Tales of Transportation – Leipzig Spring 19

With a desire to see and learn things that are foreign, my classmates and I took off to the world in the form of European travel. From Leipzig to Berlin, Wittenburg, Weimar, Zwickau, Sächsische Schweiz, Denmark, England, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Czechia, Greece, Holland, Switzerland, and France, travel was the underlying proponent of each of these places. Trams, buses, trains, and planes were all too familiar by the end of our time abroad, but to learn them was a daunting and difficult task. My experience abroad can be very well metamorphized by my transition from a lack of understanding to a full comfort in using the transportation systems of Germany and across Europe.

I am reminded of the first, free weekend trip that we were granted. I had chosen to meet up with some of my friends that were studying abroad in Oxford. After researching flights and hostels for days, we decided to meet in Copenhagen because it was the cheapest flight for that weekend. This trip, for me, meant booking a train to and from Berlin from Leipzig, and flights to and from Copenhagen. Seeing as this was my first time to do anything of this sort, I was appropriately on edge, constantly checking and refreshing and updating departure statuses. Thankfully, this worry was not in vain because on the day of travel, the train that we had booked was going to run late. Schade. With a dropped stomach, I contacted Lindsay Snyder, the onsite house director for Leipzig, to see what would need to be done to get me to Denmark. My panic was easily calmed by the help of Lindsay who mentioned that usually trains are re-bookable if it was the fault of the rail system. Because of my flight times, the only train I could take was an hour earlier than what had been planned, so this meant a rush to get ready and to the Hauptbahnhof in time. The stress of this situation was serious and it didn’t subside until we were in the air to Copenhagen.

Flash forward to the last free weekend of travel. I had decided to visit the new Bauhaus Museum in Weimar which is only about a one-and-a-half-hour train ride away from Leipzig. The amount of energy and worry I put into this trip, as compared to the aforementioned one, is drastically less. I booked the train the day just before and was even well-versed enough to know that it was a regional train that ran periodically, which I could hop on and off whenever I needed to. I had developed a confident understanding of the language and transportation systems so much at this point that spending the day alone in a new city in a foreign country 60 miles from anyone I knew was not the least bit frightening. I spent the day learning about the Bauhaus school which was an architectural and artistic movement from the early 20th century that stressed function over form and simplicity over unnecessary ornamentation which was common at the time and could be considered the nucleus of modern art and architecture. The trip was capped by a conversation I had with my elementary German skills on the train with a German couple just for leisure. My mind was at ease.

Above all of the numerous things that I learned while traveling, the self-realization that I had on my honor’s grant trip was possibly more significant than the trip itself. Through an unpredictable and gratifying process, I grew to an awareness of a lifestyle that had very little knowledge of my own. It is often said that studying abroad is an experience that is intended to make a student uncomfortable for the sake of learning. Well, I was decidedly not at ease for most of my time in Germany, which taught me a lot of specific things about my behavior and mental processes, but, by the time I was making a day trip by myself, I gathered that I was no longer uncomfortable in Germany. Because of this, I understood that I had translated my comfort zone to a Komfortzone and that I would need to come back to the United States for the same reason I left.