After another week in Berlin I'm doing much better finding my way around. With an area of 344 square miles (thank you, Wikipedia!) doing so can be quite overwhelming. My commute to work every morning is about one hour door to door, with 45 of those minutes spent on the S-Bahn. I've attempted with resolve to productively sleep during that time (Wannsee, where the American Academy is located, is the last station on the line - a sleeping me would be kicked off the train rather than missing my stop!) but that failing I've turned to reading an Agatha Christie novel and some Brothers Grimm stories on my Kindle. I'm also actively soliciting more book or hobbies-that-would-fit-on-an-S-bahn-seat suggestions!
The weird continues...after working late one night this week for a film screening I was almost chased by a drunken man and then just missed stepping on a plastic hand in the street...which I thought at the time was real, of course. What is it with random hands and this city?
Mr. Sun decided to show his glowing face for precisely five hours this week and it was glorious. Most of that time I was unfortunately sitting at my desk, but even just the taste of spring has made me oh-so-excited for the warm months ahead. I've just returned from our weekly buffet lunch with the fellows here (amazing) and a very nice wife of one of the fellows from Stanford (a fellow sorta Californian, yay!) said her attitude is that she wasn't even expecting sun at all this week, so what we did have was great. I need to adopt that attitude. Sigh. I've heard Berlin in summer is glorious and I've just about had it with my down coat - I sure hope that groundhog is right with his early spring prediction.
Last Saturday I checked out the Deutsches Historiches Museum, which currently has a temporary and somewhat controversial exhibit on Hitler and the populist society that supported him. It was incredibly packed on that Saturday afternoon. The New York times did a story on the exhibition back in October...it's the first of its kind in Berlin with tons of Nazi paraphernalia and items like Hitler's gradeschool pictures. I found it to be interesting and also a bit chilling. And I was in lots of company - the small exhibit was incredibly packed that afternoon.
The weekend's activities also included a couple fun nights out with friends, including a trip to a great Thai restaurant (green curry and Thai ice tea - heck yes!) and a "pay what you want" wine place. You go and drink all the wine and order all the food you want, and then at the end of the night decide what you want to pay for everything - an interesting economics (and moral) experiment - and also great fun.
I always laugh a bit here when I meet Germans and they ask with a look of bewilderment: "Why are you learning German!?" It seems that alot of Germans (and especially Berliners...who are especially good at English) can't understand why we Amerikaners would want to embark on learning their "ugly" and "not useful" language (the quotes are there because those are things I've heard from Germans). It's too easy here to just speak English...I'm afraid of my German going down the tubes, especially since much of my work is now in English. I put a very short posting on a local university's sprachenzentrum website last week seeking a German speaking partner and now have about 30 responses...what the heck?! I didn't realize what a commodity my English als Muttersprache would be. So now I'm completely overwhelmed - should I interview these people?!
No comments:
Post a Comment