Adaptation

a continuation/elaboration of sorts from the previous post...

Every time I take the stairs down into the Hauptbahnhof, the smell of waffles and crepes overwhelms the air. Now, it is a scent that I know, one unique in my experience to this specific place of my train station. When the H-Bahn (the "hanging railway") is closed on the weekends, my 20-minute walk from my dorm to the main campus is more readily visualized than any daily walk I used to take back home. And though it is not customary for cashiers at the discount grocery store in my neighborhood to bag one’s items and will yell at me if I taketoo long to bag, the store is nonetheless my grocery store now. I know where things are,and I recognize the face of the efficient but always greeting cashier. Already, I have breakfasted with a few German friends in an apartment kitchen on Lippestrasse. German breakfast is steaming broetchen warmed in the oven and the octopus of hands reaching, grabbing, sharing and lending jelly, butter, Nutella, cheese and sliced tomato. I listen to Lisa and Sarah’s German, and one will translate when the tenses overwhelm any familiar nouns. I struggle to describe yesterday so I keep to the present tense or eat more bread. After a month and a half studying abroad in Germany, I am struck by how a sense of home is capable of great elasticity, how something so different like a new country can become familiar. Adaptation is a magical thing because it just kind of happens like homeostasis.