In a Tent Way in the Alps

Perhaps the most daunting part of what I do is finding a place to live in a foreign country. I have begun the process of planning a two month stay in Stuttgart Germany so that I can conduct preliminary research on issues of urban renewal, development, and political life Germany's most successful Bundesland. This involves me not only securing a flight to Germany, but actually finding somewhere I can stay for two months while I do field work. The last time I was in Europe, my accommodations could be secured at a hostel, or were taken care of by the study abroad program I was on. The most I had to worry about, really, was transportation. But now, the game has changed.

It appears that Stuttgart's housing issue is that they just don't have enough of it. I have looked for sublets (does the concept even translate?) and student housing, but the pickings are slim. Every day I scan listings in hopes that someone is going to need to leave their place for just long enough that I can squat in their space. Its sad, really, that the biggest concern right now isn't so much my research as it is having a place to put my stuff at night.

The fact that I will be gone for two months is beginning to get very real to me. I have begun writing grant proposals and setting up an itinerary. With each subsequent step, I realize more and more that I am on the verge of something that very well could define the next six years of my life, if not more. There is undoubtably a tremendous amount of excitement on my part- the world is open to me, and I am going to pry it open in a very real way. I cannot visualize the places I will go, but I know that in a year's time these places will be a part of my own mental landscape.

With every opportunity, of course, there are a great many things to be left behind. I am having to leave my girlfriend and my dog to set out on my own and figure out the process of fieldwork. For someone who is so comforted by the very notion of 'home,' this is daunting, to say the least. Somewhere outside the comforts of the familiar I must define myself in a new context and bring that back with me.

There will be new people I have to force myself to meet, and the limits of my own knowledge to test. And at the end of the day, I have to go back to a place that isn't home and try to find solace in that. What is so exciting is that I am now being told to explore the unfamiliar and find a register to put it in so that others may find some wonder and familiarity in it all the same. I am to take my love of discovery and translate it into words that resonate beyond my own experience. Anthropologists don't simply question or explain, they reveal the familiar plurality that populates this world. I get to be a part of that, but its not going to be a comfortable process.

There is still a lot left to do here in Princeton before the summer, but nonetheless I can't help but plan ahead just a little. I mean, I don't want to land in Stuttgart and then have to go live in a tent in the Alps.