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!