The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I had to write a two-page essay on my time in Germany in order to get credit for doing the Bucerius program. I'm not sure there's much in it that I haven't already blogged about, but why waste a perfectly good piece of writing...

Edit 9/23/08: Actually, it was not a perfectly good piece of writing. Re-reading it today it was pretty terrible. So I've edited it a bit in order to be able to link back to it from subsequent posts referencing Bucerius without feeling *too* embarrassed by it...

There is something about actually living in a foreign country for over a month that's a fundamentally different experience than merely being a tourist there for a lesser duration. As a tourist the place you visit is put on display for you, whereas as a resident it engulfs you as your home.

Hamburg was a nice place to call home. The city is very orderly: clean, safe, and easy to traverse. Well, at least by mass transit, it is; the streetplan is really quite labyrinth. It was a happy day when I finally could figure out how to get to other parts of the city than just home and school…

I shared an apartment with another girl in the international program. It was a nice apartment in an older building in the Eimsbuettel section of the city. It had been modernized and had a full kitchen, a bathroom with shower, and we each had our own rooms.

The girl we rented it from was a medical student who spent the term in Australia, and she also lent me her bike, which was fun to ride around town (except for the labyrinth streets - see above). Hamburg is an easy town to bike around - everyone does it, there's tons of places to lock up bikes, and you can even ride in special lanes on the sidewalks.

My days were mostly spent at school, even on weekends. (It was the only place where I had Internet access.) The building was open to us 24/7 with our card key. It was a nice building, with verdant grounds and a renovated interior. Classrooms were outfitted with some of the latest AV technology. The building also had a cafeteria that served reasonably edible and affordable lunches (although perhaps not as edible or affordable as the University of Hamburg cafeteria, where we could also eat at a discount). [Edit 9/23/08: There has since been a renovation to the campus, which turned the old cafeteria into a coffee shop and added a new one in the addition.] Other cheap places to eat were the "Essen und Trinken" food hall at nearby Gaensemarkt and the various Doener-kebab shops around town. There was nothing in the immediate vicinity of the school, which was a problem on weekends when the school was closed, but the Dammtor train station was an easy walk in one direction and the Gaensemarkt area in the other. Gaensemarkt also had a town square area where various civic events would take place, like political rallies (I saw the one for the Green Party, but managed to miss the one by the Nazi Party…) and seasonal markets.

It was not necessary to speak German to get around town, although it helped. When I first got there I hardly knew any German, and it was weird being functionally illiterate. For instance, I could see signs bearing admonitions not to do things, but I couldn't figure out what it was that I wasn't supposed to do… There were also smaller shops, like bike shops, where it was hard to do business without knowing German. German was not required at all, however, for anything connected to school. All the academic staff, faculty, and students spoke English. The German students in particular spoke incredibly fluent English, including figures of speech and slang.

But there were opportunities to learn the local language. The school arranged for several series of classes on-site and negotiated discounts with another language institute in the neighborhood for additional ones. I also did my own self-study and review. The result of all this effort was that by the time I left, I could function in German when I needed to.

This I did on top of all my regular law classes, all but one of which were in English. The way the international program worked is that all the international students were offered a choice of about 12 courses to take over the course of the semester. In theory they followed three scheduling patterns, running either the first half of the term, the second half, or over both halves. (All classes were worth two ABA credits, so the ones that ran longer just met less frequently.) In reality however they tended to begin and end on a staggered basis.

Most classes were taken with other international students (there were about 70, about two-thirds of whom were American and the other third from other countries around the world), but a few were taken with other German students. "International commercial transactions" was taught to both groups, and I also did a French class (in French) and a moot court class (in English, dealing with the Vis Moot Court for international arbitration) from the regular German students' course catalog.

The class schedule was a little complicated - classes wouldn't necessarily meet at the same time, week by week - but they tended to cluster around the middle so that people would have time to travel on the end. Lots of people traveled quite a bit - my roommate was gone practically every weekend - but I ended up only taking two trips: a quick one to Ireland before I came home, and a long weekend one to Poland. That last trip was particularly profound for me as I went to the town where part of my family is from. It made me feel particularly rooted to Europe in a way I hadn't before, walking in the footsteps of my great-grandma (for whom I'd been named) 100 years after her.

There was also a school-sponsored trip to Berlin, although I didn't go on it. In retrospect I probably should have - it sounded like a good trip - but I did other things to connect with the local people I was spending my time with. Every week the school would have various speakers and other events at the school. Some of these events were in English, which made it easy to attend, but sometimes I went even when they were in German. One such event was a showing of a Holocaust propaganda movie, something allowed in Germany only when it could be presented in an educational way. It was interesting: I couldn't understand a word of what I was hearing, and yet I understood plenty.

I also got involved with extracurricular activities, like playing soccer. I played with the men in pick-up games and on the women's team they sent to the inter-scholastic sports competition at another private college in Germany, WHU. Schools from all over Europe sent teams there for a weekend of sports and partying. I took a pass on the partying, but it was nice to use it as an opportunity to get out of Hamburg and see a bit more of Germany - though not like a tourist. It was better than being a tourist, because rather than seeing Germany through its museums, you could come to know Germany through seeing how Germans actually lived.