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.