From September of 1999 until July 2000, I lived in a small city in Germany called Tübingen. The Karls-Eberhard Universität Tübingen was my university for two semesters, and I lived in a student section of the city called WHO (Waldhäuser Ost), which was basically a student ghetto, and had a year of both good and bad times.
I was traveling to Germany as part of a reciprocal exchange program with my then University, the University of Texas at Austin. I was going to improve my German abilities, since German was my major.
Before leaving the United States, I had hit a brick wall with my intellectual stimulation (due in large part to the relationship I was involved in at the time), and I had been raised with the idea that Europe was a magical land, free of the closed-mindedness I had grown accustomed to in the United States. I was ready for something new; a new world which would challenge who I was and what I knew. And in a way, you could say going to Germany did that. But certainly not in the ways I thought it would.
I was expecting a utopia. Someplace free of rampant capitalism, blatant American ideals, or greed. That's what I had always learned about Europe. What I discovered was that these ideas were just a product of Europe's own marketing scheme. They use the same things I had come to despise in America to market Europe as a better place.
I was disappointed, to say the least. And I was dealing with the previously-mentioned relationship as well, from across the ocean, no less! Of course I had a good time my first few months -- getting used to a new country is exhilirating, and I was making lots of new friends (or acquaintances). But after that initial excitement wore off, things got a little hard. Before I go into that, though, I want to talk a little bit about the place where I was living. The area of Tübingen I mentioned above (WHO) had a nice mix of international and German students. It was very beneficial to be surrounded by people from all over the world, as I made friends from the UK, Ireland, Spain, New Zealand, Palestine, Poland, France, Turkey, and several other countries.
But it was, in the end, a ghetto. It was a dreary existence, with washers and dryers that would rarely work, German students who would eye you with suspicion if you even spoke another language, though you would always address them in their native language, and old, run-down facilities across the area. One of the few nice things about this area was the small amount of woods behind WHO. The view from my window was always beautiful, and was one of the things that kept me going. The other thing was my friends.

¤ curse me!