Yesterday, I found a paperclip again. It was not a spectacular one, but it was in our street. And it is spectacular to even see the pavement under the heaps and heaps of golden leaves.

Two days ago, when I walked to University, a man had apparently slipped on the foliage with his bike and crashed against a tree. Several people were already there, and the ambulance arrived the moment I passed by. A little down the road, and about a month earlier, two cars crashed into each other, but I’m sure that had little to do with the leaves. But maybe our street is a little haunted…

Just on Halloween, Sanna broke the news to us that in 1994, a spree killing happened at Aarhus University. And where? In the Trojborg buildings, in our street. Flemming Nielsen shot two young women in the cafeterias before killing himself in a basement bathroom. (http://drabssageridanmark.beboer2650.dk/html/drabssager_-_1994.html)

Passing by at nighttime on the 2nd of November had a whole new excitement to it. 

Last Friday was J-Day. Julebryg-Day. Christmasbeer-Day. Every first Friday in November, Tuborg releases its Christmas brew. Trucks drive around town and deliver crates of “Royal X-Mas” to bars, where Santa’s helpers hand out the bottles. Needless to say, it’s a big deal. Although Denmark has – in Skandinavian comparison – relatively low alcohol prices, who would say no to a free beer? So more people than usually were abouts in Aarhus even at 8:30pm. One must be in time, because Royal X-Mas strikes at 8:59 sharp. As adaptive as we international students are, we decided to join the frenzy. 

Girls in Sexy-Santa dresses indeed gave us free beer after we had waited for an hour (we were misinformed and thought the brew would start flowing at 8pm), Jingle Bells and Last Christmas were blasted and the few other guests who were already at the bar were singing, dancing, falling all over. Only one of us managed to drink his stout fast enough to catch a free second round, but it turned out that the Christmas brew is cheaper than others. 

Except for the free beer and seeing drunken Danes, J-Day means that here, Christmas is officially starting. Yesterday I considered buying an advent calendar in the supermarket, because it didn’t occur to me that there is an entire months to go before December even starts. The holiday season will be a long one this year. At least, there will be Julebryg throughout. 

50 years ago, tens of thousands of Turkish men (and women, as I was just informed) entered Germany to work. 50 years ago, the first Turks entered a country that wasn’t entirely Zen with itself yet. The Second World War had left deep scars with the German population, and if one can’t entirely make sense of one’s self, how is one supposed to make sense with some one else? But the economy was booming and the employees were “needed”, although not wanted. Germany never perceived itself as an immigration country, let alone an immigration society. So when the 1961 treaty ended in 1973, and 3 out of 14 million Turkish men did not leave, Germany was puzzled. The men brought their families, but the schools weren’t prepared, the government wasn’t prepared, there was no such thing as integration. Instead, the word Leitkultur was invented. Rather than integration, a pessimistic multicultural set in: Coexistance appeared better than mingling. Integration improved over the decades, the shifts of generations helped; but is that really the whole picture?

            Germany pretended not to be an immigration country, but it is. And it has been. Apparently, we’re just not spontaneous enough to notice. But there is willingness to debate. For instance, after Angela Merkel declared multiculturalism in Germany a failure (see above). Or when Thilo Sarrazin published “Deutschland – ein Land schafft sich ab”. Yet there’s more than political and intellectual debate. Since the 1990’s, numerous German-Turkish comedians, TV-hosts and film directors emerged, some with wide success, like Fatih Akin. In 2006, the TV series “Türkisch für Anfänger” was a great success, picking up on everyday topics in a German-Turkish patchwork family.

            Over the last few days, much has been said and written about the lives of Deutschtürken. But just as little as there was a handshake between the German and Turkish heads of state in 1961 (there was none – only letters), there is appreciation for what Germany has achieved. Needless to say, much more needs to be done. But given that Germany was still under shock when (un-) welcoming the Turkish workers, and was still under shock when some stayed, and has done innumerous mistakes concerning integration policies (ranging from separate Turkish school classes to Einbürgerungstests), there are myriads of examples of Deutschtürken that are perfectly fine and that mingle. On top of that, Germans finally seem to finde a national identity that they are comfortable with. And as much as is now accredited that Germany and its Germans influenced and changed the Turkish immigrants, there must be the realization that Germany has been transformed just as much. We are not a country of Germans and Germans only. We are a country of hybrids: Germans that are deutschtürkisch, deutschrussisch, deutschpolnisch, deutschitalienisch and so on and so forth. Slowly but surely, we are getting used to the thought. Raising the question of whether it’s a good or a bad thing to have immigrants is like asking if it’s good or bad to be here at all. 50 years and a positive twist over the past decades are reason enough to celebrate. 

here's a little photo-update from what Risskov looks like these days! On Friday I was amazed by the mist and how beautiful and serene everything looked, and obviously enough I hadn't taken my camera with me. But after Saturday was no photo-weather, Sunday proved perfect:
Recovering from Saturday night's Vengaboys show at Train and the return to standard time, Liselott and I went for a walk through Risskov and to the harbor closest to us. Wait did I say Vengaboys?

As an attempt to adventurize our lives a bit, and actually just because it sounded like a fantastic party, we bought lots and lots of Vengaboys tickets for Saturday aaaand we were right! They played for what felt like 15 minutes, but at least only the songs we all knew from our childhoods in the 90's, and were then replaced by more 21st century music. The Vengabus was in town and everybody was jumping! 

We got to dance, and we got to dance an hour longer. I have a little time-change jet lag, and I will not blame the Vengaboys. 

Speaking of the basement before, here’s one to clarify. Our house in Retirementhomestreet is hyggelig (cozy. well, call it that, but it's more). We spoke today of cultural conceptions that differ in specific countries, and Germany was mentioned in the context of homeliness. But the Danes certainly take this to the top. When I lived with my mentor for the first few days of being in Aarhus, fresh buns or bread or cakes were always in the oven, and Luane was just busy making jam from some fruits she collected on her way home. On TV and Game nights, there were candles lit all over, at 4pm, even in the bathroom.  So when Sergio from Italy spoke of the Germans as a heimelige (see hyggelig) society, I had to smile.

In our house, 13 people share their lives to a greater or lesser extent. Add numerous bugs and spiders in our basement apartment. A few days ago, right after I revivified this blog, my housemate Sanna sent me a text message: “I just found a paperclip!”

Without implying any hierarchical relations here, this was funny. How many emails has my mum sent me about finding paperclips? So house equals home sooner or later. House becomes home because that’s all we have, because we throw our stuff around and store our food and our memories at this place, even though it’s in a limited time frame. House becomes home because you share stories with people you didn’t choose but chose to spend time with anyways. House becomes home because with 13 people, there will be people you instantly connect with, and others you get along with, and so on. 

There are candles lit in my room, my room is a mess (it’s home, after all) and I’m recovering from a hyggelig Pölser-Dinner with the basement roomies.

Next to hyggelig and candles, pölser is the thing to do in Denmark, or so it seems. Wikipedia says the Danish Hot Dog is the most known hot dog in Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog_variations#Denmark_.26_Iceland

House became home. Hot dogs in the basement turned into a boys vs girls evening: when Kieran and Stephan began playing fifa on Stephan’s playstation just one wall away, Liselott (who almost lives in the basement) and I drank cheap sparkling wine and watched Sex and the City. Kieran is off to a trip round Europe. Sanna’s back in Norway for the weekend to recover from Aarhus and visit her real family. And the replacement will be waiting for them here.  

Living in the basement apartment of a student house has many, many advantages. For instance, the basement is one floor and one floor only. Down here, we share our bathroom and kitchen with four people and we know who’s cooking. And who’s leaving the mess – you get my point. Another nice thing about living in the basement is that we can do whatever we want without an entire 13-people household licking their lips. This is also how we came to invent Pancake-Sunday. I think. 

We do still hold that more are merrier. In any case, we’ve had our third weekly Pancake-Sunday today and because pancakes are everywhere and always in our student house, we’re over pancakes already. 

So instead of writing that essay that’s been waiting for days already, I decided to take it on a culinary challenge: Challenge the Samosa-man from the shopping center across the street! To my own surprise, my home-style samosas were pretty edible (say Kieran and Liselott and I’m eating one of the leftover samosas right now). And I’ll most likely be having sore muscles from kneading the dough. Aha - That’s why people have kitchen aids. 

My creative spirits thus awoken, the essay moved further down my to-do list and I went for a walk instead – to find out what’s on the other side of the shopping center. Curiously enough, the Danes do really seem to put much trust in each other – while in the Netherlands, no single supermarket would even leave their dumpsters out, the bins and boxes are stacked right next to the parking lot here. 

Coming back to said creative spirits; I’ve been feeling the need to get storage space in my room that I don’t have to look at all the time, so this seemed perfect. And so later today Sanna, Liselott and I put on hooded sweaters and pretended to be scary, walking the 20m to the parking lot and got crates that I can now fill and stack under my bed. I might have to go back for more. 

Obviously, this wasn’t really adventurous until I noticed that our landlord/neighbor was strolling down the street – he does that. And although he’s actually a nice man who just happens to be quite slow on fulfilling his landlordy duties, he’s quite attentive to whatever could be causing trouble on our side. Oh well. He didn’t seem to care about the crates. I’d like to believe we actually tricked him with our hoodies… 

What kind of Sunday was this? No pancakes, no real adventure, but the discovery of non-20DKK samosas, storage space and ants in my cosy basement room (that happened just now). 

As I was standing in line for the Bus 50 to Aachen this morning, with a big suitcase, a small suitcase and a backpack, I found a paperclip.

After not having seen any for quite a while, these past few days have been more successful, so to speak. This one made me smile, so I actually picked it up and put it in my pocket – something I usually just don’t do. This clip and the other recent ones were all memorable in a way, because they signify the end of my time in Maastricht.

For instance, I found one at the Kommelquartier when I was on my way to hand in my Bachelor’s Thesis at the faculty. That day, I had begun packing up things in my room. Because of this, my room was a complete mess (I’m quite bad in throwing things away…) and I preferred spending my time outside. Handing in a thesis is not at all as rewarding as we all expected it to be – not half as rewarding as the moment we finished it and held the bound copies in our hands. This, we did the day before, and ended that day dancing to whatever in a friend’s living room.

Two days after the hand-in, my sister and brother-in-law came to Maastricht to pick up my materialized life: boxes of books, boxes of photographs, documents, bric-a-brac, CDs, simply everything. When I disassembled one of the cupboards, a paperclip was laying in the corner behind it. My room was still a complete mess, and the door rang, my sister arrived. It felt so good to have her here, to show her a few of the things I love about Maastricht, have Asian food and ice cream, show her where I studied, where I went to the gym, where we sat to drink beer the other night and – well, yes, we emptied my room of its annoying full-ness.

So then my room was almost empty, my sister and brother-in-law left, and I had one week to wrap things up in Maastricht. The paperclip in the corner I left where I found it. Yesterday, when all the furniture was picked up by their new owners, when the leftovers where brought to the Kringloop shop, and when I had finally finished packing my enormous suitcase, there it was again. I was feeling a little melodramatic so I still did not pick it up but just vacuumed it away, together with a felt bazillion silverfish, spiders, cobwebs, and the dust of three fantastic years spent in this truly icky room (I never really admitted to it because I had too much of a good time in this room and house, but objectively: icky).

This morning, then, I stood at Maastricht Station with my three-piece luggage and an odd feeling in my stomach, and then I saw this paperclip. It reminded me of so many things that had happened here over the past months, as if all these memories were wrapped up in this small piece of metal.

So now, here I sit, in my weird new all-equipped apartment in Baden-Baden, with this paperclip in front of me, between thinking back and waiting for the next big thing to happen.  

Today, I found a paperclip, and one that was truly rewarding. The fantastic thing about this paperclip is, and this distinguishes it from all those useless other paperclips laying around town, that it was in my room. Yes. It was here all along, and in my imagination, it was one of the paperclips that I used in my first year of University to bundle the exams and essay before handing them in. In the meantime, I stopped using paperclips and just stapled the stacks (don’t ask me why we used paperclips at first), I went abroad and had a sub-renter in my room, I came back, and now I am procrastinating heavily from writing that Bachelor’s thesis (as you might be able to tell, procrastination unfortunately is a big part of my life)

So I cleaned my desk, because I was sure that once it’s clean and tidy, I would be able to work so much more efficient. I threw away some stuff and sorted some papers and realized I also had to sell this desk at some point. This seemed the perfect time to empty and photograph it.

And when I was done doing that, I decided to throw away some pens that aren’t working any more, as to eventually end up with one can filled with pens instead of two. At the bottom of that one can, with all the ink spots and sharpening-dust, there was this one paperclip.

As if it had been a sign, a riddle in my head was solved, I sorted out all my issues with moving out, moving in somewhere else, moving out there again and then sort of not living anywhere but having to be somewhere, and now it all makes sense, and there is a plan and it’s on a piece of paper and that’s (almost) the only piece of paper on my desk right now, too.

Now that I’ve posted this and put that desk online to sell it and cleaned everything and ate (because cleaning made me hungry), I can finally continue working. 

So, paperclips. I’ve found a couple in the past weeks, but unorganized how I felt, I didn’t write down where.

I remember one in Munich. I just got out of the tram at 4am and there it was, a little white paper clip. I was in Munich for an assessment center, and I was awake at 4am because I met a friend from Budapest and we went to a bar and drank ginger beer. And here’s news for you: ginger beer is not beer. It’s pure, sweet, pungent. It takes forever to get it down, and afterwards your throat will hurt and you’ll feel like anything but ginger for the rest of your life.

In fact, except for the ginger beer experience and a long, long journey home to my cousin’s apartment, not much happened during that night. I did eat a fantastic quiche, too…

And because this was sort of lame, I’ll just take my notebook with me from now on again and write down the paperclips I find. 

Today has been the warmest day of the year so far. It’s April 2, 2011, and spring has finally heard our cries. Also, it is exam period. Ultimately, this is a call out for procrastination of the finest sorts. We had an extensive breakfast on the balcony, which was on the verge of turning into a brunch, but we averted that last minute. Instead of heading to our rooms to study, we decided to fulfill our weekly duties of bringing away paper, cans and bottles to the recycling station. Since the bins are next to our local Aldi, we decided to go in real quick, just to buy some fruits and snacks. On our way home, Caro, who has her exam on Monday, had the great idea to defrost our fridge. Since we’ve been planning to do that (by now one third of the fridge was completely iced) for quite a while, today with its 24°C seemed to be THE day. We emptied the fridge, put it out on the balcony, where by now Alexandra was sitting to study, cleaned the top of the lower fridge (we have two standing on top of each other), got rid of all the spider webs etc…when we finally decided there was nothing really left that we could do without feeling stupid because we’re not studying.

So we tried that for about an hour and then had lunch, barefoot, with tank tops, sunglasses and bright sunshine, the fridge thawing away next to us. Since the thawing took longer than we found reasonable, Caro went to get a hammer and screwdriver, and began pecking away chunks of ice. When I got my camera to film the scene, I saw a paperclip lying between the miniature ice floes. It got covered entirely by the chunks, but it was there, and this is already the end of the story. The bad part is, that now we have to clean the fridge and put it back up on top of the other fridge and sort stuff back in…and for some reason now it doesn’t seem to be as much fun anymore as this morning. So instead of doing that, I’m writing this.

 This was a story of procrastination.