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.