Das Vaterland ruft: January 2010

Just a short first post at the one-month mark.

Willkommen

Welcome to my blog. Here, I will attempt to post descriptions of my life in Germany. I created this mainly to keep in touch with the people I left behind in the States but it's also a journal and a travelogue of sorts and anyone is welcome to read and comment. I moved to Germany because I felt it was simply what I needed to do with my life (please read "My Story" below). At the present, I am studying to earn my masters degree at the Technische Universität Dortmund. Where my life will take me after this particular segment is done, I do not know. But this is the record of this part of my journey. Of my adaptation to the German life, my explorations of the continent that drives my interest and my pursuit of higher education. But most importantly: my pursuit of the equilibrium my soul flirts with while I am in Germany relishing in the vast history and culture of my heritage. If you choose to read this, I thank you deeply for your interest in my life for that truly has value to me. I’d love to see comments and to hear from you all so don’t hold back.

My Story

My name is Michael Pude and I am a college student currently working on my masters at TU Dortmund. I was born and raised in Western North Carolina. My mother's family are of Italian descent and hail from Buffalo, New York. My father immigrated to the US from Germany in the 70s and when I was younger we took a couple trips to Germany to visit my relatives. I think I was too young at the time to understand the significance but I think I like that because ever since then, when I thought about Germany, it was quite intriguing. Not quite a mystery but more like a fuzzy picture in my mind. And as I grew up I felt a desire to see the picture clearly.

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I became very interested in my German heritage and German culture, history and eventually the language. I took four years of German in High School but sadly never practiced with my father. In college I found my passion in History. I loved learning history at the collegiate level. I found it so awesome I wanted to tell other people about the stuff I was learning. I decided I wanted to teach history. This double-major of History and Secondary Education which I took on, often led to me having to fill out paperwork to allow me to take more than the maximum number of credit hours each semester, in order to graduate in even five years. This unfortunately left no room for German and I only took one semester of it in college. I quickly, however, directed my entire focus on European History. I learned a great deal about Germany as well as the rest of Europe and I imagined myself later in life, traveling Europe and doing historical research. There was only one problem: I was imaging something that I hadn't actually experienced yet. It was clear to me then: I needed to get to Europe to figure this out for real. In my last year as an undergraduate, I was given the opportunity to finally study abroad. Germany was of course my first choice but I was open to all possibilities. I almost ended up in Estonia, actually. I dare you Americans to find Estonia on an unlabeled map. But as I thought more about it, I grew apprehensive. Everything I wanted in life hinged on this starting point and I feared I would fail in Europe. I felt I needed to go to Germany where I at least stood a chance because of my background knowledge in the culture and most importantly the language, which I had always struggled with by the way. I looked at the list of cities available to study and found Dortmund among them. The professional soccer team from Dortmund had always been my favorite because when I was younger I liked their black and yellow color scheme. I spent almost six months of 2009 in Dortmund as an exchange student and cataloged the time in another blog entitled Püde Abroad. While I was there, I met Anne, my amazing girlfriend. She is from a small town in the mountains about two hours east of Dortmund that reminds me of where I grew up. She is also studying at the university to be a teacher and we simply understood each other very well and began to hang out. She informally taught me the vast majority of my language skills. By the end of the semester, I was one of the two Americans that had found a significant other in Germany and I really, really didn't want to go back to North Carolina. From August 2009 until March 2010, I spent most of my time talking to Anne per Skype or ICQ and putting in a lot of hours at Ardenwoods, the retirement community I work at. I also used this time to slowly come to terms and prepare myself for the inevitable life alteration that had been looming since I got on a plane to leave Germany that August. I had to go back. This time for good. I decided to return to Dortmund to study History and English at a post-graduate level and earn a degree with which I could teach those subjects.