And we're off

Well, wanted to do a nice wrap-up, pretty, tidy little "Berlin is over" sort of post to cap off the experience, but of course, moving out of the room and packing for the month-long travel portion of the trip here has made that completely impossible. Bullshit tends to take precedence over more interesting things, eh? But for information's sake:

All finished up with the program here! Very sad to leave this weird, wonderful city and to say goodbye to all the friends I made here, but it was one hell of an experience to say the least. Incredibly glad I did it, even if it was for only six weeks or so.

Not so sad about leaving my homestay. Very much looking forward to living on my own terms again, been feeling like a trained animal for the past few weeks. But hey, got a good story out of it anyway, eh?

Departing for Prague tomorrow morning. Won't have a computer with me, and all internet access will probably be conducted through internet cafes and the like, so I think this is the end of the blog for the time being. I'm gonna keep a journal while I'm ambling around, but I don't think I want to take the time to transcribe it all out here. I may end up doing that later when I get back to Ithaca.

Trip itinerary for the next two weeks: Prague, Vienna, Munich, Strasbourg (France), Cologne. After that things are still up in the air. Been thinking something along the lines of Hamburg->Stockholm->Oslo.

A brief scene

"Where the hell IS this place?" Someone says in an irritated voice. It is 9:30, Thursday night, I'm in a group of about five or six other guys wandering the streets in the northeastern part of the city.

We'd been walking around the same city block in Prenzlauerberg for about half an hour looking for this bar, Sunset Beach I think. Beach bars in this city are really popular. I personally don't get it. I enjoy a normal bar establishment just as much (probably more) than a similar establishment with sand all over the floor. But this one was of particular note- located on a roof on top of a big building, with a great view of the whole city and, you guessed it, the sunset.

We were completely incapable of finding it.

"Well, maybe we should stop in this Spätkauf and ask directions."
"But whose gonna talk to the guy behind the counter?"
We pause for a moment to think, then,
"Probably the guy with the best German, right?"

All assembled stop, turn, and give me a look. I can't suppress my smile, especially when you consider the fact that three or four of the best German speakers in the whole group were present during the excursion.

That little instant, I think, was the defining moment where I knew that "Yeah, man, I think I accomplished what I came here to do."

Things I will miss about this place:

Mohawks and the mullets. all. over. the. place.
Alexanderplatz.
The TV Tower (incredibly useful for orienting yourself).
Puddles of vomit and blood on subway station platforms. Gross, yes, but it adds to the character of the place.
The Citymarkt in the Friedrichstrasse Train Station (the quintessential meeting point for all weekend excursions).
Hearing German all the time, and understanding it almost perfectly.
Really bad European clothing fashions.
Taking the subway/tram to go everywhere.
Graffiti everywhere. Adds the same sort of flavor as the vomit and blood, plus some of the huge murals on the sides of buildings are really cool.
Walking home as the sun rises on Saturday/Sunday morning.
Pergamon Bistro, right under the Friedrichstrasse S-Bahn station. Best Döner I've had anywhere in the city.
The beach at Wansee.
Monday night poker club at the Quell-Eck.


Things I won't miss:

Coming home from bars/clubs absolutely reeking of cigarette smoke.
The sun rising at 4:30.
Three hour class sessions. It's just too much.
The German dial tone. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP. One must always remember to hold their ear a little ways away from the phone receiver to avoid going deaf.
Feeling like I live with my parents (aka Katja).
Using drying racks to dry clothing.
Hearing sweaty, middle-aged American tourists talking trash about the very destinations they paid good money to come and visit.
German toothpaste.
Gypsies.
Paying upwards of two Euros for a soda at a restaurant.

And so it begins

After a little consternation, much thought and meditation, I decided a week or two ago to stick with the previously scheduled month of travel. Not only did everyone I talked to recommend that I stick with it, but my previous insecurities about it have mostly faded I think. I'll make it work, right? Plus for the first two weeks, from July 19-August 3rd, I'll be traveling with Alex Ruhland and Andy Bean, a couple other friends who are also doing the program. They're fun people, and it'll be great to run around with a couple others for a few weeks. Three's company, right?

This afternoon we all sat down at the Mensa (one of Humboldt University's student cafeterias) and planned it all out. So far the agenda is as follows: Prague, Vienna, Munich, Strasbourg (France), Cologne, and then Alex and Andy are heading back to Berlin for their flights out, leaving me completely free to go wherever I want from August 3rd to August 19th, when my own flight takes off from Berlin.

The planning for all of this will, of course, end up being about 200% harder than I anticipated way back in January when I was dreaming up all these far flung, grandiose plans. I found a PDF of the Eurail net train schedule timetables: the thing is about 138 pages long, and full of weird symbols substituted for actual words to save space in the manual. On top of that, the departure and arrival schedule for individual cities won't give you the details for, say, Berlin to Prague, so you have to find the connecting city (in this case Dresden) and then figure out the next leg of the journey and match up the two (or three or four) separate timetables to one another, assessing if you want an overnight train, if there are additional reservation fees on top of the Eurail pass, what sort of cabin you want. The list goes on.

And then the accommodations. I don't even want to think about finding places to stay and figuring out where the hell they are actually located in all these strange, foreign cities. We'll leave that to simmer in the back of my head for a day or two before figuring it all out.

Challenges for sure, but they're by no means insurmountable. I've also managed to spend a lot less money here in Berlin than I was expecting to--Berlin is surprisingly cheap compared to other cities--so I've actually got a much bigger budget for the travel portion than first anticipated, which is awesome. I sort of anticipated coming out of the other side of this next to broke, which would be fine. After all, what better way to spend all of your money, right? But if I play it right I may have some left over at the end.

Krakow was a great preparation for all of this. Not only did I get to sample what train travel is actually like, but it was also a miniature dry run for the real thing. I learned that while it is terribly unpleasant to spend four days on the road with only one set of socks, it is completely doable, and washing laundry in the sink is surprisingly effective. The pack I have isn't large by any means, but it'll do the job. I had it packed to maybe 75% capacity for Krakow, and even that was completely fine, maybe just a bit too much.

Still have no idea where I'm going for the solo half of the trip. The length of this excursion has a weird way of seeming bigger and smaller in my mind depending on what sort of mood I'm in; right now the two or so weeks I have to myself doesn't seem nearly big enough. I've got a friend who lives in Budapest (Emoke from work), I may send her an email or something and see what she's up to, but aside for that I'm drawing a blank.

Earlier I was fixated pretty heavily on Scandinavia, but I think it'd be cool to see more of Germany as well. My German has gotten to the point where I'm pretty confident in most conversations. I'll forget/not have a word here or there, but if I can't work around it somehow the people I talk to mostly know the word in English already. It'd be great to spend more time here and speak it a little more.

Plus, I'd be 100% immersed in German if I traveled around here by myself. Here in Berlin I only speak German when I'm at my apartment, out in the city on my own, or in class, but I speak English all the time to my friends. It'd be a lot of fun (and really beneficial to me) to be around native Germans ALL of the time and talk with them.

But we'll see! More to come.

While on the subject of weird things in Alexanderplatz...

Ran into a really....interesting display while walking through Alexanderplatz on Saturday. I don't quite know how to describe it in words. It was sort of like a big techno version of Lord of the Dance.
A whole bunch of German teenagers were gathered around the S-Bahn station, all wearing different "Jumpstyle" team uniforms, jumping around and dancing to techno. It was a very quintessentially European form of dance, there's no way you'd ever see anything quite like this anywhere else. Unfortunately didn't have my camera with me, but a few videos I found speak for themselves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm4EpiD2rrI

And especially for you, Adam Polaski:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t8GdtYdRk0

Poland, part the third

After the Auschwitz experience none of us felt like doing much, but after a little nap and a gigantic four-course Polish meal courtesy of the hotel we were feeling a little better, and we all headed into downtown Krakow to check out the Polish nightlife. We ended up at a club that Marcin recommended. Can't remember the name, started with an S I think, but it was quite the place. It was exactly what you'd expect an Eastern European club to be like: full of smoke, riddled with labyrinthine corridors, rickety as hell, and completely packed with tons of people dressed in strange fashions and speaking all sorts of languages. The entire thing was spread out over four or five floors, with multiple bars and dance floors on each level, and....you get the idea.

Europeans party a lot harder than pretty much everybody else in the entire world. In the United States bars close at one or two in the morning, three at the latest, but here the bars and clubs don't close until everybody leaves. So weekend (and weekday) revelers typically head out into the night around midnight or so and stay out until about 7 or 8 in the morning. Given the extreme northern latitude of both Germany and Poland, the sun rises around 4:30 in the morning during the summer, so while it's almost unthinkable to stay out until sunrise in the USA, by the time you leave a bar in Europe the sun is already halfway in the sky. So, to make a long story short, all of the people in that damn place were absolutely nuts and completely out of control. I -stank- of cigarette smoke and Polish beer in the morning, and by the time we left at the modest hour of 2:30 fresh newcomers were still arriving. Michael Jackson had died earlier that day, too, so the DJ's put on a couple Michale Jackson songs every half hour or so, which was actually a lot of fun; everybody stopped what they were doing every time to sing along and dance.

The next day we took a tour of Wawel Castle with Marcin, about a 10-minute walk from downtown, and then we had the rest of the day to ourselves before dinner and the train ride back. Not much else to report there: shopping, hanging out, dinner, etc..

One of the most interesting things I noticed about the Poles is that they're all very proud of their country. Marcin would go off on big tangents while giving his tours about how big and powerful Poland used to be during its heyday, and why its on it's way back to greatness as we speak. The tour guide we had for Auschwitz was also very notably patriotic and a little defensive about Poland's history. It was interesting to see that after having lived in Germany for a few weeks, where the national sentiment can be summed up as, "Well, we really REALLY messed up from about 1939 to 1989, let's acknowledge that over and over and promise never to do it again." Their national pride didn't seem strange or out of place, either; all of the Poles love their country, and that's completely normal. You have to be a little stupid to love America completely without considering the cons with the pros, but that blind, patriotic ignorance wasn't present with the Poles we met. It was just a fact of their society.

Another extremely interesting point that Marcin made is that Poland never had a sexual revolution. Being part of the USSR, religion wasn't allowed in Poland, and so during the 60's Poland experienced a Catholic revolution instead of a sexual revolution. It seems odd, but I can see the same thing happening in the United States; from one angle religion can seem like a limiting of personal freedom, but if something that is very important to a lot of people is outlawed, then it makes sense to fight to get it back. While the younger generation is less religious than their parents, Poland is still a very Catholic country. They love John Paul the 2nd there (world's first Polish Pope); there were plaques and commemorations and big photos and John Paul paraphernalia all over the place.

I also felt a little bad about how much English I ended up seeing and hearing in Poland. Granted, English is obviously the definitive international language, but even so, I don't think it should take precedence over a country's national language. While we were walking around the town square on the first day we caught a performance by a children's choir. They all looked to be about middle school aged, and were affiliated with some church or another. The choir sang nothing but American pop songs, and between songs the director would talk to the crowd in English, even though the majority of the crowd was Polish and the choir itself was Polish. It was certainly helpful for me, but I didn't like the cultural implications of the scene.

Women Chopping Wood

We interrupt this Poland special to bring you: "Frauen Hacken Holz," or, "Women Chopping Wood."

There's usually a lot of weird stuff on Alexanderplatz: Gypsies, tourists, street performers, vendors, but as I was riding the tram yesterday I caught sight of something truly bizarre: big stacks of firewood. All over the place. Far too intrigued to pass by without investigating, I hopped off the tram at the next stop and walked back to see what was going on. In the center of the square was a fenced off area full of about 15 women with axes and chainsaws, some cutting up bigger logs for firewood, others splitting wood, others stacking the wood into big piles in the center. Next to the main area was another fenced off area with a big wooden target. In this area other women were hucking huge double-bladed axes at the target, one after the other, recording their scores on the side.

The meaning of this display escaped me completely. Awesome as chainsaws and axe-throwers may be, I didn't see a purpose behind it. Fortunately, there were little placards strung up along the fences with information about the event.

Begun in Sweden in 2007, Frauen Hacken Holz is a sort of performance-art piece/demonstration highlighting female power, a bridging of cultural boundaries through shared labor, and an effort to make country life more visible in the city. A bunch of Swedish women, all 50+ years old, travel around to different cities in Europe every couple of months, team up with women in those cities, and spend a few days chopping wood. The act is supposed to release positive energy into the environment and educate the public about feminism.

It's a strange concept, but I like the rationale behind it. You can read a poorly Google-translated Berliner Zeitung article about the event here. Following are a few photos (you can click on them for a bigger size):

Axe in mid-flight.

Another action shot. They hit it dead center every time.

Part of the main display. They were chopping away for three days straight, 8-10 hours a day.

Arbeit Macht Frei

The next morning we all piled out of bed around 8 in the morning, enjoyed another breakfast at the hotel, piled into the tour bus and headed out into the country to pay a visit to Auschwitz, one of the most notorious and famous of the hundreds of German Concentration Camps.

All that we're taught in school is that the Nazis had a bunch of concentration camps where they killed Jews, but that is a bit of a simplification. There were three categories of camps: work camps, concentration camps, and death camps. Everybody was (obviously) forced into slave labor at the work camps, but concentration camps were distinguished from death camps in that the purpose of a concentration camp was punishment rather than murder. This is one of the reasons that Auschwitz is so famous. Not only was it the biggest camp ever built, but it left actual survivors.

In other words, the only reason that we hear so much about Auschwitz is because the REAL death camps had 100% mortality rates.

Which is no belittlement of Auschwitz by any means. The living conditions were nothing short of terrifying. In one little Lager, which were often converted from horse stables to save on costs, the Nazis would stick up to 1000 Jews, six to a bunk. In Birkenau (one of the three separate camps that comprised Auschwitz) you could only go to the bathroom twice a day: once in the morning and once at night. The diet, hard labor, and lack of proper medical treatment often resulted in horrible diarrhea, so the top bunks were often fought over so you didn't have to spend the night getting shit on by your fellow prisoners.

Speaking of the bathrooms, these were the only places the SS guards wouldn't go because they stank so horribly. The one we visited was literally a trough covered with a concrete slab with about thirty holes staggered along the top. Since this was the only place the guards would leave you alone, this was were the culture (if you can call it that) flourished in the camp.

The whole Auschwitz experience, as you can imagine, left us all sticken to silence. We're usually a pretty irreverant group. It's always the case that about half of us actually listen to the tour guides in the places we visit while the other half talks amongst themselves, which is incredibly rude and pisses me off to no end, but we were all held to rapt attention during the entire four hour tour through Auschwitz One and Two.

On display in one room was an absolutely enormous pile of human hair, all of which was shaved off of the prisoners before being gassed.
Next to the hair was a sample of cloth woven from human hair, which was often used in Nazi uniforms.
At one point we walked through one of the actual gas chambers used at the camp. One one part of the wall were three scratch marks in the concrete from somebody's fingernails. Oftentimes people would scramble over each other in a desperate attempt to escape the gas. Women and children were always on the bottom of the pile: on top were the strongest in the group.

Each new fact didn't really diminish the atrocity of the place; infants born to inmates drowned hours after birth, guards who tried to help the prisoners burned alive in the incinerators used for the corpses, prisoners who weighed only sixty pounds a whole four months after being freed. If a prisoner managed to escape, 12 prisoners would be hung in their stead. Children under fourteen were put to death instantly upon arrival at Auschwitz; if you were older you might have had a chance of being put to work and surviving.

The trip was....sobering, to say the least. There's an academic knowledge you can gain from hearing about these sorts of things, but to actually walk the mile-long stretch of train track from the front gate of Bireknau to the back, and to see the thousands of Lagers that housed the tens of thousands of prisoners was overwhelming. Even the knowledge that over a million people were put to death at the camp can't quite make the feeling hit home: the number is too big for human comprehension. Another one of those experiences that's good to have, but probably best not to repeat.

King Krak and the Slutty

Well, just got back from the Krakow trip after 12 hours on a Polish train, and it was a blast. Krakow isn't exactly the first place any of us here would consider visiting--those with travel plans all have their sights set on Spain and France and the UK and whatnot--but after having done the trip I'm very glad I went. Krakow is a very interesting little city.

The downtown (which went practically untouched during WW2) is the archetypal old European city- cobbled streets, big central town squares, castles, etc., but the periphery of the city is really kind of drab. Poland has a beleaguered history to say the least, and it really shows in the people, the economy, the sort of run-down quality of the place. It's currently about 1 Euros to 4 Polish złoty (which we, in our profound maturity and cultural sensitivity, pronounced "slutty" for the whole trip).

But anyway, best to begin with the beginning. Almost immediately after leaving my homestay I realized that I had completely forgotten to pack clean socks. I never, ever, ever fail to forget something when leaving on a trip, and if I had forgotten extra pants or deodorant or something non-vital/easily replaceable then it wouldn't be a huge deal.

But socks.
Where the hell do you buy socks in Poland?

Before the train ride I'd rented a bike, and had spent most of the day riding around seeing the sights around the city, so I not only had only one clean set of socks, but dirty, sweaty socks at that. "Well," I thought, "Messed that one up, eh? Too late to turn around now, gonna be late if you go back, time to man up." Definitely not an optimal way to start a four day trip to Krakow.

We all boarded the train at the Lichtenberg station at about 9:00 on Wednesday night. Normally the train ride to Krakow takes about 5 hours, but seeing as we were riding on an overnight train, we hit up a bunch of different out of the way stops along the way. I'm pretty sure we doubled back at some point in the night. The whole ride lasted about 12 hours. I really didn't mind though. Everybody bitched about the train ride, complaining about the cramped little six-person sleeping compartments and how slow we were going, but I actually like it a lot. It was nice to stick my head out the window and watch the forests and little towns pass by, and we had a lot of fun just hanging out and messing around on the train. Plus the fold out cots were actually a step up from my bed at my homestay, they at least had a little cushion to them. Sleeping on the futon here is like sleeping on an ironing board.

Upon our arrival around 9:30 we boarded a bus for our hotel. Driving through the outskirts of Krakow was an interesting experience. Not only did it have a very...industrial, minimalist sort of quality to it, but everything was in Polish, which may be a dumb observation to make, but it was jarring to be in an enviroment where I didn't know what anything meant. In Berlin if I don't know exactly what's being said I can at least tease the meaning out of the words, but Polish (a Slavic language) is so completely different from German and English (Germanic languages) that I could maybe pick out a word or two here and there. I thought I'd be able to pick up some phrases or words, but all I managed to take away from the trip was the word for water (woda).

I also felt a little ignorant and imposing. It's one thing to attempt to order something in German and have the shop owner answer you in English, but to just walk up to a native Pole and start speaking English to them was embarassing. On a couple occasions shop owners would flat out pick the currency out of my palm because I took too long to figure out what the hell all of their strange little coins were worth.

We got about an hour to move our stuff in, recuperate, and have breakfast, and then we headed off to downtown Krakow with our tour guide Marcin (pronounce Marchin, which is the Slavic version of Martin). Marcin was a great guy. He was definitely the type of guy you'd expect in the Eastern Bloc: greasy shoulder length hair, beer gut, thick accent. He'd been giving tours since about 1994 I think, but his English was still pretty spotty. He'd say stuff like, "You must remind that Poland was at one point occupated by both Germany and Russia," and "this club is a great place for making a party." In standard Central European style, it was raining the whole time, but the city tour was very nice. Berlin is absolutely filthy with graffiti, you can't go ten feet without seeing some, and while it's all sort of faded into the background (I kinda like it now), the relative cleanliness of Krakow was really refreshing.

After the city tour we broke up and went exploring by ourselves. A group of us got a little ice cream (only 1 Slutty a scoop!), and went exploring the shops in and around the city center. Around 3 or 4 a couple of us took a break in the park that surrounds the city to find a bench and sit around for a while. We sat down on a bench in the shade and immediately smelled something strange. We figured it was the bum taking a nap on the bench next to us, so we walked across the path and sat down on an adjacent bench. We discovered the source of the stink almost immediately: behind the first bench was another bum with his pants around his ankles pooping next to a tree.

We were speechless.

There have been a precious few moments in life where I've been completely, utterly at a loss for what to do, and that was one of them. He was muttering to himself the entire time, and wasn't really trying to hide himself either. He was pooping next to the tree as opposed to behind it, and the whole scene took place about five feet from the sidewalk. Me and Caitlin tried to avert our eyes the best we could, Ian decided to take the initiative and snap some photos. After thirty seconds we couldn't take any more and walked to the other side of the park.

NEXT UP: Auschwitz, more sight seeing in Krakow, and a real life Eastern European club experience.
PS, miss you guys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luRG8XXcZ84

Sorry for the general dearth of posts recently. Been trying to keep up with everything that's been going on, but...you know...

And the group is taking a big trip to Krakow, Poland, leaving tonight at 8:30, so there will be even fewer posts between now and Sunday! But I'll get to writing after I get back.

Andy

Frühling für Hitler

A few days ago me and a few people (Caitlyn, Kristin, Ryan, Keegan, and Anna) got together to see The Producers at the Admiralspalast, a theater just down the road from IES on Friedrichstraβe.
Now, before we continue, I want you to take a few things into consideration:

-This is The Producers we're talking about. A Mel Brooks musical that opens up it's second act with a dancing, singing number entitled "Springtime for Hitler."
-This is in Germany.
-The Admiralspalast was Hitler's favorite theater. I was sitting about thirty feet away from the Führer's personal box.

So as you can imagine, this was not your normal off-Broadway theater experience. In the United States, of course, the subject of World War 2 is fair game for satire by now, but here there are still living remnants from the time period, and the whole national conception of the war is completely different from our own. I understand that even 60 years on that Germans are still pretty sensitive about the whole subject. So I wasn't quite sure how a musical with tap dancing stormtroopers, gay Hitlers, and women dressed up in Third Reich Eagle costumes was going to go over with an audience like this.

In addition, I had taken a visit to the Holocaust Memorial a few days earlier, and that was just a horrifying experience. You can read about stuff like that in textbooks, but after reading the history of the extermination of a whole race of people, coupled with the personal stories of dozens of Jews/families and letters from people getting shipped off to concentration camps, the reality of the Holocaust hit me a lot harder. For a day or two after that I didn't consider it at all appropriate to be showing something like this in Germany.

But, I went to see it anyway, and I must admit, it was pretty damn funny. It was all translated into German, but having seen the show a couple times before I didn't have any problem following the plot. I'd like to say that I would have been able to watch the translation for the first time without knowing the plot of the show, but there were a few key moments that I couldn't quite pick up for lack of vocabulary or for the actors speaking too fast. The first song was just impossible for me to understand at all, but as the show progressed it got progressively easier to hear the words and sort out the meanings. I'd say by the end I was comprehending 60-70 percent of it. Beforehand I was worried about not being able to understand one of the characters, Ulla, in the show, seeing as she speaks with a really exaggerated Swedish accent, but ironically enough she was the easiest to understand since she spoke the slowest.

We all thought the show was funny, but I don't think all the Germans around us got as big of a kick out of it. It was a Tuesday night, so the crowd wasn't as big as it might have been on a weekend, but all of the slapstick moments that would make a standard American theater audience laugh were observed with an awkwardly somber silence by the Berliners. Maybe it's just a matter of German taste, who knows.

Potsdam, weekend

Well, the weekend has been pretty good. Low key for the most part, haven't really gone out at all, but we did take a big field trip down to Potsdam all day Saturday (taking the train, of course). Had I gone out on Friday it would have been a miserable trip anyway, we were on our feet for the vast majority of the day, walking all over the place. We started out at the palace of Sanssouci. Sanssouci was an interesting place; it was sort of like an all boy's club for Frederick the Great out in the boonies of Brandenberg. The palace was his private getaway, and no women (including his wife, who was forced to stay in Berlin) were allowed in, seeing as they "disturb the peace." He'd entertain philosophers (namely Voltaire) and musicians (including one of Bach's sons), and generally devote his days to the pursuit of intellectual conversation and eating fruit and drinking coffee (he was a big fan of these, which were rarities back in the day).

The tour guide only spoke German (she was pretty old, and she says English wasn't very popular to learn back in the day), so Fanny, one of the IES student assistants, was translating into English, but I was very pleased by the fact that I could understand everything perfectly without Fanny. I've been reflecting on fluency a lot for the past couple months. For a while I thought there was some shining standard of fluency that I could strive for, and that I'd know I was fluent instantly upon attaining it, but I'm finding the barrier distinguishing fluent and non-fluent is getting hazier for me. I can sort of read the newspaper, for instance, but I can't understand the German translation of Men in Black 2, nor can I get more than a few sentences into a novel before getting lost. I can, however, understand the German translation of Catwoman (don't ask me why I was watching that awful movie), and I can understand German tours of Sanssouci Palace. So you could call me intermediate I suppose.

Anyway, after that we hung out in downtown Potsdam for a while. It's a very quaint little place. Extremely posh, and super touristy, but nevertheless fun to walk around. I had my third Döner of the trip for lunch, with "doppelfleisch" (double-meat). I don't know why I ordered it with twice as much meat, I was hungry I suppose. I have trouble finishing a normal Döner, but the doppelfleisch Döner almost killed me. Far, far too much food. After lunch we all met up at the center of town and did a tour of Potsdam itself. It was admittedly a lot more interesting than the tour of the castle, and went back and forth between its Prussian and Nazi/East German history, going from old houses built for the Danish architects of the town to KGB prisons and one of the Nazi Eugenics Courts. We also got to see real life nudist sunbathers at a park next to the river that runs through Potsdam. It inspired an interesting reaction in all of us- we were all torn between gawking at something you'd never see in the US to trying to keep it cool and act normally so as not to disturb the peace of everybody there.

After we got back (around 7:00) I hit the sack for about an hour, seeing as I'd basically been walking around all day from 9:00-6:00. When I woke up I could barely walk, even after thinking I'd finally gotten used to walking so much here. I'd say that around here I walk at least three times as much as I do back home. For the first few days my legs were pretty sore, and I actually have to tighten my belt an extra loop, but when I got out of bed my feet were incredibly tight. I suppose it's all a matter of acclimatizing yourself to it though- our tour guide for the town logged 10,000 steps on her pedometer the day she led us through Potsdam, and we were her second tour group.

Been seriously considering changing my plane ticket and cutting the travel portion of the trip short. It seemed like an awesome idea way back in April when I bought the tickets, but when we were riding the train to Potsdam I kept thinking, "Oh, well, this is going to be me for a whole month. Except I'm going to be completely, totally alone." As independent as I consider myself, and as much wanderlust that I thought I had, I just don't feel the desire to have THAT huge of a solo excursion anymore. I think I'd just be lonely the entire time. You are the sum of your experiences, but they're meaningless if you can't share them with someone else, and I even get a little sad walking around here by myself just for the fact that there's nobody with me. I miss Ithaca and my friends a lot, and just want to have the opportunity to hang out there for a little bit before the year starts.

Reflections on the language, city

Language is a really bizarre thing when you think about it. Sometimes I just casually listen to people talking here without really paying attention to the words and think about how different and strange it sounds. Barely a week ago German was something I spoke for three hours a week in class and a little bit in the afternoons while doing homework, but here I'm just swimming in it. And while it has gotten a little more normal, all of the "kkkh" and "cshhh" and "ooaah" and "uuueah" and "eearrrh" still sound foreign.

Then again, sometimes it comes really naturally to me, and I can almost speak it with the same easy, natural flow as I speak English. Most of the time when I'm walking by myself from place to place I just switch off English entirely and think in German. I also sometimes find myself structuring my English sentences in ways that would probably make more sense in German than in English, if that makes any sense. And I'm sure from the other side of the language gulf English sounds pretty weird too. I met a German a couple years ago who said that when Americans speak English it sounds like we have a hot potato in the backs of our throats. I have no idea where that comparison comes from, or how it even makes sense, but just goes to show ya.

Occasionally I get really frustrated with my skill level. This afternoon I was talking with Rose and Katja, and I had to excuse myself to go to my room for a little bit and lie down cause my brain felt like it was going to burst. I was also really hungry, which probably had a lot to do with my frustration, but there's just so much I still have to learn. Katja corrects me right and left when I make mistakes, which is really helpful, but there are dozens of little errors I make with gender and case (probably the hardest things about gendered languages like German) that end up slipping by uncorrected. And while it's getting easier and easier to talk to Rose and Katja, I still get nervous when I talk to professors. I just seize up and lose about a third of my vocabulary on the spot when I try and speak up in class (which is much more often than everyone else. I guess none of my fellow students share my enthusiasm for the material. Or they don't understand the questions. Or they're too nervous).

Some things I like about Berlin:
-The deposits on bottles are huge here. You'd get about 8 cents in a handful of US states for a returned bottle of water, but here you get 25 Euro cents back for a bottle of water/Coke, much more for bigger bottles. Every three Cokes is a free Coke!
-The machines in the grocery stores that they use to determine your deposit are reaaaally cool too. They have entirely too much technology for such a simple task--all sorts of spinning wheels and conveyor belts and lasers and crushers and receipt printers--but half of the fun in returning bottles is seeing the bottle collectors in action.
-Alexanderplatz (the place I live near) is just really awesome. Earlier I made a judgment that it didn't seem like I lived in a very pretty part of Berlin, and while Alexanderplatz ("Alex," as they call it here) isn't exactly pretty, it is probably one of the coolest areas of the city. It's one of the cultural centers of East Berlin, and there are always tons of people out there, and on weekends there's always live music and street performers and all sorts of stuff. It's sort of like the Commons, except supersized and more urban.

Some things I don't like about Berlin:
-You have to pay 1.50 Euros (almost 2 USD) for a shopping cart at the grocery store near my homestay. Really? Really? That is highway robbery. I'd sooner use my backpack to shop for groceries (which I did) than pay to use a shopping cart.
-Nobody accepts credit or debit. The only places I've seen people using their cards to pay for things have been in grocery stores. Literally NOWHERE else. Really? In this day and age?
-The bottle caps here drive me insane. On American bottles there's the cap itself and then that little ring on the bottom that holds the cap to the bottle. Here the cap and the ring are connected on one side, so whenever you take a bottle cap off the dongly little plastic ring stays attached, and that is just not ok. All of us here spend at least five minutes after removing the bottle cap trying to rip off the plastic ring.

Taking a day trip to Potsdam on Saturday, but otherwise the weekend remains open.

One quick thing: Spongebob Squarepants in German- Spongebob Schwammkopf.
Literal translation: Spongebob Spongehead.
I thought that was pretty damn funny.

Monday night in Hackescher Markt

Had an interesting night tonight. Beforehand we had our first real full day of classes, I had German at 11:00-2:00 and then Berlin Literature from 6:00-8:00 (yes, PM), and after that we all went out to eat, since grocery stores close around 8:00 here and I don't have any food in the fridge.

Speaking of fridges (if I may digress for a moment), I was talking to Rose the other day in the kitchen while she was preparing food and having dinner, and when she was finished eating her rice she just set it down on the counter instead of putting it away in the refrigerator. "Uh, Rose, why don't you put that in the fridge?" I asked. "Oh, Germans don't do that with hot food, they wait for it to cool down before putting it in the fridge cause it takes more energy to refrigerate hot food." And I thought Ithaca was hardcore. Geez.

But anyway, we went to get some pizza around Hackescher Markt, which is full of restaurants and shops and the like, and it is all a pedestrian zone. It's one of the few older areas of the city that wasn't completely bombed out in WW2, so it's still got a sort of classic feel to it, whereas the other areas of the city are much more modern/urban. There are tons of people walking around in the evening, and a ton of street performers.

Strangely enough, we ran into our friend Patty from the program while we were looking for a spot to sit down and eat lunch. Patty is extremely friendly and outgoing. Maybe a little crazy. On our first night out she made friends with a few working-class Germans at a bar on Freidrichstraβe, and on this particular evening she was hanging out with one of the homeless street performers on his homemade bike/carriage. He was pretty damn grungy and was missing quite a few teeth, although the thing that caught my attention were the mutton chops with matching mutton chop tattoos on his cheeks. He has the world's strongest eardrums, and is apparently the world's only inflatable man, and he incorporates both skills into his act, although we didn't get to see him perform while we were there. We sat nearby eating while Patty rode his custom built chopper-style bike around and made friends with all of his friends.

We did make our share of friends at Hackescher Markt though. On my right there was a guy hanging out, drinking a couple of beers (no open container laws here) and wearing a bright green safety jacket. He looked a little worse for the wear, so I didn't talk to him initially, but he eventually ended up slurring some sort of greeting to me, and we chatted for a little bit. He was dirty, wearing sunglasses even though it was twilight out, and didn't seem...completely there. Most of the conversation was in German, but there was a hefty amount of Portuguese, Spanish and English mixed in as well, so I had a tough time understanding him with all the strange words flying around, not to mention the fact that he's got some serious speech problems and has probably wreaked some massive damage on his brain with a whole melange of chemicals. Highlights of the conversation included:

Him: Allendo allendo allendo (he had a thing about saying things three times).
Me: Uh, what?
Him: Allendo allendo allendo, you are allendo.
Me: Um, I'm sorry, I have no idea what that is...
Him: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Obama Obama Obama.
He apparently found my confusion pretty damn funny, still don't know what allendo is, or what that even means. Big fan of Obama too apparently.

Me: So where do you work?
Him: qwelrqwermbukjhu-newspapers.
(his speech was also REALLY slurred)
Me: Oh, you deliver newspapers?
Him: No! *sign language, more gibberish*
Me: Um...
Him: dafjlwaeirualkjf-newspapers-asdkfjaowief-magazines in a truck-asdofuhawef-factory.
Me: Aaah, you load newspapers and stuff into a truck at a factory?
Him: Yes! asdflajweoifajwef
Me: That's cool, do you like it?
Him: dfaowejflsdfjoawief!!!
Me: Oh. Ok.

Him: I prefer the cold.
Me: Oh really? I like warm weather better.
Him: No no no, the cold is better. When the warm sun hits my head, everything is broken. I have asdlfkjawoeif, everything broken.
Me: What?
Him: asdlfjasf, the uh-uh-uh-uh, opium, opium yeah? asldkjjhiufwe, everything broken.
Me: Oh, you smoked too much opium and now your brain doesn't work, huh?
Him: *silence*
Me: I'll keep that in mind and avoid it.

He was a nice guy, shook my hand when he departed and everything, but wow. He would be the perfect poster boy for a "This is your brain on drugs" commercial. He was a little less interesting than the guy who taught me the Meth recipe while I was working at the Sundance Film Festival two winters ago, but so far as bums go he was pretty fun to talk to.

After that Ian, one of the other guys in our dinner group, went off to play guitar with a few street musicians he'd met earlier. We camped out in a tunnel that runs through the S-Bahn station in Hackescher Markt and watched him play for a while for the passers-by. It was actually pretty good- one of the guys had a wooden box he was pounding on which made for a pretty convincing drum set, one of the guys rapped (half in German, half in English), and Ian had an amp for the acoustic guitar and everything. It was especially interesting hearing the Berliners sing blues tunes about growing up in Leipzig and moving all the way out to Berlin to make it big. It's quite the lesson in globalization to see a blond haired, blue eyed German performing a rural, black, American art form. I tried jamming with them a little bit, but we couldn't really work up a groove, so I gave the guitar back to Ian and stuck around for a few more songs. We all left around 10:30 or so.

Still on the agenda for the week: poker tomorrow with Ian at a place near his homestay (5 euro buy in, Texas Holdem), maybe a field trip to some locations mentioned in the stuff we're reading for the Berlin Lit. class, learning more German! Stay tuned.

First class, Döner, observations

Had my first actual class this Friday, and it was a bit more intense than I was expecting. It's marked as a 200-level German Language course, and so far as Ithaca is concerned the credits are 200-level as well, but I'd say it's closer to a 300-level. My German professor back at school said it might be a good idea to take the class, since German classes are generally harder than their American equivalents, and he was definitely right. The professor speaks really, really quickly (I understand most people from northern Germany do), and uses a pretty extensive vocabulary. I'd say I understood 90-95 percent of it, but I was definitely hanging on by the skin of my teeth, and a few people in the class were totally lost. Every language class I've taken has been completely in German, but for some of the students that was the first time that they'd been in an all-German environment. I wasn't sure the class would be useful for me, since I've taken two 300-level classes at IC so far, but I'll definitely learn a lot by staying in, and it'll be good to review a few pieces of grammar that may have slipped between the cracks somewhere.

After class we went out and found a Döner stand. Döner is like a Turkish version of a gyro that the Turks (Germany's largest minority group) make in Berlin. Apparently you can only get it here as well; if you go to Turkey and ask for Döner they won't know what you're talking about. There's a little place in the IES neighborhood that sells them, and between classes we all headed out to get some. They are incredibly messy, and will most certainly kill if you eat too many (lots of sauce, a half-pound of lamb meat, etc.), but it was a lot better than I was expecting it to be. Really inexpensive too, only 2.50, but things in Berlin tend to be on the cheaper side anyway.

A few more things I've learned so far-
-In German, you don't play music (spielen Musik), you make (machen) music, although you do play an instrument.
-Something isn't fun (Das ist spass), it "makes" fun (Das macht spass).
-I FINALLY learned what deswegen means (because of). That word has always eluded me, and now I can actually use it in a sentence.

A few other things-
-Germans love techno. There was a guy in Alexanderplatz the other day who had a big collection of amps and instruments and whatnot hooked up to his car battery, and he was just rocking out on the keyboard with a looped electronica drum beat. It was actually kind of cool.
-I've been trying to discern things that makes Germans German aside for the language--things where you can look at a person and determine instantly that they're a native and not a tourist. So far I've got: over 30 and living in the city, nice shoes (although this isn't always the case), and really bad hair. I've seen some absolutely atrocious haircuts in this city: one guy with his head shaved on one side and the rest bleached white, a sort of mullet-mohawk (a mohawk, but only on the back), and several actual mullets.
-Berliners are extremely environmentally friendly. There are at least five different categories for trash- paper, glass, plastic, food, and "restmull" (stuff that can't be recycled). Some trash cans around the city will be divided into four or five sections, and while people in the US (especially in Ithaca, surprisingly) will just toss anything anywhere, Germans are very careful to properly separate out all their trash so it ends up in the right spot. You also can't get grocery bags in grocery stores, you either bring your own or just carry it.

First couple days

Note: [text in brackets] indicates German)

Whew! What a whirlwind tour. I’d say I prepared a fair deal for this, but so far the whole experience has hit me a lot harder mentally than I thought it would, and this city is nothing like I imagined it would be. Currently sitting in bed writing. I spent all day running around the city, getting a mini tour of the IES center, meeting my home stay host, and once I finally saw the bed around six PM I just lost it, hit the sheets and passed out from exhaustion. Not quite sure what time it is, I’ve found three conflicting time sources in the apartment so far, but best guesses put the time around 1 AM. I’m wide awake of course; it’s only five in the afternoon in Utah. So I figure I’ll write a little something up and try to tire myself out again.

Left for the airport around 6:30 in the morning on Monday with Mom, got there, checked my bags, and got on board. Neither flight was particularly bad, except I didn’t sleep on either of them. From SLC to JFK I took a little 10-minute nap, but on the JFK to Berlin flight, which departed at 7 PM East Coast time and arrived in Berlin around 2 in the morning (9 AM in this time zone), I sort of pretended to close my eyes and tried to sleep, but to no avail. I was a little wired when I touched down, not only from the lack of sleep, but cause I’m finally in FRICKIN BERLIN MAN!!! Grabbed my bags with no holdups, and headed out the gate to the pick-up area.

To get to the IES Center I had to catch bus 128 to an U-Bahn station, hop on train U6 and take it to the Oranienberger Tor stop, and walk to the Center. First order of business upon arrival was figuring out where the busses were. I wandered around for a little bit, searching for a map of the airport and looking as conspicuously American as possible with my bright red external frame backpacking backpack, but I couldn’t figure it out on my own. And so I was faced with the first of many dilemmas I have confronted in my short time in the city so far: 1) find someone who speaks English to give me directions to the busses, ensuring I get a straight answer but starting myself down the slippery slope of invalidating one of my main reasons for going on this trip (getting better at German), or 2) ask for directions in German and risk sounding completely stupid.

I walked round and round considering it for a while, testing out different phrases in German in my head (“[Excuse me, do you know where the busses depart from?],” “[Hi, where are the busses located?”]), and finally settled on what ended up being the most grumpy, disheveled security guard in the airport to ask my question. Moseying up, I asked in the most casual (read: awkward) tone I could manage:

“[Uh, hi. Where are the busses?]”
He regarded me critically for a second, pointed to the right, said,
“[You see down there?]”
“[Um, yes.]”
“[Ok, so, blkasjdf;lajsokjhliuh;bih;kewf.]” (approximation of his mumbled, lightning-fast response)

Shhhhhhhhhit. What did the hell did he just say? I nodded like an idiot, pretending to understand, and went off in the direction he pointed, figuring that at the very least I might be able to figure it out based on that. Fortunately that was enough to find it. I went up to the bus ticket counter to get a ticket for the bus, and the attendant—either trying to be sympathetic with me or just giving up—answered me in English when I spoke to him. Well. Maybe this whole speaking German thing is going to be a little harder in real life than I thought. I was little chagrined to discover I couldn’t even pick up on conversations in the terminal at JFK. I could hear German noises and vowel sounds—“aah” and “ooh” and “ehh” and “kkh” all over the place—but could only pick out a word or two.

Finding the Center wasn’t too big a deal. When I arrived I set my bags down and headed into the lounge to meet and greet with the other students who had arrived. We were all divided into groups and given little mini tours of the grounds and given packets with maps of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, calendars for the program, and monthly passes for the busses and trains. That took about an hour, and after that I teamed up with a few people—Nick, Mark, Caitlyn, Kristin, and Rena—and headed off to Alexanderplatz to get a cell phone, as the program requires you to have one. Actually figuring out the routes on the S-Bahn was an adventure in and of itself, and we got off way too early and ended up walking most of the distance to the place.

When we got there we roamed around for a little bit looking for Saturn or Media Market (both places where you can get prepaid cell phones), but couldn’t really figure it out until asking some people to point us in the right direction. Found Saturn we located some cheap phones (10 Euros) with prepaid cards (15 Euros), and went to the desk to activate them. Someone at IES told me that Germany is a “very bureaucratic country,” but I had no idea how far that bureaucracy extends. Just getting a cell phone here is an absurdly complicated process. First you have to prove that you have a German address, show the shop owner your passport, and sign a whole bunch of forms, four of which I think were completely identical. I signed my name a total of eight times before I could head to the front counter to check out. I was chatting with the guy who was helping me and said, “[It’s a little complicated to buy a cell phone in Germany, yeah?]” He gave me one look and answered with a simple, “[That is how it works here, ok?]” Something to be said for the System here I guess.

We got some lunch after the cell phone adventure, and headed back to the Center. After waiting around in the lounge for a while I met up with my home stay host, Katja Lehmann. Katja is 27, and she’s studying Economics at one of the universities in Berlin (Humboldt maybe). I was surprised but relieved to get a home stay with another student. If I got stuck with a family with kids my rough and tumble, late-night student lifestyle might have clashed with their life, but at least in this situation we both sort of have the same schedule. She’s a little shorter than me, brown hair, glasses. She asked me if I wanted to speak German or English with her as we were walking to her car, and I answered German, and for the most part it’s actually not been that bad talking with her. She told me that, aside for Rose (the other IES student who is living with us) my German is the best of anyone she’s ever hosted. Not sure if that’s a reflection of my language abilities or the caliber of the other students, but when I smiled and said “Ohhh Katja, danke,” she replied, “[No Andy, I am very serious, your German is quite good.]”

One learns, living with Katja, that it is -Katja’s- apartment, and you are –going- to abide by her rules while living there. I wouldn’t say she has any of that German “coldness” that I mentioned earlier—she’s plenty friendly—but she’s one of the most direct and commanding people I’ve ever met, and has a standard for cleanliness and orderliness that I have never seen before or will again. She was really reluctant to show me her room, telling me that “there is a huge mess in there.” Huge mess by her definition seems to mean that everything is in immaculate order, bed made and tucked in, with maybe a few small things sitting out of place on her desk. Some highlights of the 20-minute laying of the ground rules and tour of the apartment:

“[No NO Andy! Do not step on the carpet with your shoes!! You must first wipe them off and place them here!]” (I misunderstood her directions earlier)
“[When you are finished showering in the bathroom you will always clear any and all hair out of the shower drain, take the squeegee and wipe off the walls of the shower, and dry off the sink if you spill water on the ledge. In this way the bathroom will always remain clean.]”
“[These mugs, MEIN (mine, pronounced the same way in both languages), you may not use them, because if they get broken I will first be very sad and then very angry with you. This food, MEIN, your shelf is here in the fridge. These cups and plates are MEIN. You may use Rose’s if you wish.]”
“[Oh Andy NO! Do not pet the cat under the chin! He only likes to be petted on the back of the head. The chin and the back are not his favorites.]”

I was smiling the entire time and holding back a laugh. It’s not as if any of the rules were unreasonable, but her delivery was so serious and meticulously detailed that I couldn’t help but find it funny. In the United States a host showing a guest their apartment would be full of smiles and laughter and geniality, but she was deadly, deadly serious when she told me that I have to leave the microwave open after I use it to air it out and that I can’t pee standing up in the bathroom (apparently in Germany this is actually something you just don’t do, oddly enough).

I took a nap for an hour or so, and woke up to dinner in the kitchen with Katja and Rose. Rose’s German is absolutely ridiculous. She’s doing some sort of combined spring-summer semester at IES, and apparently before coming here she spent a whole year in Bremen with a different program, so her German is absolutely flawless. I could get along pretty well with Katja and all the other Germans I spoke to in the city, but trying to listen to Katja and Rose talk with each other is something else entirely:

Rose: “[So Katja, what do you think of the BL-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L]” (approximation of trilled, machine gun rate of speech)
Katja: “[Oh, well BL-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L]”

The conversation dashed around from F.C. Bayern (a soccer team) to Smirnoff Ice (don’t know where that came from) to the dishes schedule (which I still don’t entirely understand) to all sorts of other topics that I only sort of caught wind of. I just stared dejectedly down at my spaghetti and tried to nod where I thought it was appropriate.

Rose: “[BL-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L. What do you think Andy?]”
Andy: “[Um…. I’m sorry, but I didn’t understand a word of that, what?]”

I thought I had a reasonably good grasp on the language, but after excusing myself to go to bed after dinner my brain was literally SPINNING. As in felt like it was scrambled and spun around in my head. I’d heard the expression before, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually experienced the sensation until today. I just stared at the ceiling for a little while, tired but unable to sleep, already frustrated with my skill level, feeling all the little synapses in my head quivering and shaking. I’m going to learn a ton while living with these two, but damn…that bar is really high up there.

Tomorrow we’ve got an extended tour of the facilities and a welcome dinner at a restaurant (not sure which yet). I don’t really have consistent access to the internet yet, so posts may be a little sporadic and post-dated, but challenges included I’m just having a blast so far!

Aufwiedersehen, as they say!

Leaving tomorrow!

Well, flight takes off nice and early at 8:50 tomorrow, get into Berlin-Tegel at 10:00 Germany time, which is around 2 in the morning Utah time I think. It will be "viel spaß" (lots of fun) to figure out the S-Bahn and U-Bahn (Berlin's two subway systems) after spending 18 hours in transit. I have directions to the IES Berlin Center (take a bus to a train station to another station and take a short walk), but neither me nor Mom could figure out the handful of U/S-Bahn online maps. But ehhh. Not worried about it. I'm sure there will be scads of maps and people to direct me to where I need to go.

It will be really interesting switching from speaking German three hours a week in class to speaking it full time . I had a French teacher in Junior High who peaced out and moved back to France after about a month of living in the US. Some of that may be attributable to living in Utah (no joke), some from teaching Junior High French classes, but I think it was a matter of culture shock. I consider myself a pretty flexible, adaptable guy; hopefully German culture isn't too far outside my range of tolerance. I understand the people are a little cold and emotionally distant, which I'm sure doesn't apply to everybody in the country, but still... As unfair as I consider the scary/brutal cultural stereotypes that the country's Nazi history has imbued it with (people being frightened by the "axe-murderish tone" of the language, etc.), there may be some truth to this German coldness I've heard of; a few people have told me about it.

But hey! Adveture, eh? I'll be sure to report on whether or not there's any truth to all that.

Getting close!

Well, four days until departure, and getting pretty damn excited about leaving! Not looking forward to the flight, I tend to get stuck next to the more...interesting passengers on long flights (smelly, fat French women, a 90-year-old Jehovah's Witness who gave me a pamphlet on the religion and two in-depth lectures on why God is not responsible for the world's troubles, etc.). I like Utah just fine. For about two weeks at a time, and I've just about reached my threshold. Definitely feeling a little Wanderlust building up.

This whole thing is going to be so damn cool. Unter den Linden, die Berliner Dom, die Brandenburger Tor, spending seven weeks exploring all of this is going to be a blast. I'm staying with another German university student and another IES student near Alexanderplatz on Mollstraße. It admittedly doesn't look like the prettiest part of Berlin, and I'll be living in an old East German Plattenbau, but whatever. Certainly won't get in the way of me enjoying the hell out of myself over there!