cabbages and rejection letters

There comes a dark time in all our lives when we've hit subterranean low and must venture through the deepest corners of ourselves in search of something, anything to remind us that we're still human and living and deserving of the air we breathe. Whether it be the end of a relationship, a prom dress that just doesn't quite zip up, or a stinging email from one's dream school, rejection claws at our heart and makes us feel worthless and dejected.

As I sit here and cry into my McFlurry with "sad jazz" playing on Spotify, I can't help but think of the cabbage merchant from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Our hero goes out everyday with his little green, Vitamin-A packed dreams only to have some bald kid and his friends come and knock them into cobblestone salad. That's where I saw my dreams and aspirations land after reading the typical "it's not you it's us" bullshit: lying in pieces along Ba Sing Se's other filth. 

But what I keep trying to tell myself and what you, my friend, must also remember, is that although the cabbage man may feel frustrated and throw a couple curses at the universe for completely disregarding his high GPA and impressive extracurriculars, he'll get up in the morning and carry on with the next episode, the next bald-kid-disruption, the next rejection.  Three seasons of wasted cabbages hinder him not. Instead, he keeps faith in his cart of dreams and eventually establishes his own company, even having a metal statue made in his honor.

People often say that rejection does not define us. Well it may not define us, but it sure as hell defines which paths we're taking and which paths have locked gates and barking Rottweilers. What we must remember is that we're all cabbage merchants, drifting along the streets of life with our carts of dreams and hoping that someday we'll have a statue made after us.

My friend Carly says that character defines success and she's damn right. Success doesn't care about the the lover who just didn't love you, the prom dress you didn't wear, the school you didn't go to, the cabbages you didn't sell. Success cares about how beautiful and intelligent you feel and how you've paved your own path, regardless of the obstacles in the way. 

We are our achievements and failures. We are our heartaches and joy and we are the stars for which we reach. Remember this the next time you face rejection. Remember to laugh in its face and keep fighting because life is more than a couple of heartbreaks and spilled produce.

fried rice and fractions

I read something recently that summarized everything I've always freaked out about; it explained that the reason as to why we feel time goes by much quicker as we grow older is due to the fact that each measurement of time is smaller in relation to how long we've lived. For example: a year to someone who's 5 seems much longer than it is to one who's 20 because it's a bigger fraction of their life. 1/5 is much more significant than 1/20. 

It made more sense to me when I thought about how this relates not only to time, but to one's perception of the world. When we were younger, this was limited to what our parents allowed us to see: school, home, some friends, maybe Disneyland if we were lucky. And everything was so important. We knew every detail of the path to elementary school and what made Grandma's fried rice special. The world was ours, because we hadn't yet seen just how big it is.

Now that we've broadened our horizons, it's much harder to pinpoint what makes things so significant. Details blur over and we realize how short and uneventful the path was and that her secret was extra cooking oil and garlic. The precious hours we have outside of our busy schedules are neglected because we're so exhausted and just need to catch up on sleep. 

I slip deeper into routine and pattern as senior year literally passes by. School work, extracurricular activities, and trying to keep up a social life give no leeway for smelling any roses or sitting by the water and sipping on some leisure and contemplation. One of the things I miss most about my exchange year was having the time to step back and appreciate things. As I race through this last year of high school, I hope more desperately that the privilege of having this precious time is waiting for me sometime in the future.

Despite the impatience to begin my life of independence and achieve my dreams and aspirations, a part of me has planted herself on the ground and cries out for childhood and Grandma's fried rice and walking to school with Mommy. She sees the future coming at exponential speed and knows that as soon as she steps on the ride, that there's no going back.

 But she also hopes that later on, she takes the time to step back to look back at herself and sees that life hasn't become a mere jumble of small fractions and tired eyes, rather that she's retained the childish appreciation of every fine detail that would seem insignificant to any other. The world is huge and she's so tiny in comparison, but she's found a way to make it her own.

midnight musings of a former exchange student

I didn't expect to continue this blog in America because I felt that the "adventures" of a 12th grader in the middle of California wouldn't be that interesting than of those of an exchange student in Germany. But I've decided to come back for a moment and muse about the experience of coming home. After all, coming home is part of the exchange year.

In all honesty, my journey home was one of melancholy and reluctance. I didn't want to leave Germany. Whilst preparing my luggage and brain for the long trip back to California, I thought ahead to the responsibilities waiting for me. There were relationships to mend, homework to ignore, news and gossip to catch up with, etc. etc. This was a coping mechanism I used to block out the inevitable pain I knew was coming in the form of reverse culture shock.

Our guardians discussed this in our end-of-the-year seminar. We were taught methods on how to re-enter our former lives and still keep with us the new person we've become. These tips were helpful, but they couldn't even begin to prepare me for what was to happen when I stepped off the plane and ran into the arms of this former life.

The thing about reverse culture shock that hits one hardest is the confusion. On one hand, we are once again surrounded by family and friends and taco trucks, and everyone is happy to see you. On the other, we find ourselves yearning for the people we found during our journey, to be wrapped in the arms of that person who's no longer just a train ride away, and Döner. We're torn between these conflicting emotions. We want to sit down for a while with no company other than maybe that of a bottle of magic and weep about the transiency of it all but we also realize that the drinking age is 21 and that we're expected (even by ourselves) to be happy about being back.

Going back to school intensified my reverse culture shock. When I first came home I was able to sometimes forget it by keeping myself preoccupied: hanging out with best friends and making guacamole and just enjoying the summer's freedom. But at the end I was thrown back into high school, where the first couple of weeks were extremely comparable to how Bella Swan felt when she was curled up in a ball in the middle of the forest after being abandoned by her vampire boyfriend. Of course, I couldn't just do that because A) there is no forest near me and B) I'm not the heroine in a YA Romance novel. So I gave myself some time to wallow but then pushed to keep busy in order to forget the waves of loneliness and panic beating against my skull.

It's gotten better now that I'm 3 weeks in and have come to realize that a lot of my classes aren't really that devastating to be in. So I did plow through. I complained a lot, but I plowed through.

Many think that the experience is finished as soon as one boards the plane, no matter how melancholic and reluctant one is. But in truth, the experience continues. One may think that there's not possibly anything else left to learn after coming back from a year in a foreign country, but one must remember that there always is.

 I made a mistake and assumed that saying Goodbye to Germany would be the hardest obstacle to overcome but I later learned that coming home is a million obstacles in itself. There's joy and pain and bliss and discontent and tears and beer cravings, but that's the most beautiful part of becoming an exchange student. We learn that everything is an adventure, and ignite a fire in ourselves to take on whatever it is in front of us, fearless of the inevitability of the day we come home.

in which a giant hangover looms in the near future

The year is coming to an end and I'm leaving in 3 days. I'm going back to the life I had left and will have to find some sort of way to bring with me the life I've built for myself here. 

I hate goodbyes of any sort. I hate goodbyes at the end of bad nights, when one could feel the remnants of the party churning in their stomach and the way home is longer and more twisted than usual. I hate goodbyes at the end of good nights, when one laughs and hugs their friends with the acceptance that such a night could never be repeated. But my year taught me to appreciate every night and take from it a lesson. Whether the lesson be that Fanta doesn't actually go with everything or that trains will not turn around even if you weep at the platform, I've come to accept what each night has to teach me.

My time in Germany was one long night, not bad or good or in-between, rather a midnight train ride into the Unbekannte and beyond. I've met the most amazing people here and I don't even want to imagine what it will be like without them just a train ride away. In getting to know my new country and culture, I've gotten to know myself a little better. I know my limits. I know that I walk about 60% slower than most people. And although I still have no idea what exactly I want out of life I know how I could get it and what I need to push myself. 

Every night is followed with a morning when whatever one is feeling correlates to just how magical their experiences were. Sometimes (most times when discussing a really heftig night) one had had a little too much magic or even mixed their magics and could feel it in their stomach, transformed now into a strong force that demands gallons of water and perhaps some fatty foods. Luckily, German food was probably scientifically engineered to counter the aftermath of magic. It only takes sausage, bread, and maybe some potatoes to make sure one's magic doesn't turn on them in the morning.

Because my year was about 11 months of pure magic, I know all the potatoes in the world couldn't counter the giant hangover that is next year. I'm gonna hug my new friends goodbye knowing we had the experiences of a lifetime and that such a year could never be repeated. The ride home will be long and twisted but I know I still have old friends waiting for me.

Being an exchange student is learning not only how to say goodbye, but also how to come back and face whatever is waiting there. Just as in the morning after each long night when one is left with an empty room once filled with dancers and singers, and the responsibility to clean up the empty bottles of magic and trying to make it look normal again, the end of an exchange is coming back to one's old life with the responsibility of bringing back packed up memories and picking up where they left off. But just as the room will never look the same after being stained with memories and magic, an exchange student's life could never go back to how it was before. All we could do is try to present our new selves to the old world and work to bring our two lives together. 

So grab another bottle of magic and get up and dance, because the night's almost over and you're probably gonna get a hangover anyway. 

experiencing one's chocolates

"My momma always said, 'Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.'"

-Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump is easily one of my favorite movies, but I never really understood why until this year when I really opened up my box of chocolates and dug in. This exchange year has been an adventure through which I discovered so many new things about myself and the world around me.

"But Dina, you're a Filipino immigrant. You definitely had a change of chocolates when you moved to California!"

Of course I've tasted some chocolate before coming to Germany, but I was much too young to appreciate the change in flavor. I was at the undeveloped age of 4 when we moved, so the adjustment was fairly simple and other than speaking in an English-like gibberish for the first couple of months, I had no problems with integrating myself into the new country.

But experiencing such a change when one is 16-17 years old is a whole other story. I was so confident that I already knew everything about myself because I thought 16 years was enough to shape a human being. Dealing with the first two years of high school made me create a semipermeable mental armor that only allowed certain things to effect me. I'd passed Bio (proved by the reference to the cell membrane) and AP World History, so what else was there to learn?

Little did I know, there was everything else to learn. And there's so much more to come. This exchange year not only opened my eyes to much more than I had previously dismissed as irrelevant to my life, but it also taught me that I will never stop learning or changing. I've developed a thirst to uncover every secret in the word. And while I know that I will never achieve this goal, I've come to realize that it's the journey that matters.

One should look at life like their own box of chocolates. No one looks forward to the inevitable end, where the box is empty and all one is left with is a couple of stained wrappers and the aftertaste of memory, rather one focuses on the present and appreciates every piece of chocolate as its own delicious experience.

cheap wine and sunshine

As if being a teenager isn't enough of an emotional roller coaster, going on an exchange is having one's heartstrings plucked like a beginner's violin lesson, then tossed into a car with a drunk driver on a lonely autobahn.

I've recycled this topic over and over and you're probably sick of reading metaphors about the mean ol' Time going too fast, but it's all I ever think about anymore. One of the biggest lessons I learned this year is to be grateful for every day, every rain drop, every glass of beer. Joni Mitchell (and the Counting Crows featuring Vanessa Carlton) warn us that we don't know we've got 'til it's gone - it doesn't even matter that she was referring to some trees in the song because we should genießen whatever it is we have while we still have it.

German weather is a great inspiration to follow this advice, especially the weather we've been dealing with this year. For some reason the winter decided to stick around a little while longer: we had to celebrate Easter in the snow and even now we're running around in down jackets and 4 pairs of socks. Now I won't be a hypocrite and outright playa hate on the cold. I'd only seen snow about 2 times before coming to Germany and experiencing real cold (under 40 degrees) for the first time was pretty great, but one gets easily sick of slipping on ice and falling on their ass every time they walk to the bus. Sometime in March and in the last couple of days, however, the sun showed us some sympathy and made appearances. We all treated the sunshine like the precious gift it is and crawled out of hibernation for a few hours.

In March the temperature even rose up to a whopping 12 degrees Celsius (about 54 Fahrenheit) and my family and I rushed jacketless out to the garten, letting the Spring-like weather tease us. Unfortunately later that week came snow, and we were once again shut indoors. But alas, this week has been quite gracious and Hamburg enjoyed some really nice weather. It's still pretty windy, but at least the sky has stopped spewing out frozen chunks.

We had no school on Monday so a couple of exchange students and I hung out on the Alster with some €4 wine. It was lovely just using the beautiful day as an excuse to be outside. Coming from California and before that the Philippines, I never realized how precious the sunshine is. There's something about blue sky after a long winter that just makes one want to prance around town and smell flowers and drink €4 wine with friends, and it's something beautiful.

As much as I'm looking forward to Spring (which technically started 2 weeks ago), I feel like the warmer the weather gets, the closer I am to going home. I've been fighting myself to stop but a subconscious countdown has begun in my head and refuses to be shaken out. I have 78 days left here. 78 days is definitely not a lot and no amount of weeping will make it last longer than it naturally does, so I'm going to make the best of the tragedy that is Time and enjoy what I have before the Big Yellow Taxi comes and whips it away.

stumbling through german history

From February 13th-17th the other ASSE-CBYXers and I attended our mid-year seminar in Weimar. It was a great time, but I regret not taking out my camera at all during the trip. With everyone taking pictures of everyone else I guess I just had no bock to lug mine around.

We stayed in a lovely hostel at the edge of the city that made me feel incredibly European and exchange student-ey. Our chaperons (I don't really enjoy this word because it makes me feel like a 2nd grader on a field trip instead of a grown up lady-person in Europe but whatevs) consisted of a educator named Wolfgang (who claimed to also be a mayor but I have my doubts), a very intellectual Berliner who wore turtle-necks and knew things, and an American artist who has lived in Germany for quite some time and also knew many things. 

Our days would go something like this:

• 7:00-8:00 stumbled out of bed and woke up the other 2 roommates so we could get to the cafeteria while the brötchen were still warm
• 9:00-12:30 went somewhere really interesting in Weimar and learned things 
• on the 14th we had a not-so-romantic Valentine's Day and visited the Buchenwald Concentration camp, just a couple of bus stops away from the city center. Visiting concentration camps is an incredibly surreal experience. I think it's even more complex to an exchange student because we have both the German and non-German cultural mindset to affect how we see everything. The German education system are brutal in making sure their students understand their history. My English teacher told me that when she was in 5th grade, they would be forced to watch videos the American troops made when they liberated the camps. Although those videos are no longer shown to children, the same sentiment is felt when learning about the Holocaust. Meanwhile, history lessons and textbooks in America are 1984-esque propaganda when compared to those in Germany. We are pretty much taught that Andrew Jackson gently tugged the Native Americans through the Trail of Tears and that racism and prejudice were minor oopsies and will never happen again so we have nothing to worry about. It is a requirement for a German student to visit a concentration camp at least once and I definitely know why. One could always read books and watch movies but it's a different feeling when you're actually there. Even then it's impossible to completely grasp what was going on. We stood in our down jackets and mützen and tried to understand what the cold must have felt like to the prisoners there. I can't say if I really enjoyed it, but the experience was definitely eye-opening and humbling.
• On the 15th we got down with Schiller and Goethe, two very big deals in German culture. Friedrich Schiller was one of those historical guys who did pretty much everything. He wrote William Tell and had a really cute house in the middle of the city. He was also bros with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who did even more things and is arguably more well known. Having written Faust, Goethe is the name that comes up when one thinks of German literature. He's the guy cursed by German teenagers in school. We visited his even cuter (and bigger) house and hung out in a museum which featured everything he's done. I found a really cute mechanical pencil that he used and bought a really cool puppet which I later used in a very interesting video. It will be inserted somewhere at the end of this post.
• On the 16th we learned about Bauhaus architecture and found where Ikea got pretty much all of its ideas. The idea of Bauhaus is epitomized in the saying "Form folgt Funktion", or "Form follows function" and highlights the beauty in practicality. The museum, although as minimalist as its exhibitions, was very interesting and I found a chess set that costs about $1000.
• 12:30-2:30 lunch and free time. For me and my friends this time was spent either hanging out in someone's room and sharing our stash of candy and junk food, or napping to regain our energy for later cultural integration.
• 2:30-3:00 coffee and cake time! One of my favorite German traditions.
• 3:00- approx. 5:30 actual sit-down seminar with the adults. We discussed our end-of-the-year seminar in Berlin and a presentation we will have to do, and had talking circles where we discussed our experiences so far. I have to say, speaking German with other Americans is even more unnerving than with Germans. There's a certain unmentioned competitiveness when you notice how much everyone else's speaking has improved while you still have to mentally sing the Preposition Song from German 1.
• 6:30-7:30 dinner! I happened to fall in love with the chicken wing guy but said love was not reciprocated. 
• 7:30-11:00 we pretty much had free time until curfew (12 on the last day). In this time we were welcome to tour Weimar by ourselves and do some of our own "cultural integration". Much of this "cultural integration" was spent in bars or on the streets, looking for bars. We found an Irish Pub not too far from our hostel and enjoyed the chill atmosphere. The Milchbar was my personal favorite. It was a somewhat hip hangout with billiards (at which I suck) and a wonderful beverage called the White Russian. Having nights off with my friends was a great feeling because it's something you really can't have as a teenager in America. Mainstream society in the states doesn't acknowledge the nightlife for anyone under 18 or 21, which is bullshit because it encourages adolescents to be even more rebellious than puberty calls for. It's not just the legally bought beer talking when I say that Germany is definitely raising its teenagers in a more logical fashion.

Although a big chunk of the trip was completed with no sleep and a lot of "cultural integration", I thoroughly enjoyed the city. Weimar is not a big place and one does not need a lot of time to stumble over uneven cobbled streets to get back to their hostel before curfew. I also loved seeing everyone again! My fellow exchange students are some of the greatest people I've met, and I feel so close to them although we've all known each other for less than a year. I really can't imagine how my year would be, had I not befriended the same people. You guys are amazing and I can't wait to see you again in Berlin.