Busy busy!

As per usual, I've been very busy. My last week has been quite eventful. Last weekend, I went to England. I stayed with a friend in Brighton and we spent a day in London. In London, I had the incredible fortune to attend an afternoon performance of Matilda, a Royal Shakespeare Company production of a musical based on the Roald Dahl book by the same name, in addition to an evening performance of Wicked. Both performances were wonderful and amazing and I wish I could do it all over again. I was particularly impressed by the dance sequences in both shows, the talent of the children in Matilda, and the costumes in Wicked. I also had a lovely time around Brighton, which is a fun town.

I came back home to Berlin (and it really did feel like coming home) early on Monday morning and had class in the afternoon. In the evening, I packed my things up, and then on Tuesday, I moved! I'd had a combination of issues that were contributing factors to the move. I was frustrated by my distance from Humboldt and IES and thus from my classes, and I was also frustrated by my distance from other students. Half an hour to IES is reasonable, 45 minutes from other students is a big deterrent if I ever want to hang out or invite someone over. In addition, while the area I was in had some good shopping, it wasn't very interesting for a student. For example, the only bar near me was for New Zealand expats and showed live rugby, and I don't think there were any cafes. It's a really great area for families or for "real" adults, but for a student, it was a cause of frustration. The final big issue was that I had very much expected to have regular contact with my host and be able to hear and use German at home, but my host expected me to want to be very independent. I would see her maybe once or twice during the week. The really cool thing was that I had the opportunity to spend weekends with her at her place in the countryside, and that was a really good place to meet people and practice German, but I didn't always want to give up my weekends.

So I moved. My new host is the chief editor of a flamenco magazine, a flamenco guitar teacher, and a freelance journalist and photographer. He has 50% custody of his seven and ten year old girls. His girlfriend doesn't live here, but she's around a lot too. They're all very nice. The kids can get a little loud, but they're charming. The older one just started learning piano and the younger one is learning Christmas carols, so I alternately hear Harry Potter theme music and Christmas carols coming from the other room. I'm also less than ten minutes from IES by foot and around fifteen minutes from Humboldt.

My IES classes are starting to pick up. We have three more weeks of class plus finals left. The way classes are structured here, most of the graded items are turned in at the very end of the semester. The only graded items we've had so far are midterms. I've also given one presentation, but I don't think I'll be given a grade until I turn in the accompanying paper, which is due at the end of the semester. In the next month, I have three papers, one presentation, and two tests. My Humboldt classes are going until February, at which point I'll have a test and a paper for them, but that paper will be as long as the three IES papers combined. I also have ongoing work for my German as a foreign language class, which is generally weekly one-page papers and some tests as well as, of course, regular readings.

This week IES is doing a Thanksgiving thing on Wednesday and then on Friday I'm going to the Netherlands to celebrate with some expat friends who live there. I'm bringing challah and I'm very excited!

Semester Start!

I've been incredibly busy over the last month. Here are a few updates.

All my classes have started. At IES, I'm taking a history class about Jews in Germany and a political science class about the EU and its history and institutions. Meanwhile, at Humboldt University, I'm taking a literature class on Tieck, a Romanticist, a linguistics lecture on text varieties, genre, and register, and a literature lecture on gender and sexuality in 12th century courtly poetry. In addition, I'm required to take German as a Foreign Language, which is at Humboldt's language center. Not to mention my online class at the Yiddish Book Center about Chaim Grade and my Yiddish class at Berlin's Jewish community/adult education center. Honestly, it's too much. I'm going to switch the courtly poetry class to an audit. It's far too interesting to drop entirely! Previously the linguistics class was an audit, but we managed to convince the professor to let me take it. I find the linguistics professor's lectures easier to understand than the poetry professor's. She's more animated and she either enunciates more or her pronunciation is just easier for me to hear.

I've been dragged in circles by Humboldt-- I can take this class, I can't take this class, keep going and see if they'll let you take this class, I can take this class if I take the two other companion classes, which I can't take, etc. I'm glad to have it 95% nailed down.

In the last few weeks I've connected with Grinnell alumni living in Berlin, attended the anniversary show of the musical Tanz der Vampire, rented a viola for the semester, baked a lot of bread, gotten a care package from my family, and hung out with a Grinnell friend doing a teaching Fulbright in northwestern Germany. I have plans to go to London in a couple of weeks to visit a friend from high school and see a couple of musicals. I've been invited to two different Halloween parties this week and I even have a costume.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the semester goes and I'll try to post more regularly!

Swingin'!

I'm near the end of my vacation week between the intensive German class and the start of IES classes. A few highlights:

I went grocery shopping and learned how to use the bottle return machines. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn in my receipts for my deposit refund. Ah well, you win some and you lose some. I also found POCKET COFFEE! It's about the size of a Hershey's nugget, and it's a shell of milk chocolate mixed with dark chocolate and espresso (yes, liquid) inside. I don't recommend storing them in your pockets lest they get crushed in some place other than your mouth. They're really really good. I first tried Pocket Coffee at Sweets & Treats in Iowa City, but it's much cheaper in Germany.

I went swing dancing! Everybody here is way better than me, which doesn't take much, and I exceeded my dance quota (dance 3 songs or ask 5 leads, whichever comes first) and had a lot of fun. I was asked the "why German?" question, which happens to me a lot. Only this time I was asked in German in Germany by a fellow non-native German speaker, which struck me as quite funny. He's originally from Poland and does software development. As we were dancing, I didn't feel the need to give a hugely involved answer, so I just stuck with "weil es mir gefällt"-- because I enjoy it. 

Today I signed up for the Yiddish class at the Jewish adult education center! I wanted to sign up for "Yiddish for beginners with prior knowledge," but the friendly secretary told me that she really didn't think the class was going to have enough students to go. Unless I was really really fluent, she said, I would do better to just sign up for "Yiddish for beginners without prior knowledge," so that's what I ended up doing. For that class, if just one more person signs up, I'll get a 25 euro discount because they make classes cheaper if lots of people are in them. I'm really looking forward to this, but I'm slightly concerned I'll be bored. With that said, I know my vocabulary is pretty weak, so I'm sure I'll get a lot out of it. Either way, this makes it impossible for me to take the IES theater class, which is really unfortunate. I'm going to go in on Monday and try to change my schedule.

Mostly I've been a homebody during my week off, which I've really enjoyed. Not going out much makes me enjoy it more when I do go out.

Settling In

A lot has happened for me in the last couple of weeks. I got really homesick, I met my host, the intensive German class started, I went away for the weekend, I gave a presentation in class, I'm supposed to be picking my classes for the semester, and I went (back) to the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

The homesickness was weird. I didn't want to go home and I didn't wish I was home. What did happen was I became overwhelmed by how unfamiliar everything was, and how insecure it made me feel to not know my surroundings or be able to find things in the grocery store. Even things that should have been familiar were upsetting. For example, coke here is less fizzy, has a different bottle, and tastes different because it has sugar instead of corn syrup. Something that has been the same my entire life and looks like it should be familiar here is suddenly unfamiliar, and these experiences en masse are destabilizing at a very deep level. I take for granted my ability to navigate basic things in the US, both general (like grocery stores) and social. Reading Nibelungenlied, Goethe, and Mann didn't prepare me for answering the door when the man came to fix the boiler, or asking my host if she has an extra clothes drying rack or more hangers.

At this point, I'm settled in better. I still haven't explored my locale as much as I probably should have. Usually when I'm out and about, I'm in Mitte near the IES center. I haven't walked around much around my apartment, but I have explored Edeka, the grocery store. When my host's friend took me out walking, she carefully stayed in the residential area and avoided the big commercial streets. I think it's important for me to just go look at it and see what's around here. I haven't because by the time I get home from class or hanging out with people, I'm ready to stay home.

My host, Lisa, by the way, has been very nice to me. She seems to be constantly busy, leaving home early in the morning and coming back late. She's a social worker at an elementary school and often has appointments after school. Every weekend, and sometimes during the week, she goes to Reppinichen, where she has a small woodland settlement with bungalows that she rents out. I have an open invitation to come with on the weekend, and that's where I was last weekend. It was really nice. There's internet in Lisa's main house, and at night, they build a pretty big fire in a thing that looks like a very large bird bath, and we all sit around it and I try to understand the Berlin dialect they all speak. It was nice to hear the wind in the trees and enjoy the last of the good weather. For this weekend, a couple of fellow IES students invited me to join them hitting the town, so I'm not going to go to Reppinichen, but I may again soon.

I had to do a presentation in class. Because this class isn't quite as seriously academic, I did Tanz der Vampire. Everybody was thoroughly amused by how Total Eclipse of the Heart was translated into a seductive vampire duet. And we had an orientation meeting about signing up for Humboldt classes. I'm supposed to be in five classes this semester: German as a foreign language, (my two IES classes) theater, Germans and Jews, and then I can pick two more. I'm debating whether I should take a linguistics class and a literature class at Humboldt, or if I should continue with French and then only take one Humboldt class. I'm slightly concerned that I don't have a strong enough linguistics background to actually take a German linguistics class, but when else will I have the opportunity? I'm strongly considering taking the Tieck class, but I need to look over the offerings again.

Today, we went to the Deutsches Historisches Museum. It's a really good museum, but I've been there before and I wasn't particularly interested in going again. Luckily, they wanted us to focus on things from the 20th century, which is where I spent the least time last time I was there. So I spent a few hours this morning looking at Nazi propaganda and concentration camp artifacts. It was suitably sobering. Afterward, I came home and chilled out. Sometimes it's nice to just have peace and quiet. With that said, I'm definitely planning to go out swing dancing soon.

German Adventures in Tex-Mex

Today was interesting. About half the people in the IES Berlin program showed up for an optional Stadtrundfahrt tour. That's when you get on the double decker bus, take a pair of headphones, and get driven around in a circle while your headphones tell you that "this building was heavily damaged during the second World War and it was rebuilt and now houses a sculpture museum." I think we were on it for like two hours. By the end, I was feeling a little motion sick, as well as dehydrated, hungry, and exhausted. In all seriousness, the Stadtrundfahrt really isn't worth the 17 euros per seat. It's much, much better to have a handful of sites in mind that you know you want to visit and then just walk around.

Then a few of us went to a restaurant called Tex Mex. (We went there because it happened to be there and we were desperate and didn't want to eat sushi, which was our other most immediate option. And for the record, the sushi place was selling curry, which is weird.) Overall, I liked it. We had nachos as a table, which were tortilla chips with actual cheese melted on top. We ordered salsa to go with it, and the salsa had a nice spice to it (I'd place it at around the level of a Pancheros mild if not slightly above, because for me it was a nice, doable heat and not overwhelming). The salsa was also strangely sweet and I think it had curry or cinnamon or something in it that was a little odd and not quite Mexican/Tex-Mex.

I had a burrito. It wasn't closed on either end, which I rather expected, and it was stuffed with rice, salsa, and ground beef. On the side was something they called "guacamole" and on the other side was a salad. The "guacamole" definitely contained avocado. It was separating a little bit, and it was separating into a darker green liquid and a lighter green solid. It tasted like avocado. Of all avocado products I've had in my life, it tasted most like the avocado banana smoothie I had over the summer. IE, it tasted vaguely like avocado, had no real strong flavor, and had a cooling / palate cleansing effect on my mouth. Chances are it was avocado flavored baby food. The biggest challenge of the meal was eating the entire hot (temperature) and slightly spicy burrito with only 200ml of beverage. The avocado and salad helped with that. There was some corn in the salad and I kept trying it, expecting it to taste good, and being disappointed. I really should know better by now.

Then I went home and now I'm watching X Factor.

Highlights

Highlights of Wednesday:
- I had breakfast with my host's friend. We also watched a couple of videos on oldjewstellingjokes.com, which were hilarious.
- At IES, we had a walking tour of Mitte, including Hakescher Markt, Museuminsel, and the Friedrichstrasse train station. About half of it was new to me, and I remembered loads from when I was here two years ago.
- I went and spoke to IES's housing coordinator, who is worried for me because I'm sort of on my own for the rest of the week. When I left, she told me I talk like someone who's already lived here for six months. :)
- I understood the vast majority of the (rather dull) German tv I watched.

Yesterday:
- Street food from Hackescher Markt for lunch. I can't remember what it was called, but it was sort of like a tortilla, folded in half with meat in the middle, then turned into a burrito with a mustardy sauce and salad greens.
- We had a meeting to talk about living with a German host. Everybody is jealous that my host has a dishwasher and a cleaning lady.
- I accidentally took the S2 home instead of the S1, which is an easy mistake to make because they arrive at the same place and their first four stops are the same. Fortunately I noticed, so I just hopped off, went one stop west around the big circle that three or four different train lines all make, and got on the S1. It probably added 20 minutes to my commute, though.
- I went to Edeka, which was described as being "very big." By American standards, it was pretty small for a "supermarket," but they had lots of things and plenty of selection, especially when it came to sausage. I just bought enough to get me through the next couple of days. Normally I'd go through and get a pile of non-perishables, but I guess it hasn't sunk in yet that I'm going to be here for a loooong time.

And today:
- I definitely have a cold. I went to an Apothecke and got sold something herbal. I'm not altogether surprised. My herbalist friend says most of the herbalism literature comes from Germany, because Germany actually studies this stuff and has standards for it.
- We had our placement test for the intensive German course. I imagine they'll tell us where to go when we get there on Monday morning.

I think I'm having a delayed jetlag reaction. I was fine for the first couple of days, and now I can't get enough sleep even though nothing we're doing is particularly tiring.

Landed!

I landed in Berlin this morning without any trouble. In fact, I nodded off during takeoff while I was waiting to reach cruising altitude so that I could listen to my iPod and I awoke as we touched down with a candy bar that had randomly appeared (courtesy, of course, of the lovely Lufthansa folks). (And this was my final flight which was just an hour long, not the eight hour transatlantic flight.)

The jetlag isn't looking too bad. It's 9:15pm and I'm still awake, so it could be much worse. I'm going to unpack as much as possible and then crash. My room is beautiful and gigantic. The kitchen is not very big but it does have a dishwasher, which is all kinds of wonderful. My host, Lisa, wasn't able to pick me up today because she hurt her foot, and she was out of town for the weekend, so she's still out of town. It might be a few days before she'll be back, so her good friend Suli is looking after me. Apparently they've been told not to leave me home alone for the first few weeks.

IES dragged us around, ignoring our exhaustion, and we got month passes for public transportation and cell phones. I haven't activated my phone yet because I haven't activated my SIM card yet, because we ran out of time to do that today and they're going to have us do it together tomorrow. I'm going to try to set up my phone to work with my Google Voice account. If it works, I should be able to do call the US pretty cheap, so I'll keep certain people (like my parents) updated about this.

I'm happy with my placement and happy with the city. It's not as ugly as I remembered it being. Suli took me to a restaurant for dinner. Apparently they go there quite often, because they immediately brought out two large bones for the dog who came with and at the end, they gave us each a shot of Schnapps "from the chef." Suli and I had a great conversation and I was heartened to find I understand quite a lot and was able to express myself pretty well, especially given how tired I am.