April

Berlin
Less than 12 hours after we got back to Heidelberg from Salzburg, we had a trip to Berlin. Unfortunately, the train left at like 7am and I managed to totally sleep through my alarm and some phone calls and finally woke up at 9:30. So I got ready in a jiffy, threw some clothes and stuff in a bag and booked it to the train station. Managed to catch a train at 10 something or other which took 5 hrs to get to Berlin. After navigating my way to the hostel where the rest of the program was staying and dropping off my stuff, I was able to meet up with them at Brandenburg Gate having only missed about 15 min of a city tour. Sweet. However, also 50 euros unnecessarily spent for the train ride over.

The Berlin trip was definitely too short. So much to see and we only had really 2.5 days there. The program decided to stuff in as much as possible which required us waking up at ludicrous hours every morning, but i guess it was necessary. First day we took a quick tour around the city, as i mentioned. I can't exactly remember the order of things, but it started at the Brandenburg Gate, then continued down Unter den Linden passing by Humboldt University, the Berliner Zeughaus which is now the german history museum, the old state library, one of hte major opera houses, Neue Wache which I think used to be a guardhouse but is now a memorial "to the victims of fascism and militarism." We ended up on the Museuminsel, where the Berliner Dom is and alot of museums (as suggested by its name) including hte Pergamon museum. It's also where the "Palast der Republik" of the DDR was, which formerly housed its parliament. The building's still there, apparently noone really knows what to do with it. There's been a big sign erected on top of it that says "Zweifel" which means doubt. It was actually built over the Berlin city palace which was torn down by the DDR (in addition to being bombed in the war) because it was a symbol of imperialism. The program took us after this to an italian restaurants for eats (yesss..i love going on trips with the program, they pay for everything!)

The day started early with a trip to the Reichstag, the German parliament. In the afternoonI went to the Pergamon museum, took a little boat tour on the Spree and also went to the German history museum, which had all of its permanent collection closed for some reason or another but there was a temporary exhibition on Germany's colonization of Namibia. I wanted to get to Sans Souci, but noone would go with me. Boo. I also wanted to go to the Berliner Philharmoniker since their hall is supposed to be amazing (and it's the Berliner Philharmoniker of course..) but the program seemed so-so. So I ended up going to a chamber music concert at the Konzerthaus. Didn't do anything terribly exciting any of the nights i was there; we had to wake up at ridiculous hours each morning we were there so it seemed best to just relax at night.

The last day we were there, we went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum on the Berlin Wall and attempts to smuggle from one side to another. Fairly small but really really interesting. Went to lunch afterwards, went to a street fair on Museuminsel selling a bunch of old soviet and DDR paraphernalia, and finally Mary, Katy and I went to the zoo, which was pretty awesome but we were pretty short on time unfortunately and only got to dash around and see certain animals.

So that was Berlin, unfortunately there was never enough time spent in any given place on any trip I went on, but Berlin was a good time nonetheless.

Back to Heidelberg
As soon as we got back from Berlin, we had about one day before classes started at the university and it was basically a mad scrabble to figure out classes to see and visit. I had planned on taking most of my classes at regular depts at the university, with maybe one or two at the german as a foreign language dep't. There were some terribly interesting classes on medicine in the Weimar republic and world war II, folk religion in the middle ages and a ton of other classes i wanted to take.

Unfortunately Amherst made sure none of that happened. Since most of the classes in Germany meet once a week for 1.5-2 hrs a week, this counted as 2 credits to amherst. The minimum number of credits required by Amherst was 15 credits (based on the fact that our classes at Amherst, which normally aren't given credit value, are worth about 4 credits each at other schools which doesn't make any sense because most classes meet an average of 3 hrs a week). So this would mean I would need to take a whopping 8 courses at the university to fulfill amherst's requirements. That would be far too many classes if i were at an english speaking institution much less taking normal classes at a German university. I argued and argued and argued with the regsitrar (who at first was convinced I had their credit system wrong and then just decided that nothing could be done) and the study abroad advisor (who contended that i should have somehow forseen this even though German universities don't publish course offerings until weeks before the semester starts; furhtermore, he had given false information thorughout the semester prior saying that you only needed to take so many credits as required by your program, which in this case was 12-16). I spoke to other Amherst students at Göttingen University, with whom we have an exchange, and they only needed to take four classes, and not necessarily for a schein (that is, taking a class at a German university doesn't mean you necessarily get a grade or even any sort of evidence that you took the class; if you need a grade, you have to let them know that you want a schein and then you are assigned some sort of graded work for the semester).

In the end, there was no arguing with the school which could clearly not understand how taking so many classes in germany was really pretty impossible. I dropped nearly all the courses i wanted to take, found whatever class was worth more credits (that wasn't another language class - e.g. swedish or something - which were typically worth 4 credits), and just took those. I ended up only taking one class outside the Deutsch als Fremdsprache (DaF) dept - a neuropsych course at Uni-Mannheim. The rest were various literature, linguistics and german composition/conversation courses at the DaF. I mean the DaF dept is also part of hte university proper, but the classes are tailored to international students who speak german as a foreign language and thus more manageable. Unfortunately most of the classes I had wanted to take before were outside of the dept..

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