Blogs from Berlin, Berlin, Germany, Europe - page 135

At 8am i met up with 5 (kaddie, Christiane, Mareen, Belinda and Christoph!) of my mates at the trainstation of münster... pretty impressing we were all there! we had quite a fun 8hour (just the cheapest please!) ride to berlin and didnt care about people not liking our amazing soccer-songs! whatever! when we got into Berlin-Zoo my mate Josi picked us up and we took all our stuff to the flat in charlottenburg, which was a mission and my my backpack kept on killing me! right afterwards we buggered off with some beers to the fan-mile cause we didnt wanna miss out on watching the german team kicking the portugese ases what we actually did because we were to busy dancing to the hot brasilians beats a huge group of street-musicians made! It was such a ... read more

A little sleep deprived today. Went to a "Stammtisch" at a boat that is a bar, moored on the River Spree. I met some other students there, but it was uneventful and actually a bit boring. The cool part was that it was right by a long stretch where the Berlin Wall is still standing; you get to the bar by going through a little gap in the wall down to the water. I took some pictures, but I still haven't been able to post them! I also took a bunch of pictures of my apartment and neighborhood, and I can't wait to share them! That's all for now, I need to go home and take a nap. Tschuss!... read more

I have to say, it is so much easier to speak in German today than it was even yesterday, not to mention when I first arrived. I know I'm still screwing up a lot of grammar all the time, but my vocabulary has expanded rapidly and I feel more comfortable putting together sentences. That said, it's still not a possibility (unmoeglichkeit) for me to express anything at all complicated. Its really sort of fun though, at break I stood around with David and tried to tell him about my research interest in the history of sex workers and then he told me about a friend of his who is studying a related topic--this brief exchange probably took 2 or 3 minutes to complete, without going into any detail at all. And we were using the term ... read more

Evening: Well, Germany lost, I'll spare the details. Oddly enough, no one at the little Shawarma place and neighboring hipster bar where I watched the game seemed to care that much. I heard all this cheering and fireworks down the street--Italian fans? And people are driving around, honking their horns. I met a woman at the bar (a contact improvisation dancer who does Body Mind Centering, a form of body work founded in Western Mass where I went to school--the world really does seem weirdly small sometimes!). She said that all the German flags are very strange in Germany, especially in Berlin (which she described as particularly "alternative"), because Germans tend to eschew national identity "out of shame over WWII." She said she thinks the flags and the public pride is a sort of healing experience ... read more

Well, this is long overdue. It´s the 4th of July today, but I´ll be sharing with you my short time in another country, Germany. For a week in late June I visited the captial of Berlin for some world cup soccer madness and hoped for a taste of the growing art scene shaping in East Berlin. Taking a small gamble, I lined up a room via craiglist from a guy named Johannes in Prenzlauer Berg. It worked out wonderfully and while I spent 30 euro a night, i heard from some very frustrated americans that they were spending 125 euro a night, a block down, in a 2 star holetel. Prenzlauer is to Berlin what Williamsburg is to New York. It´s very trendy with unique clothing shops, cafes, etc. Quite a few hipsters deutsche, but I ... read more