouver.

As we entered dense Vancouver traffic, new real estate loomed everywhere without rhyme or reason.

Greyish? bluish? in the hazy, moist Vancouver air, skyscrapers and white bridges rose at diverse parts of the metropolis (I couldn't tell apart Delta, Surrey, Richmond, ...) north of the highway.

Even at the highway: Our minivan pulled alongside a plot or two of undeveloped land with dense forest and perhaps a white bindweed flower tumbling alongside the asphalt; then, at the next street intersection, we saw rezoning and land development posters on its fence.

It was clear that, like in Berlin, the pressure on the housing market is intense.

Long freight trains, wagons patterned in Gauguin colours, and industrial yards with neatly stacked shipping containers for rebuilding, testified to the economic power of British Columbia's Lower Mainland.

It was frankly a relief to turn off those highways, landing in a remoter, more agricultural stretch as we left Vancouver to the west.

We began to approach Hope along river floodplains funneled by the dark mountains: their crests formed the dramatic curved shape of a roller coaster track.

WE REACHED THE FRINGE OF MOTELS, a weatherboarded white church steeple, and fast food restaurants on the south side of Hope, and turned into the specific Inn where we'd be staying. It was straight out of a rural American film, and I was delighted:

A two-level, wrap-around, white-and-blue painted pair of buildings, a narrow ridge of roof protecting the balcony. An office with a fluorescent OPEN sign. Red geraniums, a few garbage bins, surrounding a parking lot. In the parking lot, amongst other vehicles, there was a dusty white pick-up truck with a buggy whip. Hydrangeas, boulders, and gravel decorated the parking lot where it met the Old Hope-Princeton Highway.

A lawn chair plus white plastic tub was placed beside each motel room door, for the cigarette smokers, whose ashes wouldn't do harm dropping into the sand at the bottoms of the tubs. A mountain rose steeply behind the motel.

It was warm enough to sit outdoors. A lady in her forties or fifties was alternately observing the scene, smoking, and bowing over her smartphone in her chair.

She helped us figure out how to use the electronic room keys, when we had trouble slotting them in the key readers. 'Don't keep them in your pocket with your smart phone,' she suggested. 'It'll demagnetize them.' She also asked me later if I was 'taking care of the boys,' and confided that she was on her way back home to Vancouver Island.

LATER my brother Gi. and I went shopping at the Save On Foods across the highway. – It's a grocery chain owned by one of Canada's billionaires. More to the point, it's open later than some other shops.

There I got ginger ale, orange juice boxes for my morning iron pill routine, mandarin oranges, a Ritter Sport hazelnut chocolate square, and a four-pack of blueberry muffins. The bakery section had closed already, but there was still plenty to look at, starting with the Halloween/Thanksgiving-themed floral arrangements with chrysanthemums etc. outside the entrance.

It was fun to 'get the lay of the land': the organization of the aisles, which brands were in stock, and what the prices were. Much like Roman military camps, British Columbia grocery chain stores seem to have pretty much the same layout, regardless of which chain they are.

THE SUNSET was abrupt, because of the mountains' "tall slopes blotting out evening sunlight" (my notes).

After dark, the brothers and I walked over to the A&W. We ordered burgers, onion rings, fries, and soft drinks, and ate them outdoors on the wire tables beside the hallway. It was quiet, only the occasional passerby drifting quietly along the sidewalk. Even the trucks on the highway came by rarely. 

I WAS RELIEVED to have been given a cozy room (queen-size bed, widescreen TV, desk, nightstand, and rectangular window plus lacy curtain) that connected at the back of a larger room where my uncle and one of my brothers each had a bed.

The thought of sleeping alone in a motel room, alongside a highway with lots of strangers passing by, was not terribly appealing once I saw what it would be like. I was pretty safe; but many women and girls have gone missing along B.C.'s highways. Given the remoteness and lack of surveillance, I could understand how.

Influenza Ex Machina

The switch away from summer daylight saving time has happened: so after a grey day with low cloud cover, a long, prematurely dark afternoon has followed.

That said, things are not so grim for me personally:

I began to feel ill on the weekend. I slept most of the day on Sunday, and since then I've written to my professors and asked for time off this week. Today I toddled outdoors for the first time due to a shopping errand: it was not so bad except that I was drained and still felt in the throes of a moderate common cold – an improvement on the baroque flu symptoms (e.g. nausea) of earlier. So climbing onto a bicycle and heading to university would have been a bad idea. An attempt to catch up on homework was not too successful either; it was exhausting.

To pass the time I'm reading romance novels, doing household chores as energy permits, following the news, and watching a bit of Netflix. (Documentaries, with e.g. Greek subtitles to practice the language.)

It might not sound like fun, but it's a luxurious contrast to...: the first two weeks of the university semester were much more demanding and uncomfortable than I expected. I've warmed to the 'forced socialization' aspect that I complained about in my earlier blog post, simply because many fellow students really are quite friendly and do open up. But 8:15 and 8:30 a.m. classes do strain my health. It's clear I'm not seventeen years old any more, or even twenty-eight. On the other hand the intellectual stimulation has been healthy; so has the feeling, after a long and demoralizing phase of doing journalistic work that nobody publishes, that someone (the university bureaucracy) has finally pointed a finger at me again and said 'You Can Do This.'

In the meantime I'm still thinking of working on my 20th century research project or finally writing at length about the journey to Canada. But the same rule of thumb applies: don't overdo it.

Greek Reading and a Recycling Yard Journey

Waking up for an 8:30 a.m. class on a Tuesday has turned into a far less gruesome prospect, by comparison, now that I am also waking up for an 8:15 a.m. class on Mondays. So I arrived at the university this morning, only around 3 minutes late, in good spirits.

The previous professor had left the chalkboard written upon, although the Greek professor is allergic to chalk dust – a simple misunderstanding in her eyes that was easy to fix, but an awkward beginning to the day nonetheless. And three windows gaped open and let in the triumphant roar of lawn maintenance machinery shortly after class began: the first two windows were easy to close, but the last one would not budge.

Nonetheless we forged ahead and began reading a 20th century children's story together.

I'd already copied out a little over half of the story by hand, and annotated the vocabulary, last year. Fortunately I rediscovered the notebook I'd used, read it through again to refresh my memory yesterday, and felt superbly prepared this morning.

A beautiful wine-coloured golden light poured over the turn-of-the-century buildings and the trees, on the way to and from university: yellow leaves rustling down in the breeze like gold flakes in a river, while the sky was a faint autumnal blue.

Afterward, I took the U-Bahn to drop off rags and an old/malfunctioning(?) Intel Pentium processor at the recycling depot. The orange dumpsters at the recycling yard harmonized bombastically with the autumn colours. But the sight palled because the depot was temporarily closed: two flatbed trucks, with pincers that fit into loops on the metal holders and lifted them, were edging forwards and backwards gingerly in the enclosure, switching out the dumpsters and containers. Bitte haben Sie Geduld ('please be patient') said the sign on the locked orange gates.

A long queue of pedestrians, cars, and soon a cyclist had formed at the gates, Fast bis zum Krematorium! ('almost to the cemetery') as a woman who had been waiting for over an hour commented.

A little drama was had.

It was almost as good as a play to wait, as blue-and-white Hertha BSC flags waved at us from inside the recycling yard.

A random assortment of people brought a random assortment of unwanted items: wicker chairs, IKEA dresser drawers without the dresser, a faux-bronze floor lamp, roughly a cubic metre of broad-leaf hedge trimmings, a pair of holey socks, an unglamorous grey wall-to-wall carpet roll that was taller than the man who carried it, ...

We exchanged amused or irate glances — I'd been through the process before and had only had to wait 15 minutes or so, so I chose to be amused. A few of us indulged in more obvious drama and swapped gossip.

Then the dreaded Containerwechsel was done.

An orange-suited recycling expert courageously ventured closer, and unlocked the gates for us. We squeezed in through the gateway rather like a reluctant marshmallow through a narrow tube. Then, one heave of an item into a dumpster at a time, good humour was restored and our physical burdens vanished.

"Es is' jeden Tag det Gleiche," a woman had murmured to her companion while passing us on the sidewalk.

(And now I need to go off, to do more Spanish homework.)

Third Time's the Charm? Returning to University

It's been an intense first week of classes. Of course I'm grateful to have gotten into university – after passing the second part of the latest exam, I was told that the registration was completed lickety-split the next evening.

What I'd forgotten, though, is how much first-year classes are not for shy people. In the upper semesters it's, I'll generalize, taken for granted that everyone will be absorbed in their own subject matter and have taken on a smaller group of friends with whom they have a proven, specific rapport. But in many of my seminars this year, we're being smushed together like platonic Barbie and Ken dolls, told to socialize and form groups amongst each other, and I hate it. It's not that I don't like the other students; but that doesn't mean we necessarily have a good chemistry when it comes to teaching each other, completing a task together, or otherwise mutually bringing out good academic qualities. I'm still used to the experience of having classmates be indifferent or unhappy about being paired up with me in group projects, from school, and I can't say that reawakened trauma and awkward social interactions are a wellspring of academic genius. And I don't know why adults think that everyone who is, say, 18 years old, has so much in common that the whole class is soul twins.

Anyway, the week started with Romance-language literature, Greek, and a Spanish language class.

In the Spanish-language class, the professor was friendly and strict and thoroughly fed up at the same time, looking at tables practically bulging with students and whipping us through our paces. (The classes are overfilled, and he had a cold so that his voice was hoarse.) He set us the topic of journalism. He seemed pretty annoyed when a student innocently mentioned a celebrity magazine as an example of that journalistic genre, interjecting that maybe we should use Der Spiegel as an example instead. He mildly blew his top when someone also innocently said 'There are the ...' as 'Hay los...'; 'If it's a definite article like el, la, or los, you should use the verb 'existir,' not 'hay'.' I on the other hand wept on the inside when a fellow student said 'There is no need to be too informed' and one or two students proudly claimed that they got their news from social media...

(Which also made me rant internally about people saying that they are 'not political,' without realizing that their attitudes about everything from poverty through immigration to whether or not to adopt a climate-friendly clothes closet are quite deliberately instilled and stoked by political actors. If they don't live in a cave and shun human contact, their words and actions are in fact furthering someone's political agenda. It's important to learn about political science and history so that these hidden strings – that sounds too conspiracy-theorist, but I can't think of a better term off the top of my head – are revealed.)

Since I haven't spoken Spanish regularly since around 2002, the fellow students came across as linguistic geniuses to me when it came to their prompt and snappy replies to the teacher. It was only as I heard one trivial grammatical mistake after another, including adjectives not declined to the correct gender, that I began to feel like I fit in.

We had homework assigned for the class, which I have not quite finished yet and it's haunting me like a disgruntled spirit.

Then more Greek, where I translated German into English for the benefit of a fellow student, and I wept internally because I'd spent hundreds of Euros and over 11 hours of exam-writing to prove that I knew German... when the university uses English a lot anyway.

Last evening there was some excitement, if mainly online, because a group of 20 (police figures) or over 40 (university press release figures) broke into the university president's offices. Apparently computers were damaged and at least one red triangle (associated with the militant group Hamas) was spray-painted somewhere. The police were called. The president of the university appeared on the evening news.

I still think that the university's media strategy is totally out of touch with the opinions of students and I've gotten the sense many professors. Thinking that the best way to honour the survivors of the Holocaust is to pretend that 40,000 Palestinians are still alive in the Gaza Strip and there's nothing to worry about, is not just useless but also totally beneath our intelligence. It has nothing to do with ethics, just with a shallow notion of public relations. It just makes us look like hypocritical idiots. Besides to me it's part and parcel of a socio-religious/racist construct whereby 'Arabs' are inherently 'fanatics.'

(I guess with Lebanon it's the case that Syria and other countries have been pulling the strings of its political system from the outside through violent means for decades or centuries anyway, but also given the severe economic situation that's already created deep hardships, I'm still frankly shocked that the invasion of Lebanon isn't raising more eyebrows. Maybe it's easier to grasp the cost if one has known a Lebanese person; one of my former colleagues mentioned that he brought along medication every time he travelled to the country – because the stocks in the country are so low or the prices are too high, I've forgotten which.)

Besides it's unfair to reduce Israel and its people to a military campaign. Why can't we espouse Israeli literature, show the spectrum of opinions and interests in that country in their full diversity, instead of throwing ourselves behind a Netanyahu policy? By contrast, I really like that somebody put a literary calendar page with a photo of the Israeli author David Grossman on a door in the humanities building at the university: it always reminds me of the dissidents, and of the complexity of nationalities and experiences.

Anyway, there was a protest this afternoon 'for Jewish life and the right of Israel to exist'... One of my professors told the lecture hall that she'd be fine if we skip class to attend it. By the time I passed, it was 15 people holding Israeli flags near the biggest cafeteria, as two police officers who looked relaxed stood beside them. As I've mentioned in the past, insofar as I have a Jewish family history I do not identify myself one iota with the waving of Israeli flags in the context where it's an endorsement of killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, so the 'for Jewish life' part... Did the protestors look fanatic, though? – No, they were just quietly chatting.

Do I wish that students who are pro-Palestinian activists would concentrate more fully on raising funds for medical care, or on giving a platform to moderate speakers from Palestinian territories, Palestinian refugee camps, Israel, or Lebanon, to become more informed without attempting to instrumentalize these speakers for propaganda? – Yes.

Anyway, I still have homework to do, and shopping, cleaning, and food to prepare for friends on the weekend. But after walking through the autumn leaves at Dahlem under a sunny sky, writing all of this, and already making sure I have no homework for the last class I had today, I feel a little less disgruntled.

Passing the German Gauntlet

In more recent news, the latest Swiftian acrobatics to secure a spot as a full-time university student have been fulfilled: Last night I really tried to go to sleep by midnight, but ended up tossing and turning past 1:30 a.m. Waking up later than intended, after 7:30 a.m., was a less painful process than feared. But because of the prescribed 1 hour fast after taking my iron supplement, I went to the spoken German exam unfed.

Stirrings in the U-Bahn of teenage and twenty-something passengers proved that a few students have already begun the university semester one way or the other. But the vast halls of the Rost-/Silber-/Holzlaube building were largely empty.

Much more easily than when I was a fledgling student in 2011, I found the correct rooms (for the exam).

Half an hour early, it took a while for signs and chairs appear at the rooms. But the examiners were as friendly as I remembered them being during the written exam; the applicant who was taking the exam in the time slot after me was outright charming.

After being given a topic and 20 minutes to prepare, I was ushered into a second room, clutching my sheet of notes. Then I gave a presentation to two ladies from the German language centre – a presentation that I vaguely suspect extended beyond the 5 requested minutes.

Their eyes glazed over now and then, because really how many new and striking things could one say about the topic? But they perked up other times, and even laughed once or twice. I didn't stumble over my words as I do at other times where accurate German is asked for. The sense that the examiners wanted us to feel at ease and show our skills, rather than feel terrified and hide our knowledge, was reassuring.

And at the end the examiners both looked highly relieved at being able to pass an applicant with flying colours. They told me that I have a DSH level 3: the highest one.

(My journalistic experiments of the past year admittedly have made me feel like I've been cheating when I write exams. Formulating clearly formatted texts or speeches about random topics, after a brief period of preparation, is basically all I've been trying to do since early 2023. Even if it has rarely if ever been a success.)

Let's see if the registration works and I can really, genuinely study in 1 week!

*

After that excellent news, the question was whether to eat lunch on campus, or to go straight home; I went straight home.

Around 5 p.m., the sleep deprivation sank in and I felt my eyes begin to hollow out. But I'd promised to appear at choir practice at 7:15 p.m.

The air felt warm and muggy. But of course rain was falling by the time I walked home from practice!

That said, I have been relieved when returning from the travels in Canada to find that the tree leaves haven't all withered away in our absence. Last time I think there was a nihilistic before and after, which appeared to justify my previous Fear of Missing Out on interesting occurrences in Berlin. It also just felt morbid.