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.