der Umzug

I have been in my new home, Rostock, for just over a week now. I would have written yesterday on the one week mark, but I was wicked tired since I stayed up late to watch the Superbowl.

Last week I checked out of my room in Neubrandenburg. I'd spent the previous 24 hours scrubbing my walls with an eraser after the horror stories I'd heard from the Latvian students about room damage fees. In the end I got away with somewhere between 6.25€ and whatever a painter costs for a day in damages. The Purple Hair Lady (which surprisingly doesn't narrow the field of possible people much in Germany) claimed that the place I leaned against the wall would need to be repaired...or the entire room be painted. Maybe if they didn't paint the walls with CHALK it wouldn't be a problem, but I digress. I've moved out. Today's word by the way mean “relocation.”

This. This right here. This is what my life fits into. No bullshit.

I've moved to Rostock now because I am starting my internship phase of the program. I have my internship at the University of Rostock in the Agrobiotechnology Lab. Their website is mostly in German, but the gist of the research is getting plants to grow things that are expensive, difficult, or environmentally damaging for humans to produce normally. The two main things we trick the plants into making are immune system proteins (which normally require you to infect an animal and harvest it's blood in order to produce) and plastics (which take a lot of oil and never break down in a landfill). I'm über-excited!

The painted wooden cow in the foyer should have been the first tip that my workplace would be non-traditional

Beforehand, I was expecting the really serious work environment that everyone kept alluding to. Namely that you are always on time, your coworkers are NOT your friends, you dress well, and you are meticulously thorough. I scoped out my lab the day before I started to make sure I knew where it was in the morning, and be damned if I didn't stumble onto my boss during my casing of the building. She was happy and laughed a lot and was generally very friendly. I immediately assumed that she had to be the exception to the rule. So the next day, I walk in, and everyone is very friendly, they (surprisingly) approach me and ask me about my home and my life. In the first 2 minutes, my boss informs me that everyone there uses the informal version of “you” when the address each other, which I also didn't expect. I mean my cell phone doesn't even use the informal version of “you” with me, and god knows the secrets that thing knows about me. My coworkers are really cool people. We have two Christophs. One of whom has been showing me around in the lab. He sort of looks like Einstein, and he's also pretty smart. The other one has been showing me around the city, and has an impressive list of hobbies including cooking, vaulting, photography, and farming...oh and he's a trained carpenter. Oh and in his spare time he's in the national guard. (Ladies, the German bachelors are a fantastic lot, if I do say so myself.) Anyways my work is fantastic and I love it there.

The food in the cafeteria is awesome. Also I stole that cup.

The city of Rostock is pretty big, nothing out of control, but like 200,000 people. I found the bar district, and may or may not have a favorite bar already. Also, north of town is a suburb (sort of) called Warnemünde. It's a beach town. Christoph, some of his friends, and I went there on Sunday. It was bitterly cold, as expected, but still there were loads of people there for a 10° day. I'm excited to see how it looks in the summer, I heard there's a nude beach...

My dorm is a shared apartment, which I shared with a German named Matthias and a Palestinian named Hani. I thought Hani's name was “Honey” for the longest time. Lemme tell you, it's really bizarre when you meet someone and right away he tells you to call him Honey. Also my apartment is huge, and it took me some thinking to figure out why. I finally solved the puzzle when I was in the bathroom. Nothing immodest, we have the handicapped apartment and so our bathroom is tricked out with all kinds of guard rails and emergency call buttons. That was what tipped me off. Also the doors are super wide and we are on the first floor. I really hope there aren't any poor students in wheel-chairs living on the third floor someone because of me.

I found this little gem near the grocery store. Big Long Asia....too easy.

So, all in all I could not be happier with my current placement, and if any of you readers are from Rostock (I highly doubt this) I'm gladly taking suggestions of new things to do, see, and try in the city.

FKK

I walk into the room and it is packed! Everyone is sitting shoulder to shoulder, eyes facing forward, just waiting. I scan the front row; there might be a place if I scrunch, but then I think “what weirdo sits in the front row?” I raise my gaze to the back of the room, which is higher up. No one would really call that a seat in the proper sense, but I won't be here that long. “Hey, is the spot next to you free?” I ask. After a few seconds of confirming gestures and cutting through the rows, I'm seated. It feels really hot in here, I turn and ask my friend if he knows what the temperature is. He says what the temperature is in Celsius, which means nothing to me. I convert it and realize that in Fahrenheit it's well over 190°. It would be so much worse if I weren't naked....

Between Christmas and New Years, I decided to spend some time with my friend, who coincidentally is also named Alex, in Tübingen. On the second day of my visit he asked if I wanted to visit a sauna. I wanted to go, but I hadn't packed a swim suit. He told me that wouldn't be a problem at all, and explained that it was, of course, a nude sauna. And instantly my interest was piqued.

See, at the Language School, we all joked about this German idea called FKK, which stands for Freikörperkultur, basically nudism. There are nude beaches in Germany just like in the States, and I've always been sort of curious. At home though, I always thought of nudism as sort of a fringe thing. Admit it, you think it's weird too! And even if I wanted to try it out, nudist colonies don't really do that much advertising, surprisingly. Although, when I label nudism a “fringe thing”, I conveniently ignore the amount of time I spend stark naked, (I may or may not be writing this blog post in my underwear.) But as a foreigner in Germany, I have a free pass in the name of cultural exploration. I can try out FKK and if I hate it, I can laugh it off as part of my cultural education, but if I enjoy it, then I can label my self “cultured” and “European”. It's a win-win situation!

Still I had some reservations. The unfortunate thing about being nude is that you can't hide anything. (Also there is no good place to put your cell phone.) I'll admit, I was a little nervous about this. I mean, I'm skinny, but I'm not an Adonis. The Germans, on the other hand, ride their bikes everywhere, eat next to nothing, and the love to “make sport” all the time. I was sort of afraid that it would be scrawny me next to a bunch of Hans und Franz, body builder types.

But that really wasn't my main concern. I mean, I've been to the gym and I know that there are dudes with wicked awesome abs that put mine to shame, and I also know there are dudes with beer bellies that could hold a keg. No. My main concern was that little Alex, Alyoshka as I call him, might wake up and embarrass the hell out of me. Granted, it's not as bad as in middle school when a stiff breeze was enough to wake him up, but still, spending 3 hours around a bunch of naked people, statistically I'll find someone attractive.

I decided I'd have to gamble on that last bit, so I memorized a picture of Courtney Love as a mental cold shower and hopped in the car.

The sauna itself was really nice. There were 5 different sauna rooms with different temperatures and occasionally they would pour water over the coals and the temp would skyrocket. My best guess is that the highest temp was around 220-225° Fahrenheit but only for a very little bit. In between the sauna rooms there was a garden you could walk around in. In the middle of the garden was a swimming pool. At first I looked at the pool and thought, “hell no, I'm not getting in there with all those nasty naked people in the water!” and then I realized that it is absolutely no different from a regular pool, except in a regular pool the people have nasty fabric floating near their naked bodies.

Alyoshka stayed luckily in bed, but while he slept, I was gathering intel. I've been feeling that Alyoshka could maybe European-ize his style, so I was comparing and examining the current trends, discretely of course. I'll report back on this later. Oh, and my readers will be pleased to know that German women do in fact shave their armpits, but so do the men.

The sauna was really relaxing, and I actually got to the point where seeing people with clothes on made them look weird. There were several Adonises, but all in all the people looked like normal people you would see on the street. That made it a lot more enjoyable, honestly. It was open and honest and comfortable. If you ever get the chance, I would highly recommend going to a nude sauna. Nude saunas knock the pants off of regular saunas....get it?