Ian's Blocker Blog 2022

 I really love the format of blogging because as a literature major I often find myself and my writing bound by things like "the conventions of the language" or "making sense in a concise form." I do not feel the same type of limitations here, and frankly that affords me a lot of piece of mind, because the format opens the door for the random happenings of my life to take on a quasi academic shape.  The title of this post is "Die Schreckliche Deutsche Sprache" which is the German name/translation of Mark Twain's iconic essay "The Terrible German Language." In this essay Mark Twain pokes around his lifelong journey to learn German and gives a quick American whit to the eccentricities of Deutsch. It is a perfect read for anyone learning German, and upon rereading the essay in the appendix of Twain's book "A Tramp Abroad" — which chronicle's the satirist's 1878 trip through Baden and Switzerland—I inclined to share an irkso...

In the past few months I have claimed that the unifying "Theme" of this blog has been an exploration of space and culture, as this is already the type of casual analysis which I bring to my Alltag. A large part of what drew me to study in Germany in the first place was the way in which I felt Germany, and the Germans, value culture and community more than us Americans. While a lot of what I have written about in the past has fell into the category of cultural generalizations today I am excited to be talking about a real piece of policy—the locally infamous €9 Ticket. A few weeks ago the German governing coalition; consisting of the center left SPD, Liberal FPD, and Greens announced a plan designed to alleviate cost of living increases and encourage environmental travel by subsidizing public transit during the summer months. Since the beginning of the war in the Ukraine gas prices in Germany have been shockingly high by American standards (the equivalent of $12 per gallon bein...