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.