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.