Stephen Stolzenberg

It was Sunday, June 9, 2013, my first day in Thailand, and I was lined up to crash a wedding. I’d arrived in Phuket at 12:10 AM where Jacob, P. Nimit, and my school’s assistant principal were waiting. By the time I’d settled into Phang Nga and was ready to sleep, it was 2:30 AM. At that late time, it was a 6 out of 6 on the room heat scale. When I say six, I mean that I needed two fans set to 3 – the highest setting – in order to keep cool enough to fall sleep. You see, my room is removed from any windows, and because of that extra fans are needed for air circulation. Needless to say, I did not need to use a blanket. The one they provided me has ... read more

My last blog post was intended to be a tongue-in-check satire. I have been made to realize that one can easily miss the mark with satire and that zoo metaphors, in particular, can be interpreted as offensive. As many of my readers have already read the last post, I couldn't make amends by modifying the entry. The damage has been done. Instead, I decided that writing another post was the way to go. I realized that what I wrote offended because I forgot an important principle of satire. If you are going to "rip on" one group you need to turn around and rip on your own harder. If you remember my last post, I asserted that the incidents of anger I'd seen in Turkey were similar to cat fights in that they occurred when people ... read more

This entry is a series of loose vignettes that describe some of the more interesting aspects of Frankfurt. An Overview of Frankfurt I gaze out of my fourteenth story office window, where I sit high above my surroundings. Looking to the far right, my eyes meet the jagged points of the Tanus Mountains. They follow the green mountain slopes down to where the foothills meet the outskirts of the city of Frankfurt. The tops of the buildings, mostly of uniform height, form a plateau only visible from above. If this were any other city in Europe, this plateau would be nearly flat or would mimic the contour of the land, but this is Frankfurt. Here, the characteristic European flatness is negated by the extreme highs and lows exhibited by the many skyscrapers that punctuate the plateau, ... read more

A few weekends ago, I traded the pair of brown leather shoes that I wear to work five days a week for a pair of Asics 2140s. It was time to follow my itchy feet to the Rhine, Main, and Necker - three major rivers within an hour of the heart of Frankfurt - on three separate trips. I had not visited this area of Germany before, but I was familiar with it thanks to the works of the German Romantics. The Romantics, or Die Romantiker, were individualists whose collective work spans most of the 19th Century. They looked to the world of ages past to find their material, searching Märchen, "fairytales;" Sagen, "sayings," in Volkslieder, "Folk songs;" and the mysticism of the Middle ages. They traveled to the sites of these stories and re-imagined their ... read more

It was an abnormally warm August day back in 2008 when she called. She was one of my host sister's friends, a tiny blond girl who my host sister knew through days of putzing around in the horse stall. I had been in Germany for two weeks, tops, and understood little of what was going on around me. Up to that point, I had spent my days developing fluency in my own kind of toddler-esque hand language. It was amazing what I could communicate with my hands! Yet it was far less amazing how little use those hands were where the telephone was concerned. She was inviting me to the beach, my host mother explained to me. They'd be here in a half an hour. I should sunscreen. So there I was, scaling the steps of ... read more