why friends are all that matter, why I´m sorry about last month´s entry, and the true story behind why I´m unhappy here

What is missing for me at Würzburg is very simple: I don´t have many good friends here, and I don´t see that next semester I somehow will.

The frustration I exhaled a month ago was misdirected and I regret the form it took; I have nothing against the city of Würzburg. I won´t take the post down, because that would be dishonest -- it was how I felt at the time. I don´t regret expressing my real frustration, but the form it took was stupid and hurtful. I am sorry.

My original understanding of why I´m unhappy here had been akin to one of Pascal´s conclusions. As Jacques Barzun writes, paraphrasing Pascal´s insights, "A tumultuous life pleases good minds; for it keeps feelings astir and action continuous. Man at rest is unhappy, bored (as we say) to death." Concluding that in comparison with the intellectual and emotional stimulations at Davidson, a "tumultuous life" with "feelings astir" and "actions continuous" was an impossible expectation here, I considered myself consequently doomed to being "at rest" and therefore unhappy.

But I had to tweak my understanding of Pascal´s intuition, and my application of it to my situation here, because an environment that engenders that kind of intellectual tumult and emotion has less to do with where you are and more to do with who you´re with. There are exceptions, but most of the friends who I care about and make my life interesting are not here with me. It´s a people problem.

Würzburg is beautiful. There are a lot of great things to see, hear, and do here, if not in this city, then certainly somewhere close-by. My "state of rest" seems pathetic; I am in the middle of Europe. But, you see, that´s not the point -- on a 42 hour bus ride through barren desert terrain in western China, I was happy (even if I complained sometimes), because there were five people around me with interesting stories and thoughtful conclusions and passion and curiousity reading books aloud to each other. Good friends are what make my life worthwhile; in comparison, my location -- whether I´m on a bus in the desert, or in a Würzburg cathedral -- almost doesn´t matter.

Of course, resisting the desire to import great friends from home, and cultivating new friendships, is part of studying abroad. My time in Taiwan, and later China, proved to me again that -- in general -- making new friends comes relatively easily for me. Several friendships grew while I was in Taiwan, not just with Taiwanese, but with French, Canadian, and American students, and one Swedish guy, too.

But the Germans careful guardianship of their social circles, and my disappointment in what I percieve as a lack of intellectual curiousity in many of those I´ve met, have combined to produce, well, predictable results. I have not, and no longer expect to, forge many lasting friendships here.

There´s no point denying the brazen arrogance of it: in comparison with extremely thoughtful friends from my family, high school, college, and Asian experiences, I´ve found the students I´ve met here -- potential friends -- to be lacking intellectual passion, and, far more damning, the ambitious curiousity about the world around us that drives people and makes them worth talking to. As one still degreeless student, who has been here for 17 semesters (that´s 8.5 years) exclaimed to me, "Why leave? Where´s there better to go to? There are plenty of parties here." Unlike a senior at Davidson who is studying at Air Force ROTC because he wants to be an astronaut, the students I´ve met at the University of Würzburg are content to remain where, and who, they are. They are not reaching for anything. For me, it´s the ambition to improve ourselves and learn about the world -- necessarily bundled together -- that makes us interesting, and worth becoming, well, a friend.

Zooming out of my very personal experiences, certain continental trends and numbers, which should be considered only cautiously, also reflect my point. The graph below, taken from this week´s Economist, shows dollars spent per student per year in several different nations on higher education. Dollars may seem like a poor way to explain why I have not made close friends here. But those numbers for Germany mean overflowing lecture halls, Professors who have no personal contact with their students and mediocre learning facilities, and that means, in a very general way, students with minds ashumdrum as their higher education system. Moreover, as Adrian Wooldridge writes in his Economist article, "In Germany the universities have limited power to decide whom they educate or even whom they employ. The result of this has been a twofold catastrophe. Universities have been progressively starved of resources as governments have forced them to “process” more students without giving them significantly more money. Universities have also found it increasingly difficult to excel... so far most European countries—Britain is a semi-exception—are doing little more than tinkering with a broken system." It´s a generalization, but a "starved" and "broken" German higher education system is not going to produce interesting people comparable to top college graduates in the United States, or in other countries with stronger education system. Near-term future prospects seem dim, moreover, given Germany´s unsustainable birth-rate that, unchanged, will slowly but massively shrivel the student population. You can read the full text of the Economist article here. To view the PDF population projections of the Berlin Institut for Population and Development entitled "Deutschland: 2020" (in German, but with charts) click here.

There are, of course, exceptions to a big generality like that -- at Würzburg, and I´m sure at every other German university. Some of the students I´ve met here have impressed me, including my two roommates. But I believe the overwhelming culture of this university is as I have described. The director of my program argued that I should stay here for those "exceptions." But why should I look for the exceptions in a pool of mediocrity, when I can wallow in a sea of thoughtful, curious, and ambitious students and professors at Davidson?

Ultimately everything I´ve written here is summed up easily: I miss my friends. I miss our thoughtful, engaging conversations. I miss the "tumultuous life with feelings astir and actions continuous." And without great friends by my side to make it worth it, all the cathedrals and art and music in Europe only have so much value. After a while, I just get lonely.