Things I've learned since coming to Bremen - Part 1

Guess what? I now have internet access in my apartment! Whew. I finally asked Elsa to call the help line, and she was able to get someone to look into what was wrong. The person ultimately discovered that the internet division of the company did not even know I was a customer. He told her to talk to someone "on the second level in Kiel," and that person was then very helpful. Apparently, 1 in 1,000 customers "gets lost" in the transfer from the phone division to the internet division. I guess the odds were in my favor.

As I've said before, I've learned a lot of things since arriving here in October, and I thought it would be fun to share some of them. Some are cultural differences between the States and Germany, some are spiritual realizations, some are simply things that make life in Bremen easier, and others are things I've learned about myself. So, here's the first installment:

1) Always take your umbrella with you.
Bremen seems to be Germany's equivalent of Seattle. It rains at least once a day. Okay, there are some days when it doesn't rain, but still. It rains A LOT.

2) Just because the map shows that 2 busses or streetcars stop at the same place doesn't mean they actually do.
Yes, sometimes the stop is at the same place, but other times you have to go around the corner or down the street, or even both. What really confuses me is when the stops have the same name but you can't even see one stop while standing at the other.

3) Do NOT, under any circumstances, walk on the red brick part of the sidewalk.
That is, of course, unless you have some strange desire to be plowed over by a speeding bicycle. You know how your mother taught you to look both ways before crossing the street? Here you also have to look both ways before crossing the sidewalk. Bremen is a bicycler's paradise. Almost every part of the city is set up to accomodate bicycles with half of the sidewalk designated as a bike lane and half set aside for pedestrians. People on bicycles get very annoyed when you walk in the bike lane, and they have little bells on their bikes that they ring at you. I had several near-death experiences before I finally learned to look both ways and to avoid the red bricks at all costs.

And speaking of bicycles...

4) The statement, "It's just like riding a bike. You never forget," is not true.
(Some of you have already heard this story, but I feel a need to record it here even if only for posterity's sake.) Four days after I arrived in Bremen, a woman at church named Yek-Len asked me to come to her home the next morning. So, that night, Ingrid drew me a map showing how to get to Yek-Len's apartment and told me I could ride her daughter's bike, which had been in the storage room in the cellar for a few years. The next morning I got ready and went to the cellar to get the bicycle. After I got it out of the storage room, I discovered that getting it back upstairs and out of the building would be no easy task. I somehow managed to carry/drag the bike back up the 15 or so basement steps, through the hallway, out the door, and down the 4 or 5 steps in front of the building. I climbed on the bike and started to ride...only to find myself tipping over into a hedge a moment later. The bike stopped at the hedge; I, however, did not. I continued through the hedge and onto the ground on the other side. Let's just say that the ground was no feather pillow. I have no idea what the whole misadventure looked like, but I'm sure that any neighbor who happened to be watching out their window at that moment had a great laugh.

That, however, was not the end of my troubles. I decided that I could not ride the bike, so after climbing back through the hedge, I locked it to the stair-rail in the front of the building. At that point I was running late, so I went back upstairs and called Yek-Len to tell her what had happened and that I would be walking to her house. I hung up the phone and headed out again, only to realize after closing the apartment door that I had left my keys inside. Ingrid had introduced me to a couple of her neighbors, and I knew that they both had spare keys, so I decided I would ask one of them to let me in when I returned. I continued down the stairs and outside, only to realize that I had also left the map Ingrid had drawn for me. Since I was running so late, I determined that I could remember enough of the map to get there without it.

No such luck. What should have been about a 15-minute walk turned into a 45-minute trek because I couldn't remember the name of the street Yek-Len lives on. I did know the house number, and I walked up to every house I saw with that number looking to see if Yek-Len's name was by the bell outside. I finally arrived, rang Yek-Len's apartment, and she said, "Come on in. I'm on the top floor." Six flights of stairs later, I entered Yek-Len's apartment looking and feeling like a truck had run over me.

I had a very good visit with Yek-Len, though, and made it back to Ingrid's apartment with no problem. I managed to explain to the woman downstairs (who speaks no English) that I had locked myself out, and she let me back in. When she saw me trying to carry the bicycle back inside and down to the cellar, she also showed me the back entrance that only had 3 steps instead of the 15 I had tackled the first time. At that point in the day, all I could do was laugh at myself.

Moral of the story: You really can forget how to do things because I forgot how to ride a bike. It's been at least 10 years since I last rode one, and if I had known that I had forgotten how, I think that trip to Yek-Len's would have been much less eventful. At least the people at church have had several good laughs at my story. And like I said before, I'm sure the neighbors did as well.

5) God is multilingual.
I'm sure that sounds kind of silly, but it's something I started thinking about not too long after I got here. Ingrid and I prayed together before we ate meals, and sometimes she would pray in German and other times I prayed in English. It hit me one day that God didn't need a translator to understand Ingrid. I guess since I've always talked to God in English some part of me thought that God spoke only English.

Not only does He understand our languages, but He also speaks to us in our languages. One Sunday in Bible class we were studying I Peter and the Germans got into a discussion about 2:19. The German translates it as "Es ist Gnade..." ("It is grace..."), and they were having trouble understanding what that meant, so they asked me what it said in English. My NIV translation says, "For it is commendable...." As the discussion continued we realized that unless you know ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and have access to the original copies of Scripture, you are reading a translation of the Bible. And every translation was done by a man or woman who had to make decisions. Some things in the original languages can't be accurately translated into other languages and still keep the same feeling evoked by the author. So, scholars choose how to translate. The coolest part about this for me is that I can read the Bible in English, and other people can read in German, Chinese, Russian, or whatever language, and God speaks to each of us through His Word, even though the words are in different languages.