Prague, Czech Republic

I arrived (by bus) in Prague on Wednesday afternoon.  Lucy picked me up, and I did some reading (Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There (thanks Lis!)) while she was in her afternoon class, and got a bag of vitamin c gummies because I woke up sick that morning.  After her class, we went to Old Town Square, which is really close to her place.  It was beautiful:

me in Old Town Square

That evening, one of Lucy's roommates joined us for dinner at a cute little restaurant where I got this delicious pizza and ate all but one slice because I was so hungry:

When you go out to dinner here in Europe (and particularly in the Czech Republic) you could seriously sit there for 4 hours, and they wouldn't give you any trouble.  That's nice in that you can relax and not be rushed out, but you have to do all but tackle the waitress in order to get your check.

Thursday morning I was still quite sick so I slept while Lucy was in class that morning.  In the afternoon, we did some shopping on "the shopping street", which connects to Wenceslas Square (you know, 'Good King Wenceslas', the Christmas song?).

Wenceslas Square on a cloudy day

Prague is by far the most beautiful city I have seen yet.  The streets make absolutely no sense, but the city is small enough that if you wander through them, you'll find your way.  They're so narrow - you think you've seen narrow cobble streets - not until you've been to Prague).  I just could not get over how beautiful every nook and cranny of the city was, and these photos don't do it justice.  I wish Berlin hadn't gotten the living daylight bombed out of it after the war, or else I'm sure a lot of it would look much like Prague in that sense.

That night on our way back from meeting up with some other HWS students for one girl's birthday, we stopped at a food stand near Wenceslas to get fried cheese - a very czech food, that Anthony Bourdain recommended.  Let me tell you..... it was AMAZING.

I'm eating my way through Europe.

Friday we went to the Charles Bridge (the big/main bridge in Prague connecting the two parts of the city) and walked across it to the other part of the beautiful city.  From the bridge, you can see the castle, the house where the president lives, and an overall great view of that part of the city because it's on a hill.

On the Charles Bridge.  The castle above, and the waterfront.

We found a cute little restaurant once out of the touristy area.  They didn't have an English menu, but the waiter told us he would translate the whole menu for us if we waited a few minutes!!  It was so nice, and something that would never happen in this part of Germany.  He took our order, and then we waited an hour for our food, trying to surpress our immense hunger.

After lunch, we found the Lenin Wall, which was surprisingly small (especially after walking down the Berlin wall so many times), but cool.  We walked back across the bridge and got another Czech delicacy - a Trdelník.  It is the best thing to ever happen to carbs.  Ever.
It's a pastry that's made by wrapping a long string of dough around a metal rod many times, and then it's  cooked over a fire while it rotates (picture a pig roast).  Afterwards, it's rolled in cinnemon/nut/sugar mix.  You can also get nutella in it.  So with that, I continued to eat my way through the Czech Republic!!

Saturday we did a bit more exploring before my 5pm bus back to Berlin.  It was so nice getting to see Prague, getting to see Lucy again, and meeting all of here awesome flatmates.
On the bus ride back, I had a bit of an issue getting across the border because I didn't have my passport (because the government had it until Thursday [and I left on Wednesday] to give us our visas).  You are supposed to be able to travel via bus or train within the EU with just an ISIC (int'l student ID card) card  and a license, but the bus people weren't having any of that.  Luckily I convinced them to let me on because of a letter I had from my school saying that the authorities have my passport.  We were stopped at the border (because there are no actual border crossings in Europe like we have between Canada - black unmarked BMWs just pull you over at random).  Thank God, after much suspense, the police let me through with the letter and my two forms of ID.  It was a scary experience, and I'll definitely have to let those who advised us on travel that it is not okay to travel without passport back TO Germany, but only from.

But, thankfully, I made it back okay, and have been rushing to unpack, go to the gym (saying no to food is not an option here), and planning out my trip to Paris!  I'm leaving here in an hour, and will be back Saturday.  I can't believe I'm finally going, it's so crazy!

Have a great week!

Winter Wonderland

Here's a look at what my morning commute looked like this morning.  It was wonderful!

Also, my host mom just got back from her two-week trip to her house off the coast of Siscily, and she brought me home some traditional Sicilian fig cookies.  Mmm delicious!  She's awesome.

I'm so stuffed from a delicious German meal with Devon and her parents... now I have to frantically pack for Prague - have a great rest of the week!

Weekend with Lis

The post about the Stasi prison will have to wait until after Paris because I'll be too busy to blog too much until then.

Lis arrived at 9:30 Friday night, and we started off having fun right away by meeting up with some of my friends in Kreuzberg.  It was a fun night, but unfortunately the BVG (the company that owns all the public transit in Berlin) had scheduled a strike for Saturday until 7pm.  So we ended the night with a long walk home - good thing I knew the way!

Saturday morning, as the U-bahn was down, we did a great deal of walking.  There are 4 methods of BVG transport in Berin: U-bahn, S-bahn, tram, and bus.  Out of those, only half o the S-bahn was running.  In addition to that, there was a footbal match.  And the world's second largest film festival was still going on.  (I guess they planned their strike at a good time to draw attention!)  So, the city of Berlin plus a few bajillion tourists were crammed into very infrequent S-bahn cars.  Much to my surprise, I'd never had more positive and hygge encounters with Berliners before!  Everyone (well, a quarter of them were drunk footbal fans) was so friendly, and just laughing at the audacity of the train situation.

TWO people offered (without us asking) to take our photo Saturday.  All the Bavarian citizens must have come up for the weekend or something.

Lis jumping off of the art museum! 

Anyway, after a long day of exploring, we finally got home and our feet were throbbing so we had some down time before starting to cook our big feast!  We made a big italian dinner, and four of my friends came over and each brought a dish to share.  We ended up with a 3 course, and extremely stuffing meal!

Sunday we did a lot more exploring.  It was 40 degrees, so people were jogging outside en masse, and playing catch in t-shirts, etc (you know, typical 40 degree weather activities).  We visited the Topography of Terror museum, it's one of the city's free museums and is at the site where the Gestapo (the secret police of Nazi Germany) had their headquarters.  It was pretty much a summary of German history from 1933-45, during the Nazi Regime, but I did learn some interesting facts I hadn't learned of before.  It was a pretty good museum, and I would recommend it, especially if you're less familiar with the specifics of the Nazi era.

After this, we went to Curry 36, one of the two original/most famous currywurst places in Berlin.  It was absolutely delicious (and the people were even friendly!) - you could definitely tell the difference between that and any ol' currywurst.  Delish!

Lis's photo skills, my editing skills

We finished off the night by making our favorite German dish - Käsespätzle - all by ourselves!  We aren't known to be the best cooks around, but it turned out to be absolutely delectable.

That's what a face should look like if it tastes Käsespätzle as good as this.

This morning I took Lis back to the airport.  It was so sad to part ways again :( But it was such an awesome weekend, and so refreshing to have my best friend around again!  We finally got to fulfill part of our long-time dream of exploring Europe together.  Taking it one city at a time :)

Speaking of best friends - I will be a bit inactive on the blog this week, because on Wednesday morning I'm leaving to go visit Lucy!  Yes, I know she was just here, but that's just the way our schedules work out because we're so busy the next few months. She's got an awesome place and cool friends in Prague, so I'm super excited to see her, them, and the city!  I will be getting back Saturday night, and will hopefully have time to blog before leaving for Paris on Sunday afternoon with my school for our first study tour.

Thursday

Today started off with my German midterm, which went really well!

Devon and I treated ourselves to a lunch in the Mensa because we hadn't been there in a while, they have great cheap food, and the people watching is superb :)

After some essay writing, we had our meeting for the details of our trip to Paris! As you can imagine, I'm more excited now.  Apparently if you order a drink with dinner it's about €15 (which is about $20).... so, water it is!! I knew it'd be expensive but oh my goodness.. that one drink is about half of my (attempted) grocery budget for a week in Berlin.

At 8 tonight one of the student workers brought me to get registered at McFit.  He was really interesting - he was raised bilingual (chinese and english), studied German through school, studied abroad in Austria, did Fulbright in Berlin, now is a Humboldt masters program, and studied abroad in that in Paris.  So now he's quadrilingual and will get a job anywhere.  It was really nice to have a conversation with another person my age who has a broader and more knowledgable view on how it is living in Berlin as an American.  It gave the whole thing a lot better of a perspective than the one through which I've been viewing it.

When we're in Paris, I'm in the other student worker's group, and he doesn't speak French (so he says.  In europe "not speaking _______" seems to mean that you can still hold a conversation in said langauge, because seemingly everyone educated in the undergrad level or above can do so in several languages). So they've assigned me the job of helping him translate when our group is out to dinner each night.  As my director joked, "einmal in Französisch und einmal in Deutsch" (joking that I have to say everything once in French and then once in German - no English).  I think by May I'll be able to do that better.

Well, I should get back to searching for a summer internship.  Lis comes tomorrow, and we'll need to explore the city as much as possible during her limited time here, so you probably won't hear from me for a couple days.
Have a great weekend!

Best Wednesday Yet

Today was awesome.

First, after German class, I had a field trip for my cultural identity class to a Stasi Prison.  It was such an amazing educational experience.  I will blog about that in another post later in the week because there's so much super interesting information to tell you, and this one needs to be short so I can get back to studying for my German midterm which is tomorrow!

After I got back from the prison everyone told me that I had gotten a package - it was the one from Lauren, and it had arrived already!  I was SO excited and had to use all of my willpower not to open it then.  But since I knew I had to trapse around the city for several more hours, I figured that'd be best.

After my next class, I went to my doctor's appointment, which I was really nervous about.  Much to my surprise, the receptionist was super nice and helpful.  When I met the neurologist, he even made a joke (!!! a nice Berliner who even made a joke!?) and asked if my package was a gift I'd brought for him.  He was very kind and helpful, figured out what's wrong, and is sending me to a physical therapist to get my headaches under control.  So after I return from Paris I'll start that, thank goodness.

When I got home (actually, as I walked up my 5 flights of stairs, because I couldn't wait any longer) I opened Lauren's package and it had every thing I could've wanted in it and more.  Between that package and mom's, my semester has been made!! After my German midterm I look forward to reading american celebrity gossip magazines and painting my nails with some quality american nail polish while eating some peanut butter cups ;)

Okay, back to studying!

A random assortment of information

Today I got my itinerary for the trip to Paris, and people on the train must have though I was crazy because the whole time I was reading it I had the biggest grin on my face.  I cannot wait!  I'll need to stock up on sleep before I go so that I can spend the maximum amount of hours of the day exploring.  I also plan to eat crêpes and lots of cheese every day, which will do wonders for my frame.  Which brings me to my next point:

I'm going to join the gym on Thursday which I'm really excited about.  I originally thought it was a dumb idea because that was precious time that could be spent exploring Berlin.  But, on second thought, for my physical health (thanks, German eating habits) and mental sanity (physical exercise is mental is also mental exercise. I miss it!), I've changed my mind.  I just have to wait for Ryan to take me to register on Thursday since I can't communicate with the German public.
The gym is called "McFit" which we found really interesting, because a name like that would never fly in the states (because of McDonalds).  Even though there are McDonalds here (...a lot of them). 

Last week I mentioned to my German professor and John, one of the directors of my program, that I was going to make banana bread muffins.  One of them asked me to describe the difference between a cupcake and a muffin.  I started in German, and got confused.  So I switched to English and was still stumped.  I've never thought about it before.  I challenge you to take a good 60 seconds and try to verbalize the difference between the two, without using any America-specific references such as brand names, etc.  You may think "well that's easy, one's desert and one's breakfast".  But that's cultural - why is one for breakfast?  Because our society decided that it'd be an acceptable breakfast food, even though it'd be fine for desert, too.  Tricky!  (Or maybe that's just amusing to my sociologically trained brain - sorry if I've bored you with that paragraph). 

On another note, it's great having Lucy and Lis over here on the same continent/time zone as me.  It's so helpful to share our experiences with each other and be there for some good emotional support.  By seeing everyone's photos from being abroad, we all kind of build up an idea of all of the fun it will be, but never really think about the really difficult and frustrating aspects that we encounter almost daily (nor would we listen to anyone who told us there will be hard times.  Let's be honest, it's even taken me 1 month to admit this on my blog!).  But luckily we're all going through it at the same time, so we don't feel like we're the only person struggling with aspects of life-in-a-culture-you-haven't-studied-for-years.

Mom told me that I should treat myself to one of the (very precious) peppermint patties she sent me, so happy valentines day to me!  

yum yum yum yum yummmm 

Tomorrow I get to have my first experience with the German healthcare system (eeks!) so I'll report back if anything culturally noteworthy occurs! 

Hamburg, Germany

Two weeks from today I will be leaving for Paris!!! :)

I'm going to write about my trip to Hamburg in list form, so here we go:

3:30am: Wake up
5:18am: Board regional train to Hamburg, via stopover in Schwerin.

After a couple hours of darkness, we finally got to see the German countryside!  It was so nice to see the wide open landscape, farms, and cute houses.  It reminded me of the drive from home to the lake, just with prettier houses.

9:28 Arrival in Hamburg, where were were greeted by 6 giant posters (a few stories high, each) of David Beckham hanging from the top of the Hauptbahnhof (main train station).  Who can complain.

10:00 A bit hungry, we stopped at a bakery to be German and get some pastries.  This one's called the Kopenhagener - I'll have to consult Lis to see if there's a reason behind that.

10:30 We then visited the Rathaus (town hall), which is one of the main sites in Hamburg.  It's a really small, riverside town which grew (back in the day) because it was one of main ports in Germany.  This town hall finished construction in 1897 and still houses Hamburg's mayor, senate, and parliament (evidently the city has it's own).

Sorry for the poor quality; I could only get the whole building in the shot if I used my iphone! 

11:30 Next we meandered throughout the town and found St. Michael's church - the city's other landmark.  We bought a pass to go up to its observation deck, from which we had great views of the city and the port.

Despite this photo looking like I photoshopped myself in, I was actually there.

After braving this cold we got some lunch - my travel partners wanted to eat Hamburgers (get it..) so I had french fries for lunch.  Afterwards, I had snickers flavored gelato and it was de-licious!!  After eating all of that unhealthy food, we did some shopping and I got a new pair of running/tri shorts.

We then decided that we'd take an earlier train back to Berlin because we were cold and had kind of run out of things to see (since we excluded visiting the museums).

Notably, people in Hamburg are much more friendly than in Berlin, so that was refreshing.  Overall, it was a good day trip.

These next few days will be spent doing copious amounts of work in preparation for midterms, so that when Lis arrives on Friday I can spend lots of quality best friend time with her!

Abnormal Friday

This morning I went into school and worked on some homework, as well as finishing up a film for class.  It was The Lives of Others (as I told you, one of my favorites), which we're watching because next Wednesday we'll be visiting an actual Stasi prison on the outskirts of Berlin.  I'm really excited for this experience, it's such a unique one!!

When my friend Devon and I finished up watching the film (which was even better this time, so obviously I still highly recommend it) we stopped in Ella's office to wish her a nice weekend.  We got distracted and talked with her about the movie a bit.  She said she was really happy that we had heard of it in the states, and that it's not just known in Germany - this way people can know how crazy and often unnavigable life in the GDR was. (Background info: in the film, the main character is a famous GDR playwright and because of one tip off, his house is wired and he's under surveillance for years - he doesn't find out until long after the wall falls, but it completely ruined nearly every aspect of his life.  This was not uncommon in the GDR).  So anyway, Ella was telling us how often people in her generation and older think back to this era when meeting new people.  They think "who is he/she, and who was he/she?".  The Stasi employed 274,000 people, so the odds of meeting someone who used to be an informant (or who had their life turned completely upside down because of one person accusing them) is quite high.  That's something I didn't realize people still thought about a lot here, but after all, the wall only fell 2 decades ago.  And seeing the depth with which the Stasi penetrated these individuals' lives, it definitely isn't something you just forget after a few years.

Interestingly, after the fall of the Wall, the Stasi archives were fairly quickly opened to the public.  There are 50 MILES of Stasi documents on GDR citizens.  Anyone who lived in the GDR can walk into one of these offices and request their file.  They can over conversations they had in their bugged apartments, locations where they'd been watched/overheard, and the names of those who'd informed on them.  As we learned in class, many people preferred not to read their records.  In many cases even wives informed on husbands, in order to save themselves from imprisonment, so I see why they wouldn't want to look.  But at the same time, the curiosity would kill me.

In other news, I had several nice interactions with Germans today.  People held doors, said "have a nice day," and other uncharacteristically kind things.  It's probably because I looked quite german today.

Tomorrow I'll be getting up at 4am to catch my train to Hamburg.  Hopefully my travel companions don't drive me crazy and I have a good time.  I'll report back - hopefully with lots of photos!

A few last things

I'm longing for warm weather, since it's been in the single digits for the past two weeks.  Out of curiosity I looked at the world map and discovered that if I wanted to go as far south as the Caribbean, that'd take me to approximately the area of Mali or Chad.  Since none of you probably find it worthwhile or fun to sit around and memorize the map of Africa like I do, I'll provide a visual aide:

Speaking of maps, I'm really excited to go to St. Petersburg, Russia in 5 weeks!  I never imagined I'd have the opportunity to travel to Russia, and although it's going to be prettttttty cold, it's going to be a great experience.  On this map, find the word "Finland", look at the big lake to the right of it, and St. Petersburg is in the bottom left corner of that lake.  Brr!  But that's not for a while.  Our first field trip is to Paris which is in a little over 2 weeks, and I'll stop writing about it right now because I'm just too excited, I could go on forever!

“And so for an eternity that can last a microsecond or a thousand lifetimes, I soar across the dark void of “the past is done, the future is not yet here.” It’s called transition. I have come to believe that it is the only place that real change occurs.”

-The Essene Book of Days by Danaan Parry 

Thursday

I've been in Germany for exactly one month now!

This morning started off great, as I woke up to a winter wonderland!  It was showing real snow flakes, which was nice.  Even nicer, was that the sun came out by the time I left for school an hour later.

This afternoon I got a care package from my mom with a couple essentials I needed from the states - as well as my L.L. Bean slippers!!! I was/am so excited!  My feet are now nice and toasty against these linoleum floors :)  Unfortunately, Detusche Post took the liberty of opening my package to see what's inside.  It discovered my eye glasses, so they charged me an additional tariff to receive the package.  Luckily it arrived at school, so Ella (our wonderful staffer who helps us with literally everything) mediated this interaction with the post worker.  When I expressed a look of surprise that I had to pay this much extra (wouldn't you), he rolled his eyes and got really annoyed with me.  While I scrounged up some cash he stared at me with his "hurry the hell up, you dumb foreigner" look I've gotten so accustomed to seeing.  Anyway, I reluctantly paid and then devoured some York peppermint patties to recover from another rude interaction with a Berliner.

I spent a few hours this afternoon getting a head start on a paper due that's due in a couple months, because starting next weekend I'm going to be traveling a lot and don't want to have to be stressed about work then.  Hopefully it'll pay off!  All my classmates have been talking about how writing papers is going to be really difficult because our english has deteriorated... and let me tell you, that paper was so hard to write!  It's much different from the colloquial language with which I write here.

For dinner I made a mushroom/union/garlic/olive oil concoction with rice, and it was pretty flavorless because I don't know how to make things, but still yummy.  (But your recipes would still be greatly appreciated!)

On Saturday I'll be going to Hamburg, Germany with two other students.  We'll be doing a day trip, so we'll be taking the 5:18am train (it's a 4 hour ride) and getting back at 11pm.  It'll be a long day and my company will be less than enjoyable, but I'm still looking forward to getting out of Berlin, even if it's just for a day.

Wednesday

Monday in my pop culture class we watched a film called Changing Skins, which was made in the late 1990s and depicted the situation of two school children in the GDR.  They kidnapped their principal in order to ensure that they could apply to the university programs that they wanted to pursue.  This is because in the GDR, you didn't get to chose where you studied or what subject you studied; instead it was assigned to you by those in charge of your school.  If there were a shortage of police officers or Stasi workers, well, then you were going to be a Stasi worker - even if you were interested in studying and had the skills to pursue medicine!  Can you imagine?  I sure can't.  If someone had forced me to be a police officer or work in medicine, I don't know how I would be able to endure my university years.
Anyway, it was a good movie, and one which I will add to the list of recommended movies I'll be making while I'm here.

Today I wanted to get a head start on some midterms papers, and thus began watching The Lives of Others.  I've watched this before for a German studies class at HWS, and it's one of my favorite movies.  It's about the Stasi (the GDR's secret police) and their work in spying on one of the GDR's biggest playwrights.  It's a really fantastic movie, and sheds a lot of light onto the internal conflict that a lot of Stasi informers felt about spying on/turning people in.  If you don't believe me, the film won an Academy Award for best foreign film and was nominated for 11 German film awards.  This, along with Goodbye The Pianist is american-made).

Anyway, now I am in my kitchen again, this time finishing up making some gluten-free banana bread muffins!!  To my great surprise, they turned out to be really tasty!

Well, I should go eat a bunch of those and then get some rest so I can be extremely productive tomorrow - I'm planning to go to the Humboldt library after class.  It's so beautiful (check it out with this link), and as a result all the HU students go there and it's apparently quite hard to get a seat, so we'll see how I make out!

about these muffins:
Even if you leave butter out on the counter, it's so cold inside that it's still too hard to spread, and since microwaves don't exist, I lit a candle and melted a few spoon fulls of butter.  My first world problems.

In the kitchen

Greetings from my kitchen!   A fairly unusual place for me to be spending more than 20 minutes.

Background: Germany's eating theory basically revolves around "the clean plate club".  Everyone typically finishes everything on their plates at each meal (remember, they pay per bag for their trash), and in addition to that, no old food in the refrigerator should go to waste!  So, in that spirit, I decided to use all my rotten apples to make some homemade apple sauce the other night - inconveniently the same night my host mom was making a lamb feast for her boyfriend.  But, the situation forced me to carry on conversations in German/English for two hours, and I left - surprisingly - feeling really great about the amount of German I was able to understand!

This may not look stellar, but it was de-licious!! 

Last night (when I started writing this post and was actually in my kitchen...) I made my first attempt at gluten free pizza.  It took from 8 to 11pm from start to finish, and although it looked like thick pancake batter when I slathered it on the pan, it actually turned out looking and tasting like delicious pizza!! I was quite pleased/surprised it worked out (new recipe, new products, new units of measurement, and a lot of help from google translate).

Yum yum yum.  Pizza with no tummy or headaches.  Livin' the life. 

So, evidently I've acquired a nack for cooking (probably just because of my frugality and specific dietary preferences).  If any of you have any dinner or dessert recipes (that don't have wheat in them, until I figure out what's wrong with me), I would really appreciate if you could send them my way!  Although I do have one request - that they can be prepared in an hour or less.

If you have any you'd like to send (the more the merrier), just send them to my yahoo or school email accounts (and if you don't know what those are..... I'm not sure how to help you, but I don't want to post my email on this site because it's public and I don't want the world to see it).

Thanks!

Sunday

Tonight was an interesting one.  A girl I know from HWS, Emma, is studying in Germany on the Blocker Fellowship as well, and she is currently doing a 4-week language-intensive course in Dresden (only 2 hours from Berlin) before her semester starts.  So she came up to Berlin for the day to see the sites, and we met up for coffee this evening.  I hadn't gotten a chance to talk to her extensively at school, but we do have a lot in common.  Next thing we knew we'd been chatting over coffee for 2 hours!  We reflected on the american products (mainly food...) we miss, and she enjoyed finally having a conversation with someone in english (I do have to say, my English has gotten much better this past week, having Lucy here to talk to all the time).

As we got ready to leave the coffee shop, Emma noticed her wallet was missing, and it had been sitting on our small coffee table right between us the whole time... and neither one of us had left the table!  To her great advantage, Emma was raised bilingual, and has stellar German skills which were able to navigate her through this situation quite well.  Because of that, the people around us willingly looked through/around all of their things and helped us search high and low for the wallet (they definitely would not have done so if it were just non-German speakers with american accents).  Unfortunately, it was nowhere.  Crime/theft is exceedingly rare in Germany and Berlin, so it's very surprising that someone (most likely the child who came by asking us to sign a petition) stole it.

I felt so bad for her, but luckily she'd noticed this before we'd parted ways, so I was able to get her dinner, another train ticket back to Dresden, and give her some money to get her by the next few days.  Replacing things such as metro passes and house keys in Germany is really expensive, and she only got here a week ago.

It was a frustrating experience, and definitely reminded me of the need to keep watch of my things carefully(...especially if I'm sitting around speaking english). But as Emma said, "Nothing is lost in the Kingdom of God... everything has it's place!"  Even if our small and finite minds don't understand where that place is.

This week

This week was so cold.  I know I said it was cold before, but this time I mean it was you-will-be-numb-if-you-only-have-one-pair-of-pants-on cold.  The wind chill this week averaged at about 10 degrees - which is tolerable if you're in upstate new york with your heat on 70 degrees and you don't need to walk outside/take the u bahn (stations aren't heated at all).  As you've probably heard, 220 people have now died in Eastern Europe due to these conditions.
My point in saying this, is that I did not do much out of doors this week!

Exploring Berlin with Lucy 


For one of my classes we made a visit to the DDR Museum, which was... a museum of what life was like in the DDR (or, GDR.  The East).  It was fairly underwhelming, small, and difficult to decipher between which products were from the East and which were from the West.  At this point, to people my age they all just look "old", so it's hard to dedifferentiate between which "old" they were.

After that museum I met up with Lucy and we went to the Berliner Dom.  Now that was the opposite of underwhelming!  This church, which you may recall me posting an outdoors photo of before, which was built between 1894-1905.  A few decades later, at the end of WWII, the cathedral was severely damaged and (since it was subsequently in East Berlin and the GDR left everything from pre-1945 completely untouched) was not fully repaired until 2006!  Can you imagine?  This beautiful building was left damaged and decaying from 1945 until the early 2000's.  They did a wonderful job renovating it, as you will see in the photos below (which I don't think fully capture the beauty).

looking up at the big (main) dome

It kind of reminded me of the one inside the Capitol building

the sunlight shining through 

part of the altar

the dome right above the altar 

Then afterwards we went downstairs into the crypts, where tons of kings (and their wives & children) are in their caskets.  Frederick the Great was even down there! (that's whose big castle I saw in Potsdam on my first weekend here).

Dinner Party 


Then on Wednesday, I went to my young adult group's (from church) first dinner party.  It was at one of the girls' really homey/adorable apartment just a couple stops from mine.  Devon and I tried to help prepare the food with them, and I was assigned to make the coffee.  Here, most of the time people don't have coffee machines but instead use french presses.  Well, since I don't drink coffee or live in Berlin, I'd never used one before and totally messed it up - I didn't know that was even possible! The coffee grounds spilled all over the inside of the sink (remember, no food can go down the drains here), and I was so frustrated with myself.  Our host is super nice and didn't care at all - and was a bit amused that I did not know how to make french pressed coffee - and helped me successfully make it afterwards.  At least I know now, I suppose.   I forget that not everyone eats like me, so at the dinner I had to kindly eat a lot of pasta and bread, and went home feeling quite sick.

At the dinner there were about 12 of us, and everyone was really nice.  However since Devon and I were the only ones who didn't speak German (even though all of them knew english), we felt like our presence was kind of forcing some of them to speak english, which made us feel really awkward.  I had some good conversations about life in Germany with the two people sitting next to me, though.  For example, I mentioned to one girl that I am familiar with many German foods because I'd worked at a German restaurant for a couple years.  She then described now what the rest of the world considers "German food" is really just Bavarian food (Bavaria is the region of Southern Germany - ie Munich).  She said that here in Berlin, aside from the famous Currywurst, people eat a lot of pasta, light meats as well as dark meats, turkish food, french fries, vegetables, fruits, sushi, burgers, fresh sandwiches on baguettes, etc.  I then realized (1) why it took me so long to find what I'd thought of as "german food" in Berlin, and (2) that the Berlin diet is very much like the American diet in that it's really a hodge podge of foods from around the world.... just multitudes healthier.

All in all, Devon and I left both feeling like it was a nice experience, with nice people, and that we learned a bit about German culture.  But the language barrier that the two of us had made us feel so awkward about being there that we're not sure if we'll return for the next dinner.

Saturday 


Friday night Lucy and I did some American things on her last night here, such as eat what germans call "ice cream", and watch some of our favorite american tv online.  This morning we saw a few more things around the city, had a nice lunch, and then I saw her off for the start of her adventure in Prague!! It's sad that she had to leave, but I'd run out of things to show her in Berlin anyway, so I suppose it was good timing :)  I'll be going to Prague with Mom for Easter and then again in May to hang out with Lucy and volunteer at a church, so it won't be too long until I see her again!
I finished the day off by buying some ingredients for g-f banana bread - hopefully I can make it successfully!  All of my IES friends are (ironically) in Copenhagen this weekend, so I'm getting in some quality alone time which is turning into time in the kitchen.

I'm still alive!  I'll blog this weekend.