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.